Killer Colt (11 page)

“The manner you are using us is too bad,” he railed in one of his letters.
“Come up with some money. I am in a devil of a humor and not without a cause.” In reply, Sam (who, as one scholar drily remarks, “was about as good at spelling as at meeting his debts”) did his best to placate Pearson: “make your expenses as lite as possible … Don’t be allarmed about your wages, nothing shal be rong on my part, but doo wel for me & you shal fare wel.”
²

Charging as much as fifty cents per person for admission to his show (a considerable sum at a time when a complete multicourse dinner at Delmonico’s original restaurant in New York City could be had for twelve cents), Sam traveled through South Carolina and Georgia, keeping Pearson mollified—and “at the grindstone”—by sending him whatever money he could spare: seventy-five dollars in February 1835; another fifty in March.
³

One month later, Sam returned to Baltimore, having finished his tour with a swing through Virginia. His performances in Lynchburg and Richmond would be his last. The celebrated Dr. Coult was laid permanently to rest. Henceforth, Sam Colt would devote himself, with absolute singleness of purpose, to the fashioning of a far more heroic persona—one that would eventually take its place in the pantheon of America’s industrial demigods.

•   •   •

Taking rooms in Baltimore, Sam secured both a larger workplace and a helper for Pearson, then set about supervising the construction of a pair of patent models: one pistol, one rifle. They were completed to his satisfaction in early June. On the seventeenth of that month, he traveled to Manhattan to show them to his cousin (and potential investor) Dudley Selden, the distinguished Manhattan attorney for whom John had briefly clerked several years earlier.

Deeply impressed with the invention—and worried that it might fall prey to the piratical practices of foreign manufacturers—Selden advised Sam to patent it first in Great Britain and France. Accordingly, in the third week of August 1835, Sam—flush with loans from several family members—set sail for England.

He was gone for just under four months. From a legal standpoint, the trip was an unqualified success. When his ship, the
Albany
, arrived back in the United States in early December, Sam had his foreign patents safely in hand. According to his most reliable biographer, he brought home another acquisition as well: a sixteen-year-old wife.
⁴

Historians describe her as a person of “striking beauty” but extremely “humble origins” who “could barely read or write.” The precise circumstances of their courtship (such as it was) remain shrouded in mystery, though she and Sam reportedly met in Scotland. Since he was there for only a week or two between visits to London and Paris, he clearly leaped into the marriage with the kind of haste that, as Dr. Franklin wisely observes, causes couples to repent in leisure.

The truth of that old saw was proven in the case of Sam Colt himself. Indeed, by the time he returned to America with his bride, he already appears to have been beset by second thoughts. Perhaps, as his biographers have speculated, Sam’s initial sexual infatuation quickly gave way to a sobering realization: that he had saddled himself with an unschooled, socially awkward young wife who was unlikely to help advance his ambitions. In any event, from the moment his ship docked in New York Harbor, Sam Colt “kept the marriage a secret from the rest of the family, and the world at large.”
⁵

A
ccording to the myths of the world, there are times when all heroes must prove themselves by performing miraculous tasks—overcoming obstacles and ordeals that would defeat lesser mortals. To accomplish their quests, they must scale impossible mountains, sail peril-filled seas, descend into the lairs of monsters, negotiate nightmarish mazes, cross bottomless chasms over bridges no wider than knives. Like the classic figures of mythology, Sam Colt, too—according to the official chroniclers and keepers of his legend—had to surmount a succession of challenges and tribulations as he fought his way to his ultimate goal. That perilous “road of trials,” so full of crises and reversals, started shortly after his return from Europe.

•   •   •

Things began promisingly enough. After Sam’s American patent came through in February 1836, he and his investors lost no time in forming the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company for the making of “arms, machinery, and cutlery.” In March, under prodding from influential friends, the New Jersey legislature granted the fledgling operation a charter of incorporation. While construction commenced on an imposing four-story factory on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, Sam and his partners leased an old gristmill nearby and set up shop on the ground floor. A gifted craftsman named Pliny Lawton—formerly Christopher Colt’s head machinist at the Hampshire mill in Ware—was brought in as superintendent. Lawton set
about at once devising machines for the mass production of the guns, which, until then, had been crafted individually by hand.
¹

It soon became clear, however, that Sam’s great expectations were wildly optimistic; that—as inspirational guides were forever reminding young go-getters—the “road to success was never smooth, straight, nor strewn with flowers.”
²
On a trip to Washington, DC, that spring, he did manage to generate some favorable publicity in the
Washington Post
, where a writer named F. S. Burns testified that he had “tried the newly improved pistol of Mr. Colt and found that it shot exceedingly well—in my opinion it will prove a very great improvement in firearms.”
³
But Sam’s hopes of winning a far more important endorsement—that of President Andrew Jackson—were quickly dashed.

Jackson, of course, had an intimate, lifelong knowledge of firearms. Aside from his military heroics—most famously during the Battle of New Orleans, when he and his ragtag forces wreaked havoc on the massed British regulars—he had fought several gun duels in his younger days and still carried the bullets from two of these deadly encounters in his shoulder and chest. Moreover, just a few weeks before Sam’s arrival in the capital, Old Hickory had escaped with his life when a would-be assassin attempted to discharge a pair of pistols at his chest, both of which misfired. As one historian observes, the incident should have given the old warrior “a keen sense of the unreliability of old-time firearms.”
⁴
Nevertheless, when Sam—who had somehow wangled a meeting with the president—demonstrated his invention, Jackson was unimpressed, seeing no need for the army to abandon the kind of single-shot flintlocks that had served him so well against the redcoats.

Other disappointments soon followed. Despite his intense lobbying efforts—which consisted largely of throwing lavish, wine-fueled dinner parties for Washington officials and dispensing the occasional gift—Sam not only failed to snag any government commissions but also incurred the ire of his powerful cousin Dudley Selden. The company’s single biggest investor and de facto director, Selden repeatedly rebuked the young inventor on his extravagant—and ethically dubious—ways: “You use money as if it were drawn from an inexhaustible mine,” he fumed in one letter. “I have no belief in undertaking to raise the character of your gun by old Madeira.” At
another point, he blasted Sam’s readiness to resort to bribery as “dishonorable in every way.”
⁵

When Sam did manage to win a spot for his guns in an army trial conducted at West Point in the summer of 1837, the results were disastrous. During one demonstration, his rifle discharged several loads at once, producing a mini-explosion. In another, the hammer broke off. In the end—while conceding that Colt’s weapons might have certain limited applications—the ordnance board was “unanimous in opinion” that, owing to their “complicated character, liability to accident, and other reasons,” his revolvers were “entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service.”
⁶

There were some encouraging developments along the way. To boost the reputation of his product, Colt—whose grasp of public relations was at least as impressive as his knowledge of firearms technology—joined the prestigious American Institute of New York City, an organization dedicated to the “encouragement of science and invention.” At the institute’s annual public exhibition in October 1837, one of Sam’s revolving rifles was awarded a gold medal, the first of many that would be bestowed upon him. Pioneering a ploy that would be exploited by countless marketers to follow, he touted the award in his advertisements, the first of which appeared in the December 27, 1837, issue of the
Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer:

Two months later, in a typically splashy bit of showmanship, Sam—having secured the consent of the mayor and the city council—staged a public demonstration of his rifles at Castle Garden on the southernmost tip of Manhattan. Though the rapid-firing repeaters elicited admiring gasps from the crowd, the price of the guns—$150 apiece (equivalent to roughly
$3,500 in current funds)—rendered them prohibitive for the average purchaser. Sales remained stagnant, even as Sam continued to burn through his investors’ money at an alarming rate in an effort to drum up business.

More convinced than ever that the very survival of his company depended on volume sales to the government, Sam embarked on a bold venture. In February 1838, just weeks after his Castle Garden exhibition, he personally transported ten cases of his rifles—one hundred pieces altogether—to the Florida Everglades, where U.S. forces were bogged down in a bloody effort to dispossess the native Seminoles from their rightful lands. Fifty of his repeaters were purchased by the Second Dragoons and put into immediate action in the grueling guerrilla war. Their accuracy and rapidity of fire—sixteen shots in thirty-one seconds—won a glowing review from the commanding officer, Colonel W. S. Harney. “I do assure you that sooner I would use any other Rifle myself, I would use none,” Harney reported to his superiors in Washington—an endorsement that Sam (a pioneer in the use of expert testimonials for advertising purposes) would be quick to publicize.
⁸

Even so, the trip was far from the triumph that Sam had hoped for. Half of his rifles remained unsold. On the return voyage, moreover, Sam’s boat capsized in the waters off St. Augustine, Florida. Though he escaped drowning by clinging to the overturned craft for four hours, his luggage—including the trunk containing the army’s $6,250 draft—was lost in the surf. By the time he was safely back on land, he had come to regard the whole trip as a “cursed adventure.”
⁹

Making his way back north, Sam holed up at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan for a few recuperative days before throwing himself back into the hectic business of promoting his guns. In late fall, he returned to Washington for another costly—and ultimately futile—round of courting public officials. During one demonstration on the White House lawn—so the legend goes—“a squad of men armed with Colt’s repeating rifles” let off a “fusillade that scared the horses of the President’s carriage. The coachman was thrown from his seat trying to control the plunging horses and fell onto a picket fence, impaled.”
¹⁰
The story is unverified and almost certainly apocryphal, though it does serve as an apt metaphor for Colt’s depressing situation at this period of his life, when his high hopes were invariably punctured in the most brutal way.

The same disheartening pattern repeated itself over the next year. In 1839 the company opened a retail shop at 155 Broadway. By this point—thanks in large part to Sam’s tireless PR efforts—the public was becoming increasingly aware of the lethal efficacy of his revolvers. One newspaper editorial, for example, proposed a simple test for anyone who doubted their superiority over old-fashioned flintlocks. Should a man find himself “engaged to meet another in single combat, and his antagonist apprise him that he will come armed with one of Colt’s repeating pistols, taking his station at forty yards, then to advance and fire at will, the friend of the old system, we think, would hesitate to meet the encounter with a single dueling pistol against one of Colt’s.”
¹¹
Despite such tributes, however, the high cost of the handguns—twenty-six dollars each versus six dollars for a pair of flintlock pistols—kept sales to a trickle at the Broadway store.

Military contracts remained equally elusive, owing largely to the hidebound attitude of the head of the army’s ordnance department: Colonel George Bomford, an officer who “had reached that age and rank at which extreme rigidity sets in” and who (as Sam wrote in his reliably wretched manner) was “dedly oposed” to his newfangled firearms.
¹²
Matters came to a head in June 1840. With virtually no commercial or governmental demand for Colt’s repeaters, the board of directors—whose members had been in more or less constant conflict with Sam over his profligate ways with company funds—made a fateful decision. Sam, in Washington at the time, learned about it in a letter from Pliny Lawton, who informed him that the directors had “resolved to stop a large portion of the works … and have been devising means to pay off the workmen.” Production had been halted at the Paterson gun mill.