Episode XII: Weapons of Every Description
The Pistols of Blood Meridian
1. “She’s a Stout Looker.”
In Chapter VII of Blood Meridian, the Gang rides to the outskirts of Chihuahua City where Glanton buys crates of new pistols from a Prussian arms dealer named Speyer. McCarthy provides the following description of these revolvers:
“Glanton opened the package and let it fall to the dirt. In his hand was a longbarreled sixshot Colt’s patent revolver. It was a huge sidearm meant for dragoons and it carried in its long cylinders a rifle’s charge and weighed close to five pounds loaded. These pistols would drive the half-ounce conical ball through six inches of hardwood and there were four dozen of them in the case. Speyer was breaking out the gangmolds and flasks and tools and Judge Holden was unwrapping another of the pistols. The men pressed about. She’s a stout looker, said one.” (86)
Here is a photo of the Whitneyville Colt Dragoon that Glanton purchases—this particular pistol brought $1.6 million at auction in 2019:
In 1849, before the invention of the “repeating” rifle, these dragoon pistols were the deadliest small arms on the planet. Known as “Whitneyville Colts” (for the Connecticut town that was home to Eli Whitney’s gun factory), these pistols represented a rather significant advance over Samuel Colt’s two previous handguns: the 1836 Colt Paterson (the world’s first production revolver) and the 1846 Colt Walker, the weapon Sam Colt upgraded to produce his Dragoon pistol.
Whereas each of the men of Glanton’s Gang are given a pair of these Whitneyville Colt pistols, the Kid somehow gets his hands on a Colt Walker and carries it with him to the novel’s end. Note the similarity of the Walker pictured below to the Whitneyville Colt pictured above:
In 1846, when the Mexican-American War got under way, the Colt Walker was the most formidable pistol in the world. But it had two design flaws:
The loading lever (that steel rod directly underneath the barrel) had no latch and would drop under recoil, locking the cylinder in place and jamming the action—a malfunction that could have deadly consequences in a gunfight.
The massive cylinder allowed for a rather generous charge of black powder; this, combined with metallurgical problems at the time, meant that the cylinder would sometimes explode in the operator’s face. Because the steel wasn't strong enough to withstand the combustion of all that gunpowder, the user was potentially creating six pipe bombs whenever he loaded the cylinder’s six chambers.
Manufacturers in Connecticut solved these issues with the Colt Dragoon pistol (the “Whitneyville Colt”). This newer model’s loading lever latched under the barrel so it wouldn’t drop under recoil, and designers got around the metallurgic problems by shortening the cylinder so it couldn’t be charged with as much powder.
I’ve circled the lever-latch of the Colt Dragoon below in yellow:
Here’s a a close-up photo of the muzzle-end of a Whiteyville Colt Dragoon: note the lever-latch under the barrel:
Now, here’s a close-up of a Colt Walker. Note the absence of a lever-latch—there’s nothing to keep the loading lever from dropping when the pistol is fired:
Here’s another photo of the Colt Walker with its loading lever in the down position:
The Kid doesn’t seem to experience any of the issues common to the Colt Walker—his loading lever doesn’t drop under recoil and his pistol certainly doesn’t explode.
Some users didn’t run into these problems with their Walkers. And even with its flaws, the Colt Walker was a significant improvement over the decade-old Colt Paterson revolvers we see men in Captain White’s company carrying (and then trying to reload during the Comanche attack) in Chapter IV:
“They rode well armed, each man with a rifle and many with the smallbore fiveshot Colt’s revolvers.” (45)
Here is the rather incomplete-looking Colt Paterson which the novel’s narrator is referencing in the above-quoted passage:
This .36 caliber pistol, first produced in 1836, is missing several features we think of when we picture revolvers of the old West:
It has no trigger guard. The trigger wasn’t even visible until the operator cocked the hammer. In this photo, the (rather flimsy-looking) trigger is visible—though the hammer obviously isn’t cocked:
The cylinder only had five chambers (“fiveshot”). In 1836, the so-called “six-shooter” was ten years away.
The pistol had to be completely taken apart to be reloaded—a special tool was included in the box the revolver came in. McCarthy briefly depicts this during Captain White’s fight with the Comanche (56).
Pictured below (top to bottom): 1836 Colt Paterson, 1847 Colt Walker, 1848 Colt Dragoon:
2. What Is Your Life Worth?
For a very long time, the English resisted taking up the crossbow—even though the crossbow could be operated by men who were neither particularly-strong nor particularly skilled. These well-trained British bowmen believed there was something ungentlemanly—even immoral—about killing without technical proficiency.
Honor is to give up a technological advantage in warfare because of some deeply-held, if indefensible, ideal.
But the Anglo-Texans who rode into battle against the Comanche didn’t possess the ideals of their archer ancestors and they were tired of losing time and time again to the Lords of the Plains. The Comanche were the deadliest light cavalry the world had seen since the Mongols. The Texas Rangers who rode out to face the Comanche wanted both to win the battle and to return to their families alive.
This was asking quite a lot, as it turned out. The Comanche were not only genius horsemen; they were absolute sharpshooters with the short bows they used—bows they could fire from horseback at a full charge; bows that didn’t take a full minute to recharge like the Anglo-Texans’ single-shot, muzzle-loading rifles. A Comanche warrior could pop twenty (or more) arrows into his target with extraordinary accuracy. In all the early engagements between the Rangers and the Comanche, the former were annihilated.
Then, in 1844, a Ranger captain named Jack Coffee Hays got his hands on about 400 Colt Patersons and armed each man in his ranging company with several pistols apiece.
The Rangers no longer had to dismount to fire their weapons—as one had to do with a Kentucky long rifle. A man could ride directly at his foe, and once he got within twenty yards, pull his pistols and fire five shots from each without reloading.
Today, this sounds suicidal, but in 1844, this new weapons technology changed the game of Plains Warfare completely. The Comanche, who’d been used to literally riding over their enemies, now rode into a wall of lead.
And this is why Colt’s pistols matter so much in McCarthy’s masterpiece. When Captain Glanton (who was once a Texas Ranger) gets his hands on crates of state-of-the-art, .44 caliber Dragoon pistols, he’s equipping his men with the deadliest handheld weapons in the world. And while there are a few scenes in Blood Meridian where Glanton’s Gang ride against skilled Apache warriors, for the most part, they’re massacring peaceful and unarmed Native villagers.
And they’re doing so with what, in 1849, constituted Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Samuel Colt’s pistols would have devastating consequences for the indigenous peoples of Texas, the American Southwest, and the Great Plains. In Texas alone, the Line of Settlement was pushed all the way from Fredericksburg to present-day San Angelo.
The Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa would never recover from this marrying of Anglo-Texan greed and Eastern U.S. arms manufacturing.
The world of Blood Meridian is a world made possible by Colt’s pistols. Often glamorized in film and television, these machines of brass and steel mass-produced a campaign of death, a rolling tide of ravenous Anglos who were now able to annihilate superior horsemen and marksmen.
In that scene on the outskirts of Chihuahua City where Glanton acquires the Whitneyville Colts, the mad captain tells the Prussian arms dealer that the pistols “Ain’t worth no fifty dollars.”
“What is your life worth?” Speyer asks, but this is the wrong question to ask a man like Glanton.
He should’ve asked what the scalps of Glanton’s enemies were worth.
Death is the only currency the Glanton Gang accepts.