Goodbye to an Old Friend
by Rob Mancebo
The fusion of polished brass, blued steel, and stained walnut caught my immediate attention. I was in a gun store in Missoula in 1976 and the price tag of $60 caught my attention too. Thanks to money saved from a part-time job, that caplock .44 was within even a poor college student’s budget. It was a Navy Arms ‘Reb’, sort of a Gunnison & Griswold copy. I was just 18 and still barred from purchasing a ‘handgun’ through the benevolent mandates of the US government. But I’d drooled over Colts in movies and magazines. And a caplock didn’t take fixed ammunition so it wasn’t actually listed as a ‘handgun’. (Yes you can hear the echoing of our ancestors laughing.) The upshot of stopping at that store was, I walked out of there with caps, a powder flask, a pound of pyrodex, a box of .454 balls, a flap holster, and that gun.
The wilds of Montana being just across the campus and up the river about a stone’s throw, my roommate and I just headed on off to give it a try. We had a grand time shooting at cast off soda cans and flotsam the river had washed ashore. I got to work on my fast draw-- thanks to many prior months of practice with a single-action pellet gun, I never shot myself in the foot or made any egregious mistakes. My roommate frequently brought along his .22 rifle when we followed the railroad tracks along the river valley. We’d camp out dining upon rabbits shot in the frosty Montana mornings or nothing at all if the rabbits decided not to venture out.
We tested out all sorts of loads from about 15 grains all the way up to a maximum load which was designated as, ‘Trim the end of the ball off with your pocket knife ‘cause there’s too danged much powder ta ram it any further into the chamber and the cylinder won’t turn with it stickin’ out that way’.
A funny thing about that stinky old charcoal burner, it always drew attention. Not the ‘Uggh a gun!’ type attention you hear from our current crop of college students, but the ‘Wow, can I see it?’ type. Even the aspiring actor down the hall who was pretty clear about his dislike of firearms wanted to come out and shoot it. When we took him out he demanded the added security of carrying the cylinder in his pocket to make sure we didn’t pot any small game on the way.
For a fellow with such a vocal aversion to firearms, he sure burned a lot of powder. There’s something irresistible about all that fire and smoke. At the end of the day he excused his newfound delight in the pocket pyrotechnics of a caplock revolver by saying, “Wow, that was cool, but it’s not like a ‘real gun’.” The rest of us laughed, but didn’t disturb his self-delusion by mentioning anything about the lethal performance of such firearms in the War Between the States or the Westward Migration.
As soon as we got off campus, I’d carry that gun with the holster flap open and the butt canted slightly out. It was fast out of the leather that way. My best shot was one morning when a rabbit startled us by bounding out of the brush in front of us, hightailing it across the railroad tracks, and diving into the brambles on the other side. He was about ten feet ahead of us when he took off and skittered across our path at full speed. I drew and fired from the hip before he made cover. We had rabbit for our next meal.
That old .44 served me well for a couple of decades. It got packed away when I joined the Army and was sent to Europe, but I dragged it back out when I got back to the US. I learned to cast my own lead for that piece. Learned all the things you can do wrong- loose caps, caps not seated well, fragments down in the action, balls too small, wrong sort of paper when making paper cartridges, miss-fires, hang-fires, shooting in the rain and snow, too much oil in the winter, broken trigger & stop spring (add a leather washer). That gun was not only great to shoot, but it was always very forgiving of the mistakes a young black powder shooter might make. Throughout the years it converted (some folks say ‘perverted’) many a shooter to blackpowder.
It did have the normal drawback of any charcoal burner though-- time. The hell of spending years living in the big city, is that you only shoot on a ‘range’. There’s mostly nothing to do on a ‘range’ but shoot. A pistol that you spend more time loading than shooting is a gun to take into the open range somewhere that there are other things going on besides people in lanes turning money into noise and smoke.
Well, as warned in the included instructions, that brass framed gun finally shot loose. One day after cleaning it, it near broke my heart to find that I could wiggle the cylinder pin with a finger. After many decades of faithful service, I had to retire that gun. But I had $60 invested in it so its life wasn’t over yet. A friend’s cones became damaged, so I took the stainless steel ones off that old gun and gave them to him. Its trigger spring replaced a broken one on an 1860 army .44. I’ve still got most of that gun in a drawer of the guncase. You never know when you’ll need a mainspring or a replacement screw for another reproduction caplock.
We’ve moved out to the desert now and there’s plenty of open range here for me to wander the wastelands and burn a little powder where it won’t bother anyone. I bought an 1851 replica to replace it (In non-historically correct .44 caliber). It’s not quite the same, but it still has that old, familiar feeling to it. The snappy lock-up, that upward standing hammer that catches your thumb so naturally, the old 1851 Colt grip that fills your hand and points right on-target (Not like the Walker or the 1860 styles which tend to point down off-target a little when held at the hip.) I’m just always comfortable carrying a gun like that. I paid a lot more for my new gun, but knowing the immense entertainment value and satisfaction of those hoglegs, the price was no sort of an issue at all. I just made sure to buy one with a steel frame this time.
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