The Old West’s Other Revolver
When you think of the American Old West and the gunslingers who prowled the deserts, mountains, and small towns, one sidearm always comes to mind: the Colt Single Action Army (SAA). In almost every American Western film, you’ll see the hero (and everyone else) carrying a Colt SAA. That’s not necessarily wrong; the SAA was very popular. The United States Army adopted it as its official sidearm in 1873, keeping it as standard issue until 1892, then bringing it back during the Philippine campaign, when its replacement, the .38 caliber Colt M1892 revolver, proved too anemic for raging Moro tribesmen wearing rawhide armor and hopped up on drugs.
But there was another revolver, the Smith & Wesson, which had several seeming advantages over the Colt, not the least of which was being easier and faster to reload. But somehow, it didn’t quite catch on the way the Colt did.
So, let’s take a look at the Smith & Wesson hinged-frame revolvers, and why they didn’t blow up as many skirts as the more famous Colt.
The History
Smith & Wesson started the cartridge revolver era with one big advantage: A patent. Sam Colt had a patent, too, for what we recognize now as the modern revolver, but that patent expired in 1856. When that happened, fellow named Daniel Wesson started playing with a design for a cartridge revolver, with the chambers bored all the way through. A former Colt employee, Rollin White, held a patent for that – but it was his patent, not Colt’s, so Daniel Wesson connected back up with a former business partner, Horace Smith, and made a deal to let the new company, Smith & Wesson, manufacture the new cartridge revolvers, each of which would pay White a royalty of $0.25 for each example. That’s right; Rollin White got a quarter for each gun.
The first gun produced was the Model 1, which had a hinged frame at the top of the gun, at the front of the cylinder. This gun was a real mouse-killer, chambered for the .22 Short. There were three “issues” of the gun, but these weren’t the guns that would eventually put up a challenge to Colt’s revolvers.
It wasn’t until after the Civil War that Smith & Wesson started out making sidearms suitable for someone on the wild frontier. In fact, the first cartridge revolver adopted by the United States Army, in 1870, was the hinged-frame Model 3, chambered for the .44 S&W American, a forerunner of the .44 Special. This would be the gun that would go up against the Colt SAA.
The Guns
The Model 3’s most famous variation was known as the Schofield revolver, after the Army Major George Schofield, who made several modifications to the basic No. 3 that were eventually adopted. This gun was made in several variations and chambered for several calibers, some for foreign users. Russia bought some chambered for the .44 Russian, and the Smith & Wesson revolvers were also chambered for the .44 Henry Rimfire, the .44-40, the .32-44, the .38-44, and the .45 Schofield, the chamber being too short for the .45 Colt when that benchmark gun and cartridge were finally introduced.
The Schofield was the gun adopted by the Army, and those guns saw action in the Indian Wars, and as late as the Spanish-American War, serving alongside the Colt SAA. The Army retained the .45 Schofield cartridge as standard issue, as the Schofield round could be chambered and fired in the Colt, but not the converse. And despite its not attaining the fame of the Colt, the Smith & Wesson hinged-frame guns had some famous, or perhaps infamous, users, including John Wesley Hardin, Pat Garret, Bob Ford, Jesse James, William Bonney, and Wyatt and Virgil Earp.
All in all, across all the variations and chamberings, about 131,000 Smith & Wesson No. 3 revolvers were made, between 1868 and 1915. That’s as compared to close to half a million Colt SAAs, and that’s not counting replicas and knock-offs. So, the Colt not only ended up being more famous than the Smith & Wesson, but it was a much greater commercial success.
Why the Colt and Not the Smith?
There were some good reasons why a shooter might prefer the Smith & Wesson. It would seem to be easier and faster to load and reload, with the break-top frame allowing access to all six chambers at once. The Colt, though, was made to be operated by a horseman, and while the Smith & Wesson offered access to all six chambers while loading, it also offered the chance to spill all six chambers in a mishap or a fall, leaving one with an empty sidearm at an awkward moment.
Another rumored stroke against the Smith & Wesson guns, as put forth by the famous gun hand Elmer Keith, lay in the Smith & Wesson’s hinged frame. Keith maintained that many a gunman or cowpoke, having run out of ammo, would resolve a conflict by simply bashing his opponent over the head with the empty sidearm. The solid-frame Colts were more up to this than the hinged-frame Smith & Wessons, and many a shooter saw that hinge as a weak point, especially when one was forced to this desperate conclusion. I’ve never been able to confirm that with anyone but Mr. Keith, but this was a man who lived through a lot of this kind of thing, although there were and are those who disagree.
Then, in 1889, Colt came out with something new: The Colt M1889 revolver, a double-action piece that was the first to feature a swing-out cylinder. This, then, was the future of six-shooters, and both companies rapidly made the switch to this means of loading and unloading, leading to the first generation of combat magnums, like the Colt New Service and the famous Smith & Wesson Triple Lock.But back in the West, plenty of cattlemen, roughnecks, adventurers, and guntwists still carried the Colt SAA – and some of them still carried the old Schofield Smith & Wessons, too. And you can measure some lasting success for those hinged-frame Smiths by the fact that you can, today, still buy a replica of these interesting old guns.
So, even in our modern era, we can still debate the usefulness of both designs, even to the extreme of how well suited they are for bashing a bad guy in the skull.
