What Sam Walker told Sam Colt

In 1842 Samuel Colt’s first company failed. The Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey, had been making his revolver since 1837, under a patent dated February 25, 1836. It went under for want of a government contract.

The gun had admirers all the same. Most of them were in Texas.

Nearly the only market

In August 1839 the Republic of Texas ordered 180 of the .36-caliber Holster-model Colts for its navy. Captain Jack Hays’s Rangers later got Paterson Colts by reissue. The Handbook of Texas sums it up: Texas became a proving ground for the gun, and very nearly its only market.

The Paterson held five shots. In June 1844, in what is now Kendall County, Hays’s company fought with them. It was the first time a whole Ranger company had used Colt revolvers in combat. Hays wrote afterward, “I cannot recommend these arms too highly.”

One of the Rangers wounded in that fight was Samuel Hamilton Walker.

The user

Walker was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, on February 24, 1817. He came to Texas in January 1842. He survived the Mier Expedition and the Black Bean Episode, joined Hays’s Rangers in 1844, and was wounded by a lance at Walker’s Creek. In the Mexican War he became a captain in the U.S. Mounted Rifles.

So in late 1846, when he was in the East recruiting, Walker was a former Ranger and a serving army officer with opinions about revolvers that he had come by the hard way. He and Colt worked together on an improved one.

His view of the Colt is on record:

“With improvements I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world …”

(Walker’s sentence runs on; the quotation stops where our source stops.) Read that the way a gunsmith reads it. It is praise with a condition attached, and the condition is the useful part. With improvements.

What changed

The revolver that came of it was .44 caliber and held six shots. It had a nine-inch barrel and a loading lever, and it weighed four pounds nine ounces. Colt credited Walker with improvements that included a stationary trigger with a guard.

The government contract was dated January 4, 1847: one thousand revolvers at twenty-five dollars each. Colt had no factory, so they were built at Eli Whitney Jr.’s armory in Whitneyville, Connecticut. Colt made about a hundred more for presentation and civilian sale.

It was Colt’s first six-shot revolver, and the first repeating pistol the U.S. Army Ordnance Department ever bought. It put Colt back in business.

The scene on the cylinder

A scene is rolled onto the Walker’s cylinder. It was designed by a New York engraver, W. L. Ormsby, and at Walker’s suggestion it shows the 1844 fight. Ormsby had never seen a Texas Ranger, so he dressed them as U.S. Dragoons.

It is a small thing, and a telling one. Even on the gun itself, the story had started to drift from the facts.

What became of Walker

Samuel Walker was killed at Huamantla, Mexico, on October 9, 1847, nine months after the date on the contract. His remains were moved to San Antonio in 1848 and reburied in the Odd Fellows’ Cemetery there on April 21, 1856.

In 2021 the Texas Legislature designated “the original 1847 Colt Walker pistol” the official handgun of the State of Texas. The governor signed the resolution on May 24 of that year.

The lesson at the bench

The Walker is a big pistol, four pounds nine ounces of it, and its size is usually what gets talked about. The more useful part of the story is the list.

A man who had carried the tool told its maker, in particulars, what to fix. And the maker fixed it, when he could have defended what he had already made.

Every good job at a bench starts the same way. The owner says what the rifle is doing, in plain words. The smith listens before picking up a tool. That is the reason the request asks what it asks.