according to an article I read many years ago, ‘The Duke’ had one .45/70 in the gunbelt to remind him that he’d got down to the last few cartridges in it. Something he’d copied from old-time gunfighters.
Gun belts like that are heavy, which is why in reality people didn’t walk very far in them. Most photos of the Old West, if they show men with a pistol at all, often have it stuffed in the waistband of the trousers. Holsters, if used at all, tended to be all-enveloping things to keep the rain and the dust off on the trail. The ‘quick draw’ Hollywood types came along mostly after the Frontier era was over.
I almost posted that that looked like a .45-70. I have a box around here somewhere for the Shiloh Sharps I’ve never fired.
.45-70 is likely 55-90 sharps is most likely, the lever action rifle the Duke carries would have been a .44-40 winchester which is the same shell his handguns would have fired. .30-30 is highly unlikely considering it was not even introduced until 1895. My guess would be the larger shells belong to a sharps rolling or drop block rifle, frequently referred to as a “buffalo gun”
50-90 my bad
I suppose that would depend on how the gun opens as well. Some had the cylinder swing out the side and others “broke” open like a shotgun to expose the cylinder for reloading. The latter seems a more likely candidte for swapping out cylinders quickly.
Not with percussion revolvers. The purpose of the top-break (‘like a shotgun’ in your post – incidentally, there were also ‘tip-ups’ that were hinged the other way) and the Hand Ejectors (swing-out cylinder) is to provide a quick means of loading metallic cartridges. (Another way of loading from the rear was through a loading gate, such as on the Colt 1873 Peacemaker.) With a percussion revolver you have to load it from the front as described earlier. Percussion revolvers did not have top-breaks or swing-out cylinders to my knowledge. So the method would be to remove the barrel and replace the empty cylinder with a charged one.
There were break-open cartridge handguns from the beginning of metallic cartridges of course. Some were single-shot, some were over-and-under, and some were ‘pepperbox’ style with four barrels. Smith & Wesson made a tip-up revolver in 1857. Their first Hand Ejector was made in 1896. But again, these were cartridge arms. Percussions you either loaded from the front or swapped cylinders if you had extras.
Do you mean Revolutionary War? Because I don’t remember anything about British loyalists in the American Civil War.
The Brown Bess is a smooth bore .69 Cal weapon used by the british during the Revolutionary War. Early in the Civil War. the brown bess was used by some troops (primarily southern) until they could be supplied with better weapons.
Which were, interestingly, .577 calibre Enfield Pattern 1853 Rifled Muskets, supplied by the UK.
I’m not convinced many people made a habit of carrying pre-loaded cylinders around with them in the days before metallic cartridges, simply because most handguns at the time were at least partially hand-fitted and there wasn’t a huge degree of interchangeability between guns as there is now. Spare parts for revolvers would also have been expensive and somewhat difficult to obtain, and all in all it would have been a lot easier to carry a second handgun.
Contrary to what Westerns would tell you, people did not generally fire both guns at the same time, because A) it’s inaccurate and B) you’d have to take twice as long to reload.
The only cartridge-firing revolver I’m aware of with a cylinder designed to be completely removed were Enfield No. 2 Mk I revolvers modified by the Rhodesians during the Bush War; you broke the revolver open, pulled the empty cylinder out, and replaced it with a freshly loaded one.
The .30-30 Winchester Cartridge was introduced in 1895 (it was the first commercially available cartridge to use Smokeless Powder as a propellant), and therefore completely missed the period that’s traditionally thought of as the “Wild West”. The Winchester Model 94 rifle pops up in Western films all the time for the simple reason that there are millions of them floating around (so they’re cheap and easy to get), and the actual rifle design is certainly from the Frontier period.
Traditionally, lever-action rifles were chambered in popular contemporary centrefire pistol calibres- most commonly .44-40, but also a number of cartridges which were popular at the time but are almost unknown today, such as .38-40 and .32-20. Interestingly, the Winchester Model 73 (“The Gun that Won the West”) was never chambered in .45 Long Colt during its period of original production, even though this was the standard handgun calibre of the US Military at the time. Later models of Winchester repeating rifle were available in .45/70 Government, though.
As far as I know, people did carry spare cartridges in loops on a gunbelt, at least in the US. In the British Empire, the trend was towards a cartridge pouch into which the wearer would reach and grab cartridges as needed. Some cartridge pouches- such as the one for the .450/577 Martini-Henry rifle cartridge- had loops inside, to make it easier to get the cartridges out, whilst others- such as the one for .450 Adams and .455 Webley cartridges- were just a pouch full of loose ammunition.
It’s also worth noting that ammunition was expensive back in Yesteryear, so cartridges weren’t something to be wasted un-necessarily. It’s also surprisingly heavy, so it’s not something that people wanted to be carrying around in quantity without pack animals or native bearers, either…
The carbine used in Rio Bravo is a .44-.40 1892 Winchester.
IIRC, he carries the larger cartridge on his belt to let him know when he’s gone through half his ammo.
I’m sure very few people did it, for the reasons you state. I should point out though that Samuel Colt is known for making pistols with interchangeable parts in the factory he built in 1855. Most people, if they owned a revolver, only carried one. Some, like James B. Hickock, carried two. Nearly everyone who had a pistol didn’t carry more than two, and very few of them would have carried extra charged cylinders. Parts were, as you say, relatively expensive. Hard to obtain? They could be fairly easily be ordered from Colt – only delivery times were rather long.
I seem to have given the impression that changing cylinders was common. It wasn’t. I’ve only read it mentioned in one book (and I don’t remember which one). One thing to remember is that revolvers were ‘fast’ for the period. Prior to their invention pistols were single-shot, or else pepperboxes. With revolvers a shooter would have five or six shots and an integral loading system. (Early guns, such as the early-model Colt Patterson had to be disassembled to reload the cylinder – a good candidate for a ‘quick change’.) The loading lever allowed for quicker loading, and with the advent of combustible cartridges it became even quicker. Most people would have thought the system was marvelous. Only a very small subset of ‘professional’ shooters would have bothered with the expense of carrying extra cylinders.
Incidentally, I’ve seen a couple of interesting modifications. One was, IIRC, a Colt 1861 Navy. It didn’t have a barrel at all. It had been modified to a ‘hide-out’ gun and expelled the projectile directly from the cylinder. Not at all accurate, but could cause some damage if shoved up against someone’s belly. A couple of months ago I saw a similarly modified Belgian break-top from the late-1800s.
That’s not what I’m asking. What were British loyalists doing during the American Civil War?
[QUOTE=Martini Enfield]
Which were, interestingly, .577 calibre Enfield Pattern 1853 Rifled Muskets, supplied by the UK.
The only cartridge-firing revolver I’m aware of with a cylinder designed to be completely removed were Enfield No. 2 Mk I revolvers modified by the Rhodesians during the Bush War; you broke the revolver open, pulled the empty cylinder out, and replaced it with a freshly loaded one.
The Remington .44 Cal cap and ball revolver in use during the American Civil War has an easily removable cylinder. The hammer is placed on half cock, the rod that acts as the “axle” for the cylinder is pulled forward and the cylinder drops out of the frame. This is the revolver used by Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” (I think), and you can see him change cylinders in the final shoot-out scene. The revolver had been converted from cap and ball to cartridge, making “Speed Loading” cylinders more practical. Also, you can see that Clint’s gun belt has holders for two loaded cylinders. I don’t see the system being very practical in the cap and ball era, since the caps would have to be placed on the nipples before use.
I have no idea what the british loyalists were doing at the time, they were not in the American Civil War, but some of their obsolete Brown Bess muskets were. Therefore, it is not anachronistic if a Civil War reenactor carries a Brown Bess into battle. Especially if he portrays a confederate soldier.
From a hunting perspective, I’d rather (and do use) the loop configuration. Loose cartridges in a bag jingle and make noise. Noise scares game (and alerts the bad-guys that I’m sneaking up behind them :D)
Others have also mentioned the orientation of the bullet. Pulling them out of the loop one at a time, orients them correctly in my hand for feeding into the magazine. For a lever action rifle, it’s actually harder to have a hand full of cartridges than to have one at a time at hand. (IMO of course)
No-one was saying the rifle was anachronistic, the anomaly was the Brits being mentioned in re the ACW.
I’m sure there were British Loyalists fighting on the Confederate side of the US Civil War, in the sense that Britain was supporting the South and there would have been British adventure-seekers etc who decided to go over and “Lend a hand”, so to speak. I doubt they would have been there in great numbers (unlike the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War some years later), but I don’t think a British soldier (or former soldier) fighting on the side of the Confederacy would be an especially implausible Civil War Re-Enactment persona; their loyalty would ultimately be to the Crown of England (hence, British Loyalist), but their immediate services were being tendered to the Confederate States of America, to whom their government was providing material support and encouragement.