Samuel Colt’s story began in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814. His childhood was marked by loss and by a curiosity that often got him in trouble. He loved chemistry, fireworks, and explosives more than schoolwork. After one of his experiments set a building on fire, his father put him to sea as a way to discipline him. That voyage ended up sparking the idea that would change his life.
A ship’s wheel, with its ratchets clicking into place, gave Colt the model for something entirely new. If a wheel could rotate and lock with precision, so could the chamber of a firearm. By the time he returned from sea, he had already carved a wooden prototype of what would become the revolver.
Early success did not come easily. Colt patented his design in 1836, but buyers were wary, and his first company collapsed. To fund his ambitions, he reinvented himself as “Doctor Colt,” a showman who traveled the country demonstrating laughing gas while quietly pitching his revolver to potential investors. The salesmanship worked. He raised the money to refine his invention, though it would take a war to prove its worth.
That test came in Texas. Rangers under Captain Samuel Walker carried Colt’s pistols into battle against Comanche fighters, and the results were decisive. The revolver gave each man multiple shots before reloading, a critical advantage in close combat. Walker urged Colt to improve the weapon, and together they developed the massive Colt Walker revolver, a sidearm powerful enough to change the way the frontier fought.
From there, Colt built more than guns. His Hartford armory pioneered interchangeable parts and assembly-line techniques decades before Henry Ford, turning out revolvers by the hundreds and putting reliable firearms within reach of settlers, soldiers, and gold seekers pushing west. The weapons were practical tools, but they also became symbols of independence, of survival, and of the expanding American frontier.
Colt did not live to see the height of his empire. He died in 1862 at just forty-seven, leaving his wife, Elizabeth, to steer the company through war and loss. Under her leadership, the firm introduced the Colt Single Action Army revolver in 1873. Nicknamed the Peacemaker, it became the gun carried by sheriffs, outlaws, and cowboys, cementing its place in legend as “the gun that won the West.” Our own Greg Hengler shares the story.
