SAA – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Autry Museum Colts

By Joe Berk

I haven’t been to the Autry Museum in Los Angeles since 2018 when I took the photos you see here. I’ll get out there in the next few months. It’s one of the great destinations in the Los Angeles area, and what makes the Autry even better for me is the extensive firearms display.

I found these photos when I was poking around a bit on an external hard drive. For this blog, I’m including only the Colts in the Autry Museum. I only photographed a few of firearms I saw there. The Autry had more Colts, as well as Winchesters and other firearms on display.

The photos were a challenge. Each of the guns you see here was behind glass, and the lighting was fairly dim in the firearms display area. I was using my D3300 Nikon with its standard 18-55mm lens, shooting at ISO settings of 800 to 3200. These are not conditions conducive to capturing good images. I did the best I could.

The sixgun you see in the photo above is an original Colt Walker, one of the one thousand guns Sam Colt manufactured for Sam Walker in 1847. The last original Walker I know of that sold went for a million bucks. We’ve mentioned the Colt Walker in an earlier ExNotes blog. I bought the Uberti reproduction; the reproduction Uberti Walkers sell for just over $500.

The Autry Museum firearms collection features several Colt black powder revolvers. In addition to the Walker up top, here are a two more I photographed. The first one is a .36 caliber 1851 Colt Navy that belonged to Wild Bill Hickok. The second is a .44 caliber 1860 Colt Army. It’s quite fancy and it probably belonged to somebody famous, but I don’t know who (and that gives me a good excuse to get back out to the Autry Museum).

As you might imagine in a museum dedicated to the American West (and one carrying the name of a famous cowboy star like Gene Autry), the Colt 1873 Single Action Army revolver is well represented in this collection.

One of the 1873 Single Action Army revolvers on display at the Autrey Museum belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. His initials are carved into the ivory grips.

There were also a few Colt double action revolvers:

In addition to the early Colt revolvers, there were three Colt Pythons:

This is a crop showing some of the engraving detail on the revolver above.

The Museum also displayed an engraved 1911 .45 Auto. This 1911 was manufactured by Colt and several other manufacturers (as is the case even today; Colt still makes the 1911 and so do many other companies). The 1911 shown here had the trigger guard cut away. The idea behind removing the trigger guard is that it allows getting off a shot more quickly. The modification is not something I’d want.

There was one more Colt I should mention: A Bulldog Gatling gun. Richard Jordan Gatling, the Gatling gun inventor, never operated his own factory. All U.S. Gatlings were manufactured by Colt in Hartford, Connecticut. They were also made under license in Russia military by the Orloff company.

Uberti replicas of the Colt Walker and the Colt 1873 Single Action Army.

We’ve done other blogs in the past on the Colt Walker and the Colt Single Action Army (including the two replica revolvers you see in the photo above), other Colt black powder revolvers, and variations of the Gatling gun. Those blogs are here. You might also want to pick up our book on the Gatling gun.

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A Uberti 44 Special SAA

Good buddy Paul is the guy who got me interested in the Uberti Single Action Army and blackpowder Colt replicas, and it’s an interest that I am thoroughly enjoying. We visited recently and Paul showed me one I had seen before that he had recently added a set of custom grips to. This is a Uberti Single Action Army with the black powder frame chambered in .44 Special, and it is a stunning example of Uberti’s work.

Paul purchased a set of synthetic ivory grips that had a large decorative eagles molded into the grip material. The original grips with the eagles didn’t quite make it for Paul, and the fit of the grips to the grip frame was poor. Paul sanded the eagles into oblivion and very carefully recontoured the grips for what is now a perfect fit. There are no gaps and no overhangs anywhere. There’s something about the Colt SAA configuration that just feels right in the hand.

I like this gun. I’m a big fan of the .44 Special cartridge. Paul tells me he shoots a 215-grain bullet he casts himself and it is quite accurate. Like my .45 Colt Uberti, Paul’s gun shoots to point of aim at 50 feet, which is great for a fixed sight handgun.

Paul and I had a good conversation about our shared interest in these old western style sixguns. We’re both about the same age and we grew up in an era when cowboy TV series and western movies dominated the entertainment industry, and that undoubtedly influenced our taste in firearms. It was a good time to be a kid, I think.

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Colonel Colt and Captain Walker are in the building…

Two beautiful handguns, the ones you see above are. The one on top is a Colt Walker, the one on the bottom the timeless Single Action Army. But neither are actually Colts. They are both Uberti guns, and both are magnificent.

The story is one for the ages, and it goes like this: Samuel Colt invented the revolver, but he and his factory in Paterson, New Jersey couldn’t make a go of it. Colt left the gunmaking business and went on to other ventures, but in the meantime, there were already a few Colt revolvers writing history in the American West. Captain Sam Walker and his Texas Rangers used the early Colts with great success in battles on the Texas frontier. Walker mentioned this to Colt, Colt asked for an endorsement, Walker said yes, and then he helped Colt design a new revolver to better meet frontier combat needs. Walker drove the design requirements as he took a new commission in the US Army, and the Army ordered a cool thousand of the new 1847 Colt Walkers. Colt was back in business, courtesy of Sam Walker, the Texas Rangers, and the US Army.

Thus was born the Colt Walker, one of the largest handguns ever made. Until the advent of the .357 Magnum in the 1930s, the Walker was the world’s most powerful handgun. It was designed so that if it missed the bad guy but got the horse he was riding, it would kill the horse. I can’t help but think of an old New Jersey expression (common when I was growing up and one I still use on occasion) that ends with “….and the horse you rode in on, too!”

The last of the original Colt Walkers that changed hands went for over a million bucks not long ago, so I knew that until the ExNotes blog goes more viral (than it already has, that is), I wouldn’t be getting an original Walker anytime soon. But there’s something even better from a shootability perspective, and that’s the modern reproduction Walkers offered by Uberti.

I always wanted a Walker, and a few months ago I acted on that urge. I had to wait several months because the Uberti factory in Italy was shut down by the Covid 19 pandemic. Uberti is back in operation again and my Walker recently arrived. It’s a good deal. Unlike a cartridge revolver, here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia black powder guns can be shipped direct to your door.

I knew Uberti makes a quality handgun, as I had great experiences with my “tuned” Taylor 1873 Single Action Army in .45 Colt. That’s one of the two revolvers you see in the photo at the top of this blog. It’s a cool photo because it shows the relative size of the two guns (the Single Action Army is no pipsqueak, but it’s dwarfed by the Walker). And, I’m showing off a bit with the photo’s background (it’s the pig hide from my Arizona wild boar expedition with good buddy Paul, who ordered himself a Walker not too long ago).

Robert Duvall as Gus MacCrae in Lonesome Dove, the greatest story ever told (in my opinion). Gus carried a Colt Walker.

I’ve mentioned the Walker Colt before, most notably in the book review we posted on Revolver, the book about Samuel Colt. The Colt Walker also figured prominently in Lonesome Dove, and I thought I’d show one of the many great scenes from that movie here again.

Everybody wants to be Gus MacCrae, I guess, and I’m no exception. I suspect Paul feels the same way. So consider this a fair warning: If Paul and I walk into your establishment and order a whiskey, be quick about it. We don’t like surly bartenders, and we carry Walkers, you know.

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Men of a Certain Age

Men of a certain age, like me, grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. Our values were formed in a era when honor, courage, integrity, and self-reliance were important, and I think a big part of those values were formed by what we watched on TV. Today, television shows are mostly mindless drivel centered on pop culture (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and the so-called reality genre. We were way luckier:

Good times and good TV shows. The ’50s and’60s were a good time to be a kid.

The stars of those ’50s and ’60s shows were folks who knew the difference between right and wrong, and we received a steady stream of 30-minute morality injections several times every week as a consequence of watching them. It seemed to work. It was a good time to be a kid.

The other stars in those early Westerns were the horses and guns. I never had any interest in owning a horse, but the steady emphasis on six-shooters and leverguns instilled a lasting fascination with firearms in many of us. A Colt .45 Single Action Army figured in nearly every episode (in fact, you can see this iconic firearm in several of the photos above). It’s no small wonder that sixguns still sell well in the US.

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Today, the prices of Colt Single Action Army revolvers are through the roof, but there are a number of companies that offer exact replicas built in Italy at far more reasonable prices. A few years ago, when I saw this Taylor and Company “tuned” Single Action Army at my local gun shop, I was a goner. To borrow a phrase, I pulled the trigger.

My Taylor .45 Single Action Army. This is a sweet-shooting sixgun.

The Taylor is an exact copy of the Colt Single Action Army, it’s chambered in .45 Colt, and Taylor’s “tuned” descriptor means the revolver has a trigger and action job to slick up the internals. The trigger is under two pounds, it’s crisp, and the gun feels perfect in every way. There’s just something about a single action sixgun that feels right. This one is beautiful and it has everything that floats my boat: A brass grip frame, a color case hardened receiver, and high polish bluing everywhere else. The .45 Colt chambering is perfect, too. It’s a fun cartridge to reload and shoot, and it’s accurate.

The first day I went to the range with my new Single Action Army sixgun, I knew it was going to be a good morning. On the dirt road leading to the range, I saw a bobcat. We were both surprised. He looked at me and I looked at him, and then the cat leisurely walked across the road and disappeared into the brush. It was a good sign. I’ve seen bobcats here in California three or four times in the last 30 years and seeing one on my way to the range that morning was a special treat.

Targets at 25 yards. The Taylor is an accurate handgun. Surprisingly, the sights shoot exactly to point of aim, which is unusual for a fixed-sight revolver.

My .45 Single Action Army groups well with every load I tested. It particularly likes Trail Boss propellant and cast bullets (the two groups with arrows were with this powder). The gun shoots exactly to point of aim (I used a 6:00 o’clock hold on the targets above), and the spread you see in the groups is almost certainly more the result of my old hands and eyes than the gun or the load. If you’ve ever wondered how good the Italian replica Single Action Army handguns are, my results indicate they are fine firearms.

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