Samuel Colt was late to the double action game; he considered the design to be unreliable. Twenty years after Colt’s patent expired in 1857, Colt attempted a small-frame revolver; the following year, 1878, the company’s large-frame double action came out, known as the Frontier Colt. In this 1880s photo, a buckskin-clad dandy sports his nickeled 1878 Frontier Colt on his hip.
– Courtesy Herb Peck Jr. Collection –
Two German-born brothers, Frank W. and George Freund, followed the track of the Union Pacific Railroad westward, including to Laramie, Wyoming Territory, where, in the photo shown here, the man on the sand mound holds a double-key percussion muzzleloader, while the man to his right holds an 1866 Winchester. By 1870, with the Union Pacific built, the brothers had opened shop in Denver, Colorado, and eventually went on to secure patents for Sharps, Remington, Colt and other big gun manufacturers.
– Courtesy Union Pacific Railroad Museum –
America’s first female superstar, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, is shown here, the summer before she sailed for England with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.
– Courtesy Heritage Auctions, June 2012 –
The abundance of 1892 and 1894 Winchester rifles in the array of weapons and ammunition next to this Revolutionist vaquero explains the popularity of the Mexican Revolution folk song, “Carabina Treinta Treinta,” about the .30-30 carbine.
– Courtesy Garry James Collection —
Among the number of firearms Buffalo Bill Cody used throughout his colorful career, the one he held the highest in esteem was the 1866 Springfield .50-70 Allin conversion single-shot rifle he employed in buffalo hunts during his early scouting days (he holds it in his lap). Although others knew the rifle as the “needle gun,” due to its long firing pin, Cody called his “Lucretia Borgia.” Like the famous Renaissance femme fatale, she was “beautiful, but deadly.”
– Courtesy Buffalo Bill center of the west, Cody, Wyoming, P.6.906 –
Wyoming cowgirl Prairie Rose Henderson broke through the glass ceiling when she won the first Cheyenne Frontier Days race for women on August 23, 1899. The outdoor rodeo is still going strong and draws top professionals competing for more than a million dollars.
– True West Archives –
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