I’m not sure why your fixation on “big pistols,” “giant handguns,” or “huge hand cannons.” There were not a lot of .75 caliber pistols in service. .44 and .45 caliber weapons provided a bit more utility against cattle than a .36 or a .32, (much less a .22), without being enormously more expensive. Or, it could just as easily have been fashion as much as anything else. In the fifties, cars were dominated by chrome. In the sixties, cars were dominated by horsepower. Neither were particularly necessary, but they were sufficiently popular to sell well. I see no reason to believe that there were no fashions in the gun industry when a very large portion of the populace was buying pistols.
Wolves: True, but they will certainly eat cattle (or sheep) when they get hungry. A cowboy was more likely to shoot a wolf defending his herd than defending himself. Of course, the perception that wolves were hunting the cattle was enough – and still is enough today – to send them out hunting for the wolves. I’ll grant you, though, that a long gun was much more appropriate than a pistol in those circumstances.
Bears: Also true, but the majority of my experience is the Rocky Mountain front in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Up here in MT we have lots and lots of bears.
Snakes: Threat or not, people then and people now don’t like rattlesnakes and look for any excuse to kill one.
Darn tootin’. I used to raise Corrientes, which some claim are the breed from which longhorns were derived. Some of them can be rather unpleasant to deal with.
Some do. I used to carry a .45 sometimes in the wild areas when I had cattle. I think there are a lot more that carry smaller caliber handguns, though. A lot of the younger cowboys like the loud bangs, I think.
Because there are no longer any open ranges. Back then, you were living in nowhere land. Ranches now are just big farms with easy access, within the reach of law, and cow pokes no longer have to camp amid the herd and live off a single slaughtered carcass for weeks on end.
And as mentioned earlier, it didn’t get easier when you reached “civilization.” The California gold rush sparked a migration of people due west and the criminality in the cow towns in all the states on the way to Cal surpassed that of present day New York City.
As to the quick draw, enthusiasts estimate that to draw a full-sized SA revolver chambered for a 44 or 45 round, you will take slightly less than .5 seconds. Not very impressive. Modern artists, using highly modified weapons, can do it in .25 seconds (that’s fast but still slower than Glenn Ford, unless your name’s Munden.) The way to it is to take cover, take your colt out slowly (hit the hammer with your hand while still holstered and you send a bullet through your thigh), cock the hammer, aim and shoot.
That might be true, but that has more to do with how low the crime rate is in present day New York. It almost certainly wasn’t true of 1970’s New York, or present day New Orleans or Baltimore. The exact extent of violence in the Old West is somewhat debated among western historians, and unfortunately has been somewhat co-opted by both sides of the current gun control debate, but the actual tangible data from newspapers and public records suggest a very low crime rate in most of the Old West, including the notorious cow towns.
Yes, and that’s is exactly my point. Rather than contriving elaborate scenarios where a six shooter might have come in handy, I think it’s far more likely that their popularity was essentially a fad, driven in no small part by the fanciful stories of the lawless west found in eastern newspapers and dime novels.
Also, I’m not expert in firearm history, but my understanding is that at the time .45 wasn’t really seen as large. For instance, Civil War rifles were around .58 caliber (which themselves were much smaller than Revolutionary War muskets of about .75 caliber).
With better manufacturing technology, you can get higher velocity and don’t need as big a bullet for the same impact. But 1870s tech was not as good as modern; I’m not sure I’d trust a 1870’s-tech .22 bullet to kill anything except small birds.
Today we have 45 Long Colt “cowboy loads” that replicate the velocities and energy of the original black powder round. It’s a big case, but there’s not a huge amount of power there. 250 grain bullet, 750 fps at the muzzle and 312 ft. lbs of muzzle energy.
Modern loadings are significantly more powerful to the tune of 1000 fps and 800 ft lbs muzzle energy.
Also, you’ll often hear people opine about how cowboys carried a six shooter and carbine in 45 Long Colt for simplicity. This never happened - as no carbine in the Old
West was ever chambered in 45 Long Colt.
Little Bighorn was in 1876. And Geronimo wasn’t captured until 1886 (armed with, among other things, a Colt 45). So even if the risk to any individual on the frontier was low, there were still enough widely publicized attacks by Native Americans after 1870 that I’d imagine the threat would be a factor.
My impression is that cowboys used pistols because they were cheaper and lighter than rifles, and easier to hand for everyday use - such as scaring off/killing predators, putting wounded animals out of misery, and deterring thieves by simply existing.
Had the side benefit of self-defence, which then as now was much more theoretical that usual (as we all know, the shoot-'em-up version of the wild west is a cinema creation with only a tenuous basis in reality - the vast majority of cowboys lived hard-working, but gunfight-free, lives! ). Being armed imparted a feeling of (mostly illusory) safety when working out on the range far from help. In fact, if someone really wanted to kill you on the range, they would probably have done it the sensible way - shot you with a rifle from ambush - and you’d never even see them.
Rifles would be better for most uses, and obviously of more use in bagging game for the pot; hand-guns were a compromise between being unarmed and carrying a rifle about everywhere.
Your position appears to border on the fallacy of the excluded middle.
While “fashion” might have led some (undetermined) number of cowboys to carry pistols when they were not needed, “fashion” would also have led some (undetermined) number of cowboys to carry pistols over carbines and rifles when some weapon was advisable.
And, while it may be true that the “Wild West” was not one long, drawn out gun battle, neither was it merely a placid oasis of grass with sporadic, if memorable, shootouts. Bill O’Neal’s Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters identifies 255 persons associated with 587 gunfights and has been criticized for ignoring a number of others. His numbers were limited by his reliance on newspapers of the period, so that gunfights that did not make the news were excluded. (Curly Bill Brocius, for example, does not appear in his book, although Brocius does appear in Wyatt Earp’s autobiography.)
One encounters stories of gunfights in such odd places as My Life and Loves, the autobiography of Frank Harris, who described a cattle drive that included encounters with both bandits and Indians in the mid 1870s.
The Lincoln County War occurred in 1878 with associated murders continuing for two more years. The Johnson County War occurred in 1892 and was preceded and followed by other gunfights. The Gunfight at the OK Corral was preceded and followed by several gunfights.
Both the Dalton Gang and the combined James and Younger gangs were shot up by townsmen when they attempted to rob banks.
While the notion of a continuous gunfight lasting from 1850 through 1900 is an error, there was certainly enough violence that carrying a weapon probably seemed a practical thing to do and a sidearm is a much easier weapon to have to hand than a rifle or carbine.
You also appear to ignore or dismiss without cause the need for a handgun when dealing with longhorn cattle.
I’ll buy the holstered-six-gun-for-show explanation as well. In Michener’s “Centennial” he mentioned how, when the cattle drive was about to hit town, the cowboys would bath in the nearest body of water, shave, switch from ordinary work clothes to clean fresh garments, put on their fancier hats, polish their boots and saddle, AND tote their six guns. It showed that cowboys were as vain as everyone else, and how much pride they had in their work. The sight of lean, clean cowboys with their hats and six guns riding into town was enough to stir the imagination of every adult and child about cowboy legends.
It’s not clear how many cowboys carried pistols. In their accounts of the Texas Rangers Ford and Webb both mention how poorly armed the Rangers were after the Civil War. Times was bad out west. There are some newspaper stories by Mark Twain from his Virginia City days describing miners and townspeople getting drunk and blazing away at each other. I’ve read the most common Texas gun duel was to sneak up behind your enemy and shoot him in the back with a shotgun (hence the phrase, I’ve got your back, I reckon). And ain’t no cowboy gonna shoot a dang crazy steer unless he wants to buy it, that’s why you have a rope. In fact another popular way out west story was the cowboys surrounding a grizzly and bringing it down with their ropes. And then the fact that the only thing Wyatt Earp used his pistol for in Dodge was knocking piss drunk cowboys up side of the head with it…
Of course, Dodge was one of the rail head destinations for cattle herds that set one of the earlier anti-gun ordinances, so using his gun to smack drunks would have been the appropriate, (for the time), job of a marshal.
When he got to Tombstone, he appears to have found other uses for his pistol.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that a pistol allows you to be armed while keeping both hands free for other tasks. You might need to go out and do things like chopping wood, branding cattle, carrying water, etc. that don’t allow you to lug around a rifle and don’t put you within easy reach of your saddle sheath. You can carry a pistol everywhere, not have it in your way, and still be able to drop whatever you’re doing and grab it in a second. Cowboys weren’t always mounted any more than you’re always in your car, even if you’re someone who drives for a living.
With a rifle, if you’re doing something that needs both hands, you might have to set it aside somewhere. If it’s somewhere out of arm’s reach, you might come down with a severe case of death before you can cover the distance needed to grab it and use it.
In any case, a rifle is far less portable than a pistol. I learned a definite appreciation for portability from a couple of hunting-camping trips when I was young.
You should pick the right tool for the job. You don’t carry around a tower computer, even though having a faster processor and redundant hard drives might be useful sometimes. Most people carry a notebook computer most of the time (or smartphone all the time) and use a more powerful desktop when appropriate at work or home. It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
). Being armed imparted a feeling of (mostly illusory) safety when working out on the range far from help. In fact, if someone really wanted to kill you on the range, they would probably have done it the sensible way - shot you with a rifle from ambush - and you’d never even see them.