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COLT: LEGEND & LEGACY Produced, Written & Directed by Kenneth A COLT: LEGEND & LEGACY Produced, Written & Directed by Kenneth A. Simon www.simonpure.com OPEN NARRATOR: It was called the Peacemaker … the Equalizer …the Gun that Won the West --Colt! … The name is legendary … the gun an historic American icon. The Colt revolver helped tame frontiers, win wars and spark a revolution in American manufacturing. In the mid-19th century the Colt had no equal either as status symbol or weapon ... and everyone in the mid 1800s knew of the man behind the gun -- The revolver king, Samuel Colt, America’s first industrial tycoon. TITLE: COLT: LEGEND & LEGACY NARRATOR: The Colt empire was built on a foundation of guns, art, religion, and personal mythology. Sam Colt was complex and flamboyant -- a self-proclaimed genius whose real accomplishments were matched by relentless self-promotion and repeated self-invention. His faithful wife Elizabeth proved herself to be no less extraordinary, and in the end made Sam Colt’s legend bigger than ever, and his empire her own. KAREN BLANCHFIELD (Curator, Wadsworth Atheneum): He was forging ahead on paths that had never been walked before and all of the robber barons to follow would walk in Colt's footsteps. "If I can’t be first, I won’t be second in anything." --Sam Colt, 1844 DR. COULT NARRATOR: Sam Colt was born in Hartford in 1814. BILL HOSLEY (Author, "Colt"): I think Colt’s dominant trait was just this intense craving for success. And I am certain it all does trace back to, you know, his father’s failure, the family being knocked off the social register, their downward mobility (intense downward mobility), a- his mother’s death, his sister’s suicide. Just wave after wave of personal human tragedy to a young boy who had grown up in privilege in Hartford and then at the age of 7, between the age of 7 and 14, watched it all collapse. BLANCHFIELD: Colt was raised very modestly. His mother died when he was young. His father was an agent for a woolen textile mill. We get the feeling from family correspondence that he was not the best student but he was very ambitious and he and his father decided that the best thing for him would be to see some of the world and he was outfitted to be a sailor on a ship, that sailed around the world. While he was on this journey he conceived the idea for the repeating revolving mechanism. DEAN NELSON (Administrator, Museum of CT History): And when he returned from a one year apprenticeship aboard ship He had worked up very crude carved wooden elements of a revolving firearm. He was able to talk his father into funding some prototypes by the gunSMITH: Anson Chase in Hartford in 1832. NARRATOR: Colt was a complex man who learned self-promotion at an early age. From 1832 to 1836, Colt traveled throughout America as Doctor Coult, c-o-u-l-t, giving demonstrations of the newly discovered nitrous oxide – laughing gas. NELSON: He was setting up in local lyceums and museums and lecture halls and town halls of the period and was attempting to earn a livelihood from that. You can imagine that as master of ceremonies and the choreographer of that, a tremendous amount of showmanship came into play. And in 1834 he ends up in Baltimore where he executes a contract with John Pearson who's a local gunSMITH: and Pearson works exclusively for him under contract for about a two-year period working up the various models that lead to his formal application to the U. S. Patent Office. BLANCHFIELD: The laughing gas money allowed him to pay the gunSMITH: to produce the first prototype Colt revolvers. It was a passable way to make a living; he wasn't very successful. In fact, his gunsmith, John Pearson, was constantly reminding him that he needed to be paid. "I worked night and day almost, so I would not disappoint you and what have I got for it---why vexation and trouble...The manner you are using us is too bad...Come up with some money. ... In a devil of all ill humor and not without cause." --John Pearson, 1836 BAD TIMING, BIG EGO NARRATOR: With his patent in hand, and with the help of wealthy New Jersey relatives, Sam Colt opened the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in 1836 in Paterson, New Jersey. He was 23 years old. NELSON: His principal role was as a salesman for his patent firearms and the sales were terrible. Sam was working every angle in connection that he could to try to secure government contracts, influencing Congressmen. His cousin and - and sort of economic overseer, Dudley Seldon, was very angry with Colt for trying to sell guns through Old Madeira, basically wining and dining influential folks that had influence either with the War Department or Congress, "You use money as if it were drawn from an inexhaustible mine."--Dudley Selden, 1836 NARRATOR: In 1842, after six years and a production run of 5,000 pistols and rifles, the company declared bankruptcy, and liquidated its assets. HOSLEY: Colt had failed New Jersey for two reasons: first is that he was a chaotic presence in the midst of this small, struggling start-up business. He had ego the size of Texas, but he didn’t understand the- the nature of the challenge he was embarking on. But also - the timing was wrong. They launched the company within months of a collapse, you know, the great bank riots and panic of 1837 -- it was like a huge recession – and just a bad time in the economic cycle of the country. It was also during the period when there were no wars that the country was involved with. NARRATOR: Colt spent 1841 to 1846 in New York City, where he maintained a studio at New York University. He continued to unsuccessfully hustle for a government firearms contract as he pursued, with little success, other inventions and enterprises. In 1844, Colt demonstrated for Congress his invention of an underwater mine that used a telegraphed signal for harbor defense. Colt’s showmanship prevailed as he blew up a 500-ton schooner on the Potomac River to the delight of the thousands who attended. But to his great disappointment, Colt was once again unsuccessful in securing a U.S. government contract. During his six years in New York, Colt would regularly receive discouraging field reports on his Paterson guns. Users complained that the guns were too complicated, too easily fouled up in use, too heavy and potentially lethal to the shooter. Undaunted, Colt regularly solicited testimonials from Colt gun users, as he kept up a steady stream of correspondence with military officers and others who he thought might help him.. But fame and success were still elusive. Then, after 30-years of peace, the Mexican War broke out in 1846. HOSLEY: Sam Colt was in 1846 poor as a church mouse and he knew the Mexican War had started and he’s flailing around. He knows surf’s up and that there’s an opportunity for him but he’s not sure what. SUCCESS HOSLEY: In November 30th, 1846, Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers writes Sam Colt in Hartford a letter that will change the course of history. That letter is basically reporting from the frontier that in fact, the guns you made in New Jersey do work and they have, in fact, changed the way we fight. "The pistols which you made...have been in use by the ‘Texas Rangers’ for three years...[and are]the only good improvement I have ever seen...[In the] summer of 1844, Col. J.C.Hayes, with fifteen men, fought about 80 Comanche...Without your pistols we should not have had the confidence to undertake such daring adventures"--Samuel Walker, 1846 HOWARD LAMAR (Professor of History, Yale University): An Indian can fire 20 arrows in a minute but a gun could only shoot about once or twice in a minute because of the having to reload, say, a rifle. Something had to be developed as a counter to the Indian's great firepower, as it were, and the Colt revolver was the answer to that. RICHARD SLOTKIN (Professor of American Studies, Wesleyan University): A Texas Ranger with a repeating pistol has a weapon that can be fired as rapidly, more accurately with more hitting power than an Indian's bow and arrow, so it's very much a tool of advantage, a weapon of advantage on the Great Plains. NARRATOR: With a $25,000 contract for 1,000 guns that Walker arranged and with the design modifications that Walker suggested, Sam Colt re-entered the gun manufacturing business in 1847. Without a factory or machinery, Colt contracted with Eli Whitney’s Armory in New Haven for the manufacturing of the guns. NELSON: The key ingredient in that contract was when Whitney finished the contract, all the machinery and the tooling and the unfinished parts and the gauges became the property of Colt, so he basically moved these up to Hartford and first set them up in the Pearl Street factory. NARRATOR: It was in Colt’s native Hartford that he would finally see the success he craved. In the 1840’s, Hartford was an old merchant and banking city suffering from declining agriculture and population loss. "A Crisis has arrived...[Hartford is] on the downward course...Manufacturers and mechanics...are the soul of prosperity...We must bring prosperity to our doors by producing."--Rev. Horace Bushnell, 1847 NARRATOR: Colt returned to Hartford primarily because a rich uncle had extended a line of credit.
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