Colt .44

 

I found this old cap-and-ball revolver in the attic of our ranch house (built in 1881).  It was in a wooden box made with dovetail joints, inside a leather pouch, wrapped in an oiled cloth.  When I lifted it out of its resting place, I found it was a lot heavier than I had expected and I can't imagine it was worn on the hip or hanging along the upper thigh.  It must be what they called a horse pistol, normally holstered on the saddle.  Or else men in olden days were used to handling heavy (literally) weapons.  No wonder they called them shooting irons.

Fort Benton in the 1870s.

The lead balls it fired were inside the box in a paper packet that came apart in flakes when I tried to open it.  There was also a paper packet of what I think were minié balls but I didn't do more than peek at the contents, so I'm not really sure.

Also in the box was an 1876 newspaper clipping from the Benton Record, Fort Benton, Montana.  It was so fragile that after one tentative attempt to lift it out I left it where it was, resting atop a round tin box of metal caps that fitted over the nipples at the rear of the revolver's cylinder.  There was also a small brass powder horn that I did not touch and what appeared to be cotton wadding to pack between the ball and the powder when loading.

The newspaper article told the story, in a curiously jocular manner, of a "shooting scrape" that had occurred at a stable in town when a "stranger," a man bearing my mother's surname, I assume an ancestor, called three men horse thieves.  "Gunplay ensued and anon Boot Hill accommodated three more denizens."

Reading the story, I learned that the stranger had some weeks earlier been carrying wages "in specie" to pay off cow hands when he was bushwhacked, shot, his horse  and the saddlebags full of gold coins it carried stolen. Left for dead,  he nonetheless survived and tracked the bandits to Fort Benton, where he had it out with them in what the newspaper article called "a square fight,"

River boat at Fort Benton, 1870s.

killing all three armed men, recovering his horse and equipage, as well as most of the gold -- what they had not spent on gambling, whiskey and women.  The men, according to the news report, had booked passage on a river boat bound for St. Louis and were likely intending to travel to New Orleans.  So the stranger caught up to them just in time.  Another day and they would have been gone for good.

$20 gold coin

I don't know if the revolver in the box, a Colt .44, is the pistol used in this gun fight, but I assume it is, considering that the news clipping was included in the box with it.

Well, so I discovered another bit of family history I didn't know anything about.  I'll be asking older relatives if they can shed any light on the owner of this gun and how he fits into our family tree.