Ran across some Walker Colt history worth talking through. At 4.5 pounds and 15.5 inches, this thing makes a full-size 1911 feel like a pocket pistol — and somebody actually carried two of them on horseback into combat.

"Without your pistols we could not have had the confidence to have undertaken such daring adventures... with improvements I think they can be rendered the most perfect weapon in the world for light mounted troops."

Walker wasn't just writing a marketing blurb here — he was a working Ranger who'd used the Paterson against Comanche in the kind of running fight where reload time gets you killed. That testimonial came from genuine field experience, and Colt knew exactly how to use it to rescue a career that was basically dead in the water.

The Walker held the record as the most powerful commercially manufactured repeating handgun from 1847 until 1935 — a span of 88 years.

Sit with that for a second. That's roughly the gap between the introduction of the .357 Magnum and right now. A black powder revolver designed in six weeks, built in a borrowed factory, held the power record until the Smith & Wesson 27 came along. Next time someone at the LGS counter dismisses cap-and-ball revolvers as primitive, that's your number.

The Walker had real mechanical problems that its designers acknowledged almost immediately. Under 300 of the original 1,000 military revolvers were returned for repair due to ruptured cylinders.

Nearly a third of them came back broken — and the chain-fire risk was real enough that the fix was packing lard into the chamber mouths after loading. That's not a quirk, that's a design flaw you're managing with pig fat. Black powder shooters still do this today on replica Walkers, which tells you something about how well the underlying problem was actually solved versus just managed.

The loading lever latch dropping under recoil and jamming the action is the part that would haunt me. Soldiers wrapped rawhide around the barrel to hold it in place. That's the kind of field improvisation that either gets written into the next production spec or gets people killed — and in this case it was both.

For those of you who shoot cap-and-ball or have handled a Walker replica: what's your actual experience managing the chain-fire risk, and do you trust the loading lever latch on modern reproductions any more than the originals?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team