Colt Single Action Army

• 1. Introduction

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  The Colt Single Action Army's very first unit, serial number one, disappeared for years. It turned up in a barn in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the early 1900s. That gun was chambered in .44 S&W, loaded with charges of up to 40 grains of fine grained black powder behind a 255 grain bullet. For its time, that load hit unusually hard. Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company built the revolver for the United States government's service revolver trials of 1872. The Army adopted it as its standard-issued sidearm from 1873 to 1892. Over the years it picked up several names: the SAA, the Model P, the Peacemaker, the M1873, and the Frontier. It has been offered in more than 30 calibers and a range of barrel lengths, yet its outward look has barely changed since 1873. Colt stopped making it twice and brought it back both times, driven by customer demand. Ranchers, lawmen, and outlaws alike carried it, and that mix of owners helped fix it as a piece of Americana tied to the Wild West. Today it survives mostly with collectors and re-enactors, and its shape has echoed through other gunmakers' designs ever since. What turned a government trials entry into a legend that outlasted a century of change?

• 2. Birth of a Government Gun

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  A patent held by Rollin White stood between Colt and a bored-through cylinder for metallic cartridges. Colt refused to pay Smith & Wesson a royalty to get around it. Development could not begin until the 4th of April 1869. Colt turned to two of its top engineers, William Mason and Charles Brinckerhoff Richards. Both had already built revolvers and black powder conversions for the company. Their design won the government's service revolver trials of 1872 and became the standard military sidearm. Production started in 1873 under the official name New Model Army Metallic Cartridge Revolving Pistol.

  By the end of 1874, Colt had reached serial number 16,000. Of those, 12,500 were chambered for the .45 Colt cartridge and issued to troops, while the rest went to civilian buyers. Alongside Smith & Wesson's 1870 and 1875 American and Model 3 Schofield revolvers, the Colt replaced the older 1860 Army percussion revolver. The Colt outsold and outlasted the Schofield, staying the Army's main sidearm until 1892. That year the double-action, swing-out-cylinder Colt Model 1892, chambered in .38 Long Colt, took its place.

  Standard barrel lengths for the new revolver included the Cavalry-issue length as well as shorter options. Shooters nicknamed the short-barreled versions the Civilian or Gunfighter model and the Artillery Model. A rarer version under 4 inches, built without an ejector rod, picked up the names Sheriff's Model, Banker's Special, or Storekeeper. Between 1875 and 1880, Colt also sold a version chambered in .44 Henry, tracked in its own serial range from number 1 to 1,863.

  Colt's catalogs listed a Flattop Target Model from 1890 to 1898, and only 914 were built. Its frame was flat on top and carried an adjustable leaf rear sight, paired with a front sight base that took interchangeable blades. At serial number 164,100 in 1896, a spring-loaded base pin latch replaced the old cylinder pin retaining screw. By serial number 192,000 in 1900, the revolver was certified safe for smokeless powder. In 1920, Colt swapped the thin blade-and-notch sights for larger, more visible ones. The design then held steady until manufacturing stopped at the start of World War II.

  Between 1873 and 1940, with a small run assembled during and after the war known as the Pre-War, Post-War model, Colt produced 357,859 of these First Generation revolvers. At least thirty calibers appeared across that run, from .22 rimfire to .476 Eley. Roughly half, 158,884 guns including the Bisley and Flattop Target variants, were chambered in .45 Colt. The next most common chamberings were the .44-40 Winchester Center Fire at 71,392, the 38-40 at 50,520, the .32-20 Winchester at 43,284, and the 41 Colt at 19,676. The Bisley and Flattop variants counted in that .45 Colt total were about to take on identities entirely their own.

• 3. Guns of the Cavalry

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  Only original, good-condition Cavalry and Artillery revolvers from 1873 to 1891 draw serious money from collectors today. Examples bearing the OWA inspection mark, for Orville Wood Ainsworth, have reportedly sold for more than $10,000. So have the rarer guns carrying Henry Nettleton's stamp, depending on condition and history. Ainsworth served as the ordnance sub-inspector at the Colt factory for the gun's first 13 months of production, from October 1873 to November 1874. He personally inspected the Colts issued to Colonel G. A. Custer's 7th Cavalry. That unit was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Historians place the serial numbers of possible Little Bighorn Colts between 4,500 and 7,527.

  Henry Nettleton held the post of U.S. Principal Sub-inspector at the Springfield Armory in 1878. His inspected revolvers rank second only to Ainsworth's among serious collectors. Both men's initials, OWA or HN, appear stamped into the left side of the wood grip. David F. Clark inspected the largest single group of U.S. Colt Cavalry revolvers, working from 1880 to 1887, and his D.F.C. mark turns up on those guns.

  By the mid-1870s, the Army had also bought a large number of Smith & Wesson Schofield revolvers, which fired a shorter .45 round. The two cartridges were not interchangeable. A Colt would chamber the shorter Schofield round, but a Schofield could not chamber the longer Colt round. For a stretch, the government halted orders for the longer Colt cartridge and issued the Smith & Wesson round instead. The Schofield was retired not long after and sold off to civilians.

  In 1893, the Cavalry specifically retired its .45 Single Action Army revolvers in favor of the .38 caliber Colt Model 1892 Double Action Army. Infantry, Artillery, and other Army branches, though, kept the .45 as standard issue. Between 1895 and 1896, the government sent 2,000 SAA revolvers back to Colt for refurbishing. Roughly 800 went to the New York Militia in one barrel length, and 1,200 had their barrels altered to another. In 1898, Springfield Armory altered another 14,900 revolvers the same way. War Department records call these the Altered Revolver, though troops and collectors came to know them as the Artillery Model. Author Sapp suggests the name may trace back to the Light Artillery being among the first units to carry the shortened gun.

  The Model 1892's stopping power fell short, so the Artillery-pattern .45s stayed with Infantry, Light Artillery, and Volunteer Cavalry troops. They saw action in both the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders carried the .45 caliber Artillery Model when they charged up San Juan Hill. These guns can be spotted by the U.S. stamped on the frame, by inspector stamps such as a tiny A for Ainsworth or the letters DFC, HN, RAC, and K for replacement parts, and by the cartouche of Rinaldo A. Carr, who inspected the refurbished revolvers, stamped into the grip. Out on the ranches and rail lines beyond the fort walls, a very different .44-40 version of the gun was already earning its own reputation.

• 4. Names From the Trail

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  Chambered in .44-40 Winchester instead of .45 Colt, the same 1873 Model P frame became the Colt Frontier, or Frontier Six-Shooter. It was built to share ammunition with the new Winchester Model 1873 rifle. Riders who carried both guns could stock a single box of cartridges for the whole outfit. Production of this Model P began in 1877, and the name Colt Frontier Six-Shooter was acid-etched into the left side of the barrel. After 1889 the legend was roll-stamped instead, and in 1919 Colt added the numeral designation .44-40 alongside it. Colt's later M1878 double-action models carried the same barrel stamp when chambered in that round, and the Bisley model of 1895 was the last Colt to wear the Frontier Six-Shooter name.

  A Frontier Six-Shooter paired with a .44-40 Winchester Model 1873 rifle was one of the most familiar combinations of the Old West. It was carried, among others, by the two mounted men on the outlaw side of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Winchester, notably, never sold its Model 1873 chambered for .45 Colt. Once the frontier era had passed, the Winchester Model 1892 arrived. It joined the Model 1873 in offering .38-40 and .32-20 calibers, letting shooters keep pairing one cartridge across rifle and revolver.

  Introduced in 1894 and named for a firing range in Bisley, England, the Colt Bisley targeted accuracy over speed. A longer grip, a wider hammer spur, and a wider trigger set it apart from the standard Single Action Army. Its flat topstrap carried a sliding rear sight adjustable only for windage. A removable front blade slid into a base on the barrel and could be swapped for different elevations. The Bisley's mainspring, longer than the standard SAA's and not interchangeable with it, attached to the hammer through a forked stirrup.

  Serial numbers for the Bisley ran from 156,300 to 331,916, sharing the same sequence as the standard Single Action Army. Every gun after number 161,376 had BISLEY MODEL and its caliber stamped on the barrel, unusual for a Colt of that age. Buyers most often chose it in .32-20, .38-40, .45 Colt, .44-40, and .41 Long Colt, or, for British customers, in .450 Eley and .455 Eley. Colt built 44,350 of them before ending production in 1912. The final gun, serial number 331,916, was not shipped until after the First World War.

  Most Bisleys sold in the United States ended up as self-defense guns rather than target pistols, since the grip and hammer suited fast shooting. Surveys of surviving guns found that as many as 62 percent of Bisleys have survived, a higher share than the shorter or longer-barreled Single Action Army models. About 60 percent of Bisleys were built in .32-20 and .38-40. That suggests buyers wanted them as companions to lever-action rifles rather than for man-stopping range. As Western towns urbanized through the late 1890s, a lower-slung hammer and shorter barrel suited buyers who still spent time on horses, in buggies, and eventually in automobiles, but wore a suit coat while doing it.

  Wyatt Earp's biographer, Stuart N. Lake, gave the world the Buntline Special in his 1931 book Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, a highly fictionalized account. Lake claimed that Earp and four other lawmen, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett, and Neal Brown, each received a custom revolver with a 12-inch barrel. Other accounts place a very different gun in Earp's hand on the 26th of October 1881, the day of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: an 1869 .44 caliber Smith & Wesson American Model with an 8-inch barrel. Colt itself would later turn that same Buntline legend into an actual factory model, decades after Lake's book made it famous.

• 5. Generations of a Revolver

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  When the war ended, Colt saw no reason to revive a design many in the industry considered obsolete. Television Westerns and a wave of Western movies changed that. Customer demand rose high enough that Colt resumed manufacture in 1956. This Second-Generation line ran from 1956 to 1974, with serial numbers stretching from 0001SA to 73,205SA. Riding the popularity of the TV show The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Colt added a factory Buntline Special to that lineup from 1957 to 1974.

  From 1961 to 1975, Colt sold an adjustable-sight model called The New Frontier, its name borrowed from President John F. Kennedy's campaign slogan. Colt built 4,200 of these, including 70 on the Buntline frame. A Third Generation followed in 1976, marked by a new barrel thread pitch and a solid cylinder bushing in place of the earlier removable part. That run lasted until 1993 as a limited product, numbered from SA80,000 to SA99,999.

  Production resumed again in 1994, driven this time by the rising popularity of Cowboy Action Shooting matches. Collectors call this run the Late Third Generation or the Fourth Generation, and it brought back the original removable cylinder bushing. Its serial numbers started at S02001A and, as of 2022, still carry that S-prefix, A-suffix pattern. Colt currently builds the Single Action Army in an all-nickel or a blued, color case-hardened finish, across three barrel lengths and eight chamberings, for a total of 42 variations. In 2010, Colt released a nickel-finished revival of the Frontier Six-Shooter.

  Starting in 1999, Colt built a related model called the Colt Cowboy, fitted with a modern transfer bar safety. That safety let owners carry it with the hammer resting on a loaded chamber. It was meant to undercut the Single Action Army on price, and came in 4.75-inch, 5.5-inch, and 7.5-inch barrels. The 7.5-inch version was dropped that same year, and the 4.75-inch version followed, though it returned in 2002. Colt stopped making the Cowboy altogether in 2003. Behind many of these limited runs sat a small group of Colt's own engravers, adding gold and silver to guns few buyers ever fired.

• 6. Engraved for Prestige

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  Roughly one percent of Colt's first-generation Single Action Army production left the factory engraved, which makes those guns rare and valuable to collectors today. Lawmen, heads of state, and captains of industry were common buyers or recipients of these pieces. The practice traces back to founder Samuel Colt himself, who gave away engraved revolvers as a form of publicity for the company.

  Many of Colt's engravers were trained artisans who had emigrated from Europe, among them Gustave Young, Cuno A. Helfricht, Rudolph J. Kornbrath, and Louis Daniel Nimschke. Their signature work inlaid gold, silver, and precious stones into the steel, often paired with grips carved from ivory or pearl.

  About 400 of the Second Generation revolvers received factory engraving as well, done by Alvin Herbert, Earl Bieu, Dennis Kies, Robert Burt, Steve Kamyk, and Leonard Francolini. Among Colt's engravers, Alvin White, of the shop A. A. White Engravers, became one of the most sought after by collectors. None of that decoration changed how the gun actually loaded and fired, a routine spelled out in writing since the gun's earliest years in service.

• 7. Loaded, Cocked, and Debated

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  From the start, both Colt and the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps instructed users to load all six chambers. They also told owners to carry the revolver with its hammer cocked into the safety notch. The 1874 U.S. Army Ordnance Manual, titled Description and Rules for the Management of the Springfield Rifle, Carbine, and Army Revolvers, Caliber .45, instructed soldiers to "bring the hammer to the safety notch; keep it there until the Pistol is to be fired." Colt repeated that guidance in its own literature from 1874 until at least 1945. An 1898 advertisement for the Single Action Army, the 1877 model, and the M1878 stated that "these revolvers should be carried with the hammer resting in the safety notch." Colt's advertisements through the 1920s and into 1945 still said the gun "may be carried cocked with the hammer in the safety notch."

  Mechanically, the revolver refines the action of Colt's earlier percussion revolvers and its own 1871 cartridge revolver. A hand with two fingers turns the cylinder around a central axis, and its extended reach lets the cylinder ratchet cut in a wider circle, adding torque to each turn. Four notches on the hammer's face engage the trigger's sear, giving the hammer four distinct positions. Fully lowered, the hammer rests inside the frame. Drawn slightly back, it engages the safety notch and holds the firing pin clear of a loaded cartridge. Drawn back about halfway, the hammer reaches a second notch that cams the cylinder bolt free and lets the cylinder turn for loading. Fully cocked, the gun is ready to fire, and a spring-loaded rod in a tube on the barrel's right side ejects spent cartridges.

  That safety notch took over the job once done by pins on the rear of percussion-revolver cylinders, keeping the hammer off a live primer. Sometime after the Second World War, once the redesigned Second Generation reached the market in the 1950s, gun-writers began urging owners to leave one chamber empty under the hammer instead. Changed tolerances in that redesign meant a hard knock could damage the half-cock mechanism and let a fully loaded gun fire on its own. Shooters could also fire the revolver rapidly by holding the trigger down and fanning the hammer with the other hand. Marksman Ed McGivern proved this was not the wild, inaccurate stunt it seemed, by fanning tight shot groups himself.

  By 1878, Colt was building the revolver in extra calibers for civilian buyers and foreign militaries. The .44-40 Winchester Center Fire chambering, introduced that same year, let owners share ammunition with the Winchester '73 rifle. Colt added the .38-40 Winchester and the .32-20 Winchester in 1884, the .41 Long Colt in 1885, and the .38 Long Colt in 1887. The .38 Special and the .357 Magnum followed later in the 20th century. Some of the separately numbered .44 Henry rimfire revolvers were rechambered to .22 rimfire after 1885. Across its history the gun has appeared in dozens of calibers, from .22 rimfire to .476 Eley, though .45 Colt has always been the most common. A scaled-down .22 rimfire version, the Scout or Frontier Scout, appeared later in the 20th century.

  The first Single Action Army prototypes, built for the 1872 government trials, were actually chambered in .44 American, the same round used in the 1,000 Smith & Wesson Model 3 revolvers already issued to troops. After the trials, the government judged the Colt the better gun but specified that it be chambered for a .45 caliber cartridge instead. The resulting service round was a copper-cased, .45 centerfire, Benét-primed cartridge called Colt's Revolver Cartridges. It was loaded with 30 grains of black powder behind a 250-grain inside-lubricated bullet, and made at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia through 1874.

  In 1875, the cartridge was shortened so it would also work in the newly adopted Smith & Wesson Schofield, and renamed the Revolver Cartridge, now loaded with 28 grains of powder and a 230-grain bullet. Benét-primed rounds continued until 1882, when reloadable brass-cased cartridges with external primers took over. The original .45 Colt black-powder load drove its 255-grain bullet at a nominal 970 feet per second. Writers John Taffin and Mike Venturino have shown that modern black-powder handloads can still reach close to 1,000 feet per second from a cavalry-length barrel. This holds even though today's solid-head cases cannot hold the full original 40-grain charge. Twentieth-century smokeless loads, by comparison, push a 255-grain round-nosed flat-point bullet at 870 feet per second for 429 foot-pounds of energy.

  As of 2014, the .45 Colt case looks different from the original. Its rim is noticeably larger, with a groove cut above it, and solid brass now surrounds the primer pocket instead of that pocket protruding into the powder chamber. This solid-head design resists the kind of deformation that could weaken the primer pocket. Some modern revolvers and single-shot pistols, including the Ruger Blackhawk and the T/C Contender, are built for high-pressure .45 Colt loads that are dangerous in the Single Action Army and other vintage guns. These older guns, especially 19th-century pre-smokeless models, should be fired with black powder only, if at all. Groove diameter also changed after the war, moving from .454 inches to the .452-inch diameter shared with the .45 ACP. Between 1924 and 1940, Colt built a small number of Single Actions chambered in .45 ACP, and company records show some .45 Colt guns leaving the factory with a spare .45 ACP cylinder included. None of those cartridge specifications explain why collectors and film companies would spend the next century keeping this design alive.

• 8. A Legacy in Steel

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  Beyond its role as a service pistol, the Single Action Army's power, accuracy, and handling kept it popular well into the 20th century. General George S. Patton, who began his career in the horse cavalry, carried a custom Single Action Army with ivory grips engraved with his initials and an eagle, a gun that became his personal trademark. He carried it during the 1916 Mexican Punitive Expedition, using it in a gunfight against two of Pancho Villa's own lieutenants. He kept it until his death in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. That revolver is still on display at the General George Patton Museum of Leadership at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Alongside it sits the SAA that actor George C. Scott carried while playing Patton in the 1970 film of the same name. Villa himself carried a 5-inch barreled Colt Bisley in .44-40 for the whole of his military career.

  In the early and mid-20th century, ordinary Peacemakers without a documented history and in worn condition carried little value. Enthusiasts such as Elmer Keith, Harold Croft, and R. F. Sedgley used them as raw material, modifying the revolvers and testing more effective ammunition. By the early 21st century, first- and second-generation Single Action Armys had become prized collector's items, often considered too valuable to fire.

  After World War II, firearms enthusiast William R. Wilson spotted a fresh wave of interest in the Single Action Army and moved to meet it. In 1953, he founded the Great Western Arms Company to build an almost exact clone of the old Colt for television and movie Westerns. Great Western built its revolvers in Los Angeles.

  Later Colt editions are far easier to find today, alongside copies and near-copies built by Uberti of Italy, now owned by Beretta, maker of the Beretta Stampede. Colt Manufacturing Company still keeps the model in its own catalog. Until its dissolution in 2017, U.S. Fire Arms Mfg. Co. built versions true to the original first- and second-generation specifications. STI International built a Single Action Army with a modified hand and spring assembly meant to outlast the originals. The design itself became the precursor for modern sporting revolvers from John Linebaugh, Freedom Arms, Ruger, and Cimarron, among others.

  In 2010, Arizona State Rifle and Pistol Association President Noble C. Hathaway and Cast Bullet Director Dan Walliser polled state residents on which Old West firearm deserved recognition as the official state firearm. The Colt Patent Firearms Single Action Army won the survey by a 38 percent margin. Hathaway then took a bill to the Arizona legislature, and on the final day of the 2010-2011 session, lawmakers passed Arizona Senate Bill 1610. Governor Jan Brewer signed it into law, making Arizona the second state, after Utah's earlier adoption of the Colt M1911, to name an official state firearm.