ammunition, underwater harbor defense systems via coordinated explosive mines and, with Samuel F.B. Morse, the telegraph. In fact, having narrowly averted a war with Louis Philippe’s France in the mid 1830s, the government awarded Colt $50,000 – an immense sum in those days – to further his plans for harbor defense. But hostilities with Mexico, from whom the U.S. demanded a huge chunk of territory, interrupted Colt’s East Coast harbor defense efforts and turned him, once again, into a firearms entrepreneur.
It may have been luck, in the form of a couple of famous Texas Rangers, as much as his personal inventive genius that gave Colt a second chance. Captain Samuel Walker was recruiting for the fighting in Texas when he exchanged letters with Colt, whose Paterson guns he had used successfully against the Comanche. Many frontiersmen regarded that southwestern tribe as the finest light cavalry of the era. Working together, Colt and Walker soon developed a fresh design, more powerful and more reliable than Colt’s Paterson guns, and Colt induced Eli Whitney, Jr., son of the inventor of the cotton gin, to financially back his enterprise.
Colt sold the subsequent 1847 Walker Colt percussion revolver to the government and to civilians alike. Based on the new designs, these guns were an immediate success and Colt was on his way to fame and fortune. Walker, on the other hand, died the following year, killed by the thrust of a lance during the Battle of Juamantla, near Tlaxcala, Mexico.
By 1851, Colt was organizing and building a modern factory along the Connecticut River in Hartford. Four years later, the factory was fully operational and, incorporated as Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, was turning out fresh firearms models to supply a national sense of unrest and the flood of immigrants moving west. The California Gold Rush, the Indian Wars and looming sectional conflict that would become the Civil War, or War Between the States, fueled Colt’s armory and his almost boundless energy. Soon, a factory in London was also producing the indefatigable Yankee’s designs.
In his new factory, which was built to the latest standards of the day, Colt lost no time in specifying interchangeable parts for his firearms, some 80 percent of which were turned out on precision machinery. Because of the undeviating attention Colt – and capable lieutenants such as Elisha K. Root, a long-time friend and highly qualified engineer – paid to the manufacturing process, the Hartford production machinery achieved a remarkably high degree of uniformity for the mid-19th century. Typically, the metal parts of a Colt revolver were designed, molded, machined, fitted, stamped with a serial number, hardened and assembled right there in Hartford.
In the mid-1850s, Colt finished his remarkable factory and topped it with a marvelous blue onion dome resplendent with gold stars. Above it stood a cast bronze “rampant colt,” the rearing stallion holding a broken spear – half in its mouth and half in tandem across its legs – that would become the internationally-recognized Colt logo.
Sam also oversaw the building of a mansion, complete with greenhouses and formal gardens, which he named “Armsmear,” and he got married. His wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of a New England parson, would be instrumental in guiding the company through turbulent times following his early death in 1862.
Colt, who was by now extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected, took his bride on a six-month tour of Europe. The highlight of couple’s honeymoon was undoubtedly their attendance at the coronation of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Sam and Elizabeth had several children, but only one survived into adulthood. The one surviving boy was named Caldwell. Unfortunately, Caldwell proved to be an heir of no importance, a dilettante yachtsman and skirt-chaser. He was shot to death in 1894 while fleeing from an irate husband in Key West, Florida.)
In the 1850s, Sam Colt was considered one of the 10 wealthiest men in America. The Governor of Connecticut presented him with the honorary title of Colonel of State Militia, probably as payback for political and financial support. Still, Sam’s life was anything but calm. Because he gave lavishly engraved sets of firearms inset with gold and silver as gifts to men he believed would look favorably upon his company, he was investigated by the U.S. Congress. Adding to his troubles, several of his children died at birth or shortly thereafter. He also fought his way through numerous lawsuits, all of which sought a slice of the Colt enterprise.
In those days, Colt sold his firearms through a small force of traveling salesmen, known as agents, and between 15 and 20 “jobbers,” the old term for wholesalers who sold large quantities of guns to smaller retail outlets such as hardware stores. In addition, the company maintained sales offices in both New York City and London. The sales department also would accept direct orders at the plant, providing they were from someone who was rich and famous, a friend of the Colt family, or a buyer of a large quantity of weapons. This practice would continue long after Sam’s death. (In July of 1885, frontiersman and some-time marshal/sometime outlaw W.B. “Bat” Masterson sent Colt his order for a nickel-plated .45 caliber single action revolver. “Make it very Easy on [the] trigger,” he wrote under the letterhead of the Opera House Saloon of Dodge City, Kansas. His letter still survives in the Colt archives.)
Sam Colt was later recognized as one of the earliest American manufacturers to fully realize the potential of an effective marketing program that included sales promotion, publicity, product sampling, advertising and public relations. Whether or not any specific bribes were asked or offered is not known, but given the climate of the time, such would not have been unusual.
Samuel Colt’s health began to fail late in 1860 as the country moved toward total war. He was tired and overworked. Prior to the actual outbreak of war, Colt continued to ship product to customers in southern states; as soon as war was “official,” however, Colt supplied only the Union forces. By the end of 1861, the Hartford Armory was operating at full capacity, with more than 1,000 employees and annual earnings of about $250,000.
In his lifetime, Sam Colt had produced more than 400,000 firearms.
On January 10, 1862, Sam Colt died at the age of 47. The cause of his death remains obscure even today; contemporary accounts suggest rheumatic fever or possibly pneumonia. In his lifetime, he had produced more than 400,000 firearms. His estate was reportedly worth $15 million, an enormous sum for the time, an amount of money equivalent to more than $350 million by today’s economic standards. Following Sam’s death, control of the company passed into the hands of his widow, Elizabeth, who had promised that she would carry out her husband’s wishes for the future.
Colt died while the Civil War raged – indeed, while the outcome was very much in doubt. On a cold February morning two years after he was buried, the city of Hartford awoke to the news that Colt’s factory was in flames. At 8:15 that morning, smoke was reported issuing from the attic wing. Flames spread so rapidly that by 9:00 a.m. Colt’s well-known blue and gold onion dome with its trademark rampant colt weathervane had collapsed into the fire. Although the workers battled valiantly to save the building, its machinery and stock, by evening everything was reduced to smoking rubble. The cause of the fire was never determined, but there was some evidence of Confederate sabotage.
Unfortunately Sam had never bothered to insure the ruined building. Elizabeth had done so in a partial manner and she spearheaded reconstruction with the pitiful one-third of replacement value they eventually wrung from the reluctant insurance companies. By 1867 the new armory, now with firewalls three feet thick, was “not only an unsurpassed workshop but, also a monument to the memory of the late Colonel Colt and was fully consistent with Elizabeth’s determination to live a life of ‘faithful affection’ and memory.”
Control of the company remained in the hands of Elizabeth and her family until 1901 when she, having no living heirs, sold it to a group of investors. Thus ended the Colt family’s direct affiliation with the company that had become, and remains, one of the most widely-recognized in American
