Gun Barons

"Gun Barons

By John Bainbridge Jr.

(St. Martin's, 340 pages, $29.99)

Whenever I hear the name Smith & Wesson, I think of the scene in the film "Sudden Impact" when Clint Eastwood's Inspector Harry Callahan confronts a group of would-be robbers. "We're not just gonna let you walk out of here," Callahan tells them. When one of the crooks asks, "Who's we, sucker?" Callahan responds, in classic Dirty Harry fashion: "Smith, and Wesson, and me."

In "Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them," John Bainbridge Jr. chronicles the rise of America's greatest gunmakers -- among them Colt, Remington, Winchester and, yes, Smith and Wesson. Many of these American armorers began as inveterate tinkerers in small workshops along the Connecticut River during the mid-19th century, in a region that could be called early industrial America's fertile crescent. While some of these inventors were focused on rifles and others on handguns, they all shared the same goal: to design a repeating firearm and a reliable, waterproof cartridge containing bullet, gunpowder and ignition device, making it possible to fire shot after shot without needing to reload. To help us understand the state of gun technology then, Mr. Bainbridge explains: "Standard guns at the time required a shooter to pour gunpowder down the barrel, follow that with a lead ball, and then place a priming cap on a metal nipple near the other end of the barrel for each shot. When struck by a hammer, the primer would send burning fulminate into the powder, which would ignite and then propel the ball out the muzzle."

Some multishot guns already existed, including so-called pepperbox pistols, with multiple barrels each containing one shot. But these were, at best, unreliable and inaccurate. Then there was the Volition Repeater, invented in 1847 by Walter Hunt, the creator of the household safety pin. Hunt's rifle, in theory, could be loaded with up to a dozen cartridges underneath its long barrel. But the complex loading mechanism "never worked quite right," so Hunt sold his patent and left it to others to perfect his idea. "With this would-be firearm, Walter Hunt had made the nation's future but not his own," Mr. Bainbridge tells us. "Among those who benefited from Walter Hunt's genius were Oliver Winchester, Horace Smith, and Daniel Baird Wesson. None of these gun barons possessed the broadly inventive mind of Walter Hunt, yet all would eclipse Hunt while taking advantage of his pioneering work in weaponry."

Because many of these gunmakers were clustered close together and competing for sales, they often clashed. They stole craftsmen and laborers from one another. Sometimes they ended up in patent court. Mr. Bainbridge recounts the 1850 lawsuit that Samuel Colt filed against the Massachusetts Arms Co., which had been financed by Smith and Wesson. Colt alleged that his competitors' revolving cylinder was too much like his; a jury agreed and prohibited Massachusetts Arms from selling its Wesson & Leavitt revolvers. Five years later, Smith & Wesson struck a deal for a patent with Rollin White, a former Colt employee who had secretly developed his own revolving cylinder on company time. As a result, "Wesson would have his name on a gun that Colt dared not copy unless he himself wanted to be a defendant in another patent fight."

In addition to the technical development of these weapons, we learn about their practical application. Mr. Bainbridge takes us to Texas Hill Country, where in 1844 settlers tried to carve out a living amid Comanche attacks. The settlers were outmatched until a small group of Texas Rangers armed with Colt revolvers came to their defense. Accustomed to facing single-shot weapons, the Comanches were taken by surprise when the Rangers' guns fired not just once but again and again. "It was Colt's five-round weapon that won the day," Mr. Bainbridge writes. The Rangers "were smaller in number, but better endowed -- and faster -- in ammunition."

In telling the story of the Spencer repeating rifle, Mr. Bainbridge takes us back to June 1863 and the Battle of Hoover's Gap in Tennessee. Most Civil War soldiers had single-shot weapons that required considerable time to reload. Not so the 17th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which squared off against the 20th Tennessee Regiment Volunteer Infantry. After the Union's initial volley to repel the Confederate attack, "the Tennesseans resumed charging the men in blue, giving full-throated rebel yells as they ran," Mr. Bainbridge writes. "They hoped there was enough time to reach the Union line before the Federals could reload. They were wrong. They hadn't counted on facing Spencer repeating rifles." In the after-action report, Union Col. John T. Wilder wrote that "the effect of our terrible fire was overwhelming to our opponents."

One aspect of this well-told chronicle that may surprise present-day readers is that in the 1850s and '60s guns and their evolutionary developments were regularly trumpeted in the mainstream media. "We have seen and fired a pistol, recently invented and patented, which bids fair to excel everything in that line that has yet been offered to the public attention," the New Haven Palladium wrote in early 1855 about Smith & Wesson's Volcanic repeating pistol. The paper went on to say that the gun "seems to combine all that could be desired in such a weapon."

Then there's Scientific American, the pre-eminent publication of its day, which often wrote extensively and glowingly about weapons development, devoting long, detailed, technical articles to the latest and greatest innovations. Today Scientific American has fallen in lockstep with those who proclaim guns to be a public-health menace, believing, in short, that people don't kill people, guns do.

Would that that were true. As "Gun Barons" makes clear, guns, over their long history, have been more an instrument for good than evil." [1]

These great weapons were created by thieves of Hunt’s ideas, stealing intellectual property and from each other. And the most important use of these weapons was to seize American Indians' land with small forces. How good that the nuclear weapon destroyed the possibility of III world war.

1. Repeat Inventors
Yost, Mark. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 19 May 2022: A.17.