Killer Colt (43 page)
Authors: Harold Schechter
• • •
Even as he coped with his grief and sought a haven for Caroline and his infant namesake, Sam pressed on with his submarine battery project. Two more public demonstrations of his remote-controlled underwater mine had followed the first. In August 1842, before an audience that included President John Tyler and members of his Cabinet, he had blown up a sixty-ton schooner moored 150 yards offshore in the Potomac River. Another spectacular display took place on October 18—just a month before John’s execution date—when Sam’s destruction of a 260-ton target vessel in New York Harbor was witnessed by an estimated forty thousand spectators.
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To be sure, there were powerful politicians who opposed Sam’s undertaking. Notable among them was Representative John Quincy Adams, the former U.S. president. Ignoring the old adage about love and war, Adams believed that the use of submarine mines was unsporting, and that if enemy ships were to be blown up “at all, it should be done by fair and honest” means. Despite Adams’s objections, however, Congress voted to appropriate a substantial sum to Sam’s ongoing experiments.
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• • •
Historical records do not indicate whether Mrs. Child succeeded in securing a yearlong residency at Brook Farm for Caroline and baby Sam. What
is
certain is that by early 1844—while continuing his experiments and arranging for a fourth and final demonstration of his invention—Sam was casting about for another suitable position for Caroline.
The evidence is contained in several letters from his brother James. By then, the twenty-eight-year-old James had been admitted to the bar and fought a pistol duel over an “amorous relationship” with the wife of a fellow
lawyer—a scandal that did nothing to impede his rapid advancement to judge of the St. Louis Criminal Court.
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Though Sam’s own letters do not survive, it is clear from James’s responses that by early 1844, Caroline had received enough education to teach school out west. That, at any rate, was the life Sam now imagined for her. James, however, consistently discouraged this plan.
“In relation to Caroline’s coming out to this city for the purpose of teaching school,” he wrote from St. Louis on February 23, 1844, “I cannot, now, recommend it for several reasons … The west is full of surplus teachers and every day do I see instances of both males and females who are entirely destitute of a means of living … This city is full of teachers and all of them are distressed for the want of patronage.”
9
Eight months later, the ever-persistent Sam was still pressing James to find a teaching job for Caroline. James, however, continued to resist, adding a new argument to his original objection: that, besides being “literally filled with teachers and governesses,” the West, with its relatively loose and lawless moral atmosphere, was no place for a vulnerable young woman like Caroline.
“I have made repeated suggestions to some of my female acquaintances, to such persons who would be most likely to aid me with their counsel, and have invariably met with no encouragement whatsoever,” he wrote to Sam on October 11, 1844. “Their answer is if you want to save her character, do not permit her to come here … The waywardness of the western people would lead her to be very much exposed and this in no way could be prevented. She would be almost as much so here as she would be if she were ‘at large’ in NY … The whole west is made up of new settlers, adventurers, and speculators, and among such people what could she expect?”
In the same letter, James offered an alternative proposal:
My plan for Caroline is this. Next winter if it is possible one of us goes into Virginia or North or South Carolina and to some of the old and worthy families there, represent her situation, and if possible—to secure her a home among some of them. In Virginia among the old families the feeling of true chivalry is of much higher
standards than in comparative new countries, and it is so in North and South Carolina. In these states they have private teachers. Here we have none nor governesses. A situation could be found where her feelings would be respected and she could enjoy herself in a little society … The family should be of high moral tone and there are many such as I am informed by Virginians and North and South Carolinians who are here. She could make herself useful and become, there, an ornament to her sex. Besides, the noble little boy would come under the best influences. The New England influences would be too bigoted or rather too severe, the western too careless, but the Virginian, &c would be of that character that would lead him to feel that all he may hope for in the future would alone depend upon himself (I mean so far as character is concerned), which he would meet with noble examples of success and would receive encouragement the most liberal in his early travel of life.
Nothing in the historical record, however, suggests that either Sam or James followed through on this plan. Caroline and her “noble little boy,” so far as is known, never found refuge among the chivalrous slave-holding families of the South.
• • •
Just five days before the first of these letters was written, Sam’s hope of securing a big military contract was dealt a serious blow. On February 18, 1844, he lost his main government advocate, Abel Upshur—recently appointed secretary of state—who was killed on board the newly commissioned warship USS
Princeton
when one of her massive guns exploded during a demonstration.
Despite this setback, Sam forged ahead with preparations for his fourth and final demonstration, acquiring the 500-ton schooner
Brunette
for use as a target vessel. On April 13, 1844, as the ship—renamed the
Styx
“for its death cruise”—moved under full sail down the Potomac River, Sam set off his mines before a massive crowd of onshore spectators that included the
president, his Cabinet, and members of Congress, who had adjourned for the occasion. In a great eruption of water, smoke, and timber, the ship was “instantly shattered to atoms.”
10
As a pure pyrotechnical display, the destruction of the
Styx
, like Sam’s three preceding demonstrations, was a spectacular success. Military professionals, however, remained deeply skeptical of Sam’s system. “As experiments,” wrote one influential observer, “these, as many others, were very beautiful and striking, but in the practical application of this apparatus to purposes of war, we have no confidence.”
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By then, moreover, the United States and Great Britain had reached an agreement over several disputed border issues, eliminating the threat of Anglo-American hostilities and the need for a costly harbor defense system.
In the end, nothing would come of Sam’s invention. Though he was compensated for “personal expenses incurred during his experiments,” Congress refused to commit additional funds to the project. After devoting more than three years to its development and promotion, Sam was forced to abandon the venture. Its failure was “one of his greatest personal disappointments.”
12
F
or a while, he channeled his unquenchable energies into a collaboration with his friend Samuel Morse, setting up a business called the New York and Offing Electro-Magnetic Telegraph Association, a subscription service for stock traders, commodity speculators, newspaper editors, and other professionals who stood to profit from receiving overseas news ahead of their competitors. Stationed at the westernmost tip of Coney Island, a fleet of fast sloops maintained by the company would sail out to meet incoming vessels and gather the latest information from abroad, which was then flashed via telegraph to Manhattan. Like every other enterprise he had thrown himself into, however, Sam’s wire service failed to live up to his hopes. By 1846, the thirty-two-year-old inventor was permanently done with telegraphy and as financially hard pressed as ever.
1
• • •
It was the bloodshed on the Texas frontier that finally made Samuel Colt’s fortune.
In June 1844—in a real-life version of a scenario that would become a cliché of countless Western movies—a band of fifteen Texas Rangers under the leadership of the legendary Major John Coffee Hays encountered a war party of eighty Comanches along the Pedernales River. The Comanches were renowned as “the finest light cavalry in the world,” each warrior capable of letting fly a half dozen lethally aimed arrows in a matter of seconds while riding bareback at full gallop. Expecting an easy victory over the badly outnumbered Rangers—armed, so the Indians assumed, with their
usual single-shot muzzle loaders—the Comanches were thrown into confusion when Hays and his men came charging at them while firing their pistols at a furious rate. Within minutes, half the Comanches lay dead on the ground, while the rest of the war party fled.
2
Exactly how Hays and his men came into possession of their handguns—early model Colt repeaters—remains unclear. What
is
certain is that “Hays’s Big Fight,” as it came to be known, not only foreshadowed the fate of the Plains Indians but also altered the destiny of Samuel Colt.
One of the Rangers involved in that skirmish was Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker. When war broke out with Mexico in 1846, Walker was sent east to procure weapons for the U.S. Army. Within days of his arrival in New York City, he and Sam had met, forged an instant alliance, and concocted a new, heavier caliber, six-shot revolver designed to Walker’s specifications. A prototype of this imposing “hand cannon” was submitted to Secretary of War William L. Marcy, who—with Walker’s enthusiastic endorsement—placed an order for one thousand of the pistols to be delivered in three months’ time.
3
Sam’s elation at achieving his long-sought goal of a military contract was only slightly tempered by the fact that, with his Paterson factory gone, he had no evident means to fulfill it. Colt, however, wasn’t the sort of man to be deterred by such a trifle. Deploying his considerable powers of persuasion, he prevailed on some of the nation’s finest gunsmiths—among them Edwin Wesson and Eliphalet Remington—to drop whatever else they were doing and supply him with parts, which were then assembled in the armory of Eli Whitney, Jr., son of the famed cotton gin inventor. Their cylinders engraved with an image of “Hays’s Big Fight,” the full complement of Colt Whitneyville-Walker holster pistols (so named by firearms aficionados) was delivered on schedule. Walker himself was brandishing a pair when he was killed on October 11, 1847, while leading a company of 250 Rangers against more than 1,600 Mexican lancers in the Battle of Huamantla.
4
Another governmental order of one thousand pistols quickly followed. From that point on, nothing would stand in the way of Sam Colt’s “ascent to the top of the pyramid of American industry.”
5
Within a few years, he owned his own state-of-the-art factory in Hartford, superintended by his old friend, the mechanical genius Elisha K. Root, who devised a system of steam-powered mass production that put Colt in the forefront of America’s
industrial revolution. With the great westward migration—spurred by the discovery of gold in California—demand for Colt’s six-shooters boomed, while the outbreak of war and revolution throughout Europe opened up rich new markets for his weapons. As sales of his revolvers continued to soar—from twenty thousand per year in 1851 to fifty thousand per year by 1854—Colt kept expanding his facilities, which culminated in the construction of his vast armory on the banks of the Connecticut River. By the time this technological showcase began operation in 1855, Colonel Colt—as he now styled himself—had become an international celebrity and one of the country’s richest men.
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• • •
Sam had first met Elizabeth Jarvis in the summer of 1851 during a vacation at the glittering resort community of Newport, Rhode Island. A lovely twenty-three-year-old from a distinguished and affluent family, Elizabeth found herself “swept away by the thirty-seven-year-old industrialist”—“fairly awed,” as she later confessed, by “the magnetism of his presence … More truly than any other, he filled my ideal of a noble manhood, a princely nature, an honest, true, warm-hearted man.”
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As for Sam, the elegant, well-connected Elizabeth—daughter of a prominent Episcopal minister and descendant of an illustrious “line of religious, military, and political leaders”—was exactly the kind of woman who suited his social ambitions. After several years of courtship, Elizabeth joyfully accepted Sam’s offer of marriage, their engagement sealed with a seven-carat diamond ring, a gift originally bestowed on Colt by a grateful king of Sardinia.
8
Sam, as biographers believe, had been married once before. When he proposed to the estimable Miss Jarvis, however, he was unencumbered, having long since divested himself of his first and far less desirable wife: Caroline Henshaw.