Guns of the Old West Fall 2021

The Summer issue had my compadre Dennis Adler riding off into the sunset. I’ll be trying to fill his boots in “Western Words” and carry on with the great work that up until now he has been doing. So let’s get going, because as the Duke would say, “We’re burning daylight!” If you’ve been a reader of GOW for any length of time, you’ll recognize my byline. I’ve been writing for this magazine since its inception. The catalyst for my Old West musings has been my participation in Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS). As La Vista Bill, mounted customs inspector and terror of southwest border contrabandistas, I’ve been participating in this history-based, action-packed shooting game for some two and a half decades. In fact, just recently, I received a 25-year membership pin…

With plenty of historical firearms from the past we seldom know much about their history. Take the Smith & Wesson single-action New Model Number 3. This great gun was the latest in a line of Smith & Wesson single-action, break-top .44-caliber revolvers including the American (1870), the Russian (1873) and the .45-caliber Schofield (1875). With interest from Russia, the American evolved into three variations called the First, Second and Third Model “Russians” that used a hump (prawl) on the frame behind the hammer and a finger device on the rear of the triggerguard to help control recoil. They also used the .44 centerfire American and the .44 Henry Rimfire cartridge. Because these bullets used outside lubrication, Russian General, Alex Gorloff convinced Smith & Wesson to change it to inside lubrication to…

At a recent local gun show I found a grail gun and was able to purchase it. But first, a bit of background. J.D. O’Meara was a well-known gunsmith located in Lead, South Dakota, in the early 20th century. An obituary appeared in the January 1934 issue of the American Rifleman magazine. It noted that he was 59 years old and had been chief of the Homestake Detectives (Homestake Mine) and was a former chief of the Lead Police Department. It stated, “He was an expert gunsmith and had a valuable collection of old arms.” Legendary handgunner Elmer Keith told of blowing up a Colt .45 SA revolver with a heavy hand load, which caused him to switch to the stronger .44 Special caliber Colt SA. He stated that a gunsmith,…

THE OLD WEST was populated with as varied an assortment of folks as we have today, but due to the “wide open spaces” and a lesser amount of civilization in the more remote locales, some interesting characters developed. One such individual, who has been described as a mountain man, was long-haired Orrin Porter Rockwell. A native of Massachusetts, Porter’s neighbor was Joseph Smith, the man who wrote The Book of Mormon, which Rockwell helped to publish. Porter was baptized into Smith’s church at age 16 and followed him on his journeys. After being forced out of Missouri, the Mormons settled for a time in Nauvoo, Illinois, and founded a temple. In 1842 Rockwell was accused of the attempted assassination of Lilburn Boggs, the Missouri governor who’d evicted the Mormons. Following…

IN the late 1850s, Smith & Wesson become successful making high-quality, small-bore, tip-up barrel loading, single-action handguns with bored-through cylinders designed for metallic, rimfire cartridges. The factory used numbers to designate the frame sizes of their various guns. The No. 1 was .22 caliber, the No. 1-1/2 was .32 Short, and the No. 2 was .32 Long. The No. 3 was their largest frame and served as the basis for several popular models, of which the American was the first. When Smith & Wesson’s large-frame No. 3 American revolver hit the market in 1870, it was a watershed moment in firearms history. Chambered in .44 Henry Rimfire or, more often, their newly contrived centerfire .44/100 (.44 American) cartridge, it was the first successful American big-bore revolver designed from the start for…

STARING DOWN THE BARRELS OF A LARGE CALIBER HOWDAH PISTOL can be just as intimidating as being on the wrong end of a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, and at a glance it is an easy mistake to make. The double-barreled pistol is a very old design dating back to smoothbore double-barreled wheellock pistols from the 1600s. Flintlock designs, like those on which Pedersoli based its new Howdah model, may well have been the “inspiration” for sawed-off doubles seen in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries, the latter famously manufactured in the United States by Ithaca Gun Co. from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s as sawed-off shotguns (outlawed by the National Firearms Act of 1934) but reproduced today as a rifled-barrel pistol by Pedersoli and chambered in .45 Colt. Howdah…