The Antique Arms Gazette
Newsletter of Old Guns Canada, Delta BC Vol. 4 No. 8
www.oldgunscanada.com
Winchester Collectors’ Show Cody, Wyoming
This was the first time I took in the Winchester Collectors’ Show in Cody, Wyoming in July. My friends and colleagues have long recommended this one, and although it’s pegged as a Winchester show, there are plenty of antique handguns to be had as well. The show is not very big, and one day is plenty to see all there is to see. It’s a fun show, though, and I managed to pick up a fine selection of high-end antiques.
Cody is a quaint Western-themed town worth seeing. Despite the current political quagmire we are finding ourselves wallowing in, it was nice to spend a few days “incognito” in the heartland of America. Situated at the entrance to the most famous of US National Parks, Yellowstone, Cody is a bustling little tourist town, full of Western accoutrement stores, saloons, tack shops and many dozens of hotels and motels. The town is very clean and well maintained, and the downtown main street is reminiscent of the Old West. It is home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and the Cody Firearms Museum, among others.
Incorporated in 1901, Cody, WY is named in honour of its most famous citizens, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. He had passed through the area in the 1870’s and was impressed by the region’s beauty, its rich soil and abundance of water. He would return in 1896 to promote the establishment of a town. His daughter Irma was the owner of its first hotel, the “Irma Hotel”. It is still intact today, offering guest rooms, a saloon, dining room and “Trading Post”, all in period-correct décor. During the summer months, Cody hosts its world-famous rodeo, and nightly re-enactments of a gunfight between “The Wild Bunch” (Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid), and Cody’s local sheriff. Apparently the outlaws robbed the First National Bank in Cody, on 1 November, 1904, in a brazen daylight robbery… Its most famous citizen, and living Western legend Buffalo Bill vowed to avenge the town’s honor and bring the outlaws to justice – dead preferred over alive.
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody
Although the bank really did get robbed, problem is, it wasn’t the “Wild Bunch”, and although Bill Cody made a lot of noise (he was a showman, after all) about capturing Butch Cassidy, he never really tried. He formed a posse and rode about blustering like a turkey in heat, but nothing ever became of it. The truth of the story is that two lone individuals, possibly cowboys down on their luck, rode into town and held up the bank. The clerk and part-owner of the bank tried to intervene and ended up getting himself shot dead. The commotion brought out the town’s citizens, all armed to the teeth, and a heated gun battle ensued. Much of the downtown got shot up, but the robbers escaped unharmed…
The newspapers quickly “surmised” that it must have been the “Wild Bunch”, also known as the “Hole In The Wall Gang” even though they had no proof. They speculated that “the shorter of the two” was Kid Curry, one of Butch Cassidy’s men, and therefore it must have been his gang that robbed the bank. By all accounts, Kid Curry had died a violent death several months prior to the robbery in question, in a far-off part of the country. A small detail which escaped the astute journalists of the day. And so, another Western Yarn was spun…
Buffalo Bill and Chiefs Iron Tail (l) and Plenty Coups (r) in Cody, 1907
The “Irma Hotel”, 1908
The “Irma Hotel” today
When Pepsi puts your picture on their vending machines, you have really made it…
Colt’s First Cartridge Revolver
The details of Rollin White’s patent for the bored-through cylinder need not be recounted here, suffice it to say that the patent – and its owners’ (Rollin White and Smith & Wesson) zealous pursuit of infringers caused firearms development in the US to stagnate for a good 10 years. While European makers had mastered the metallic cartridge and the revolvers using them, Americans were still fiddling about with percussion guns and a few rim fire cartridges. Webley, Tranter, Deane and Adams had effective center-fire cartridge revolvers on the market at a time when Colt, Remington, Whitney and Bacon were still putting out percussion guns. Once the patent had expired, it was a “free-for-all” on the American continent. In anticipation of the expiry, the various makers had already started designing the means to produce cartridge guns, however until the final appeal was dismissed, all plans had to be left on the sidelines. Colt and Remington still had large inventories of finished, and partially finished percussion guns to use up, and the first attempt was to convert those to cartridge use. In the case of Colt, it was the “House Pistol”, also known by collectors as the “Cloverleaf” which was the first revolver designed specifically as a cartridge gun. For this reason, the House Pistol is an important milestone in Colt firearms development, and a cornerstone of any Colt collection.
First turned out in 1870, and offered for sale the following year, some 5,000 specimens with four-shot cylinders would become known as the “true” cloverleaf. These were the only four-shot revolver Colt ever turned out, and no other model is derived from this design. By 1872, Colt had changed the design to utilize a conventional, round, five-shot cylinder. These new House Pistols were the forerunners of the “New Line” pocket revolvers.
Among the firsts for the Cloverleaf was the captive ejector rod which fits inside the cylinder pin. Another was the counter-sunk cylinder breech which allows the cartridge head to be flush with the breech. This design was years ahead of its time, and would not be used in another Colt until well into the 20th century. R. L. Wilson writes in “Colt, An American Legend” “…as Colt’s first effort at a production revolver designed solely for metallic cartridges, these handsome pocket protectors are a historic necessity to the collector concentrating on the firm’s output of the second half of the nineteenth century.”
Show Schedule
The season for shows is just beginning. After a few weeks off over the summer I am ready to resume my travels across the continent in search of fine antiques. I have at least one show each month from September until next June. Updates will be infrequent, all depending on shipping and customs clearance. Check my website often!
