Antique prices got you down? If you’re looking to put together a collection of revolvers from the Wild West days, it can get expensive very quickly, especially if you want one of the best-known pieces. Checking the prices at CollectorsFirearms.com, you can see that first-generation Colt Single Action Army revolvers rarely dip below $2,500, and are routinely listed at far, far higher prices. Smith & Wesson’s full-sized revolvers are more affordable, but still will cost you a couple of grand (or a lot more) for a nice example of a big-bore centerfire. It’s the same for old Remington revolvers. So, how do you get started on a budget?
Old wheelguns @ TFB:
Look at rimfires
One great way to find affordable revolvers from the Wild West era is to forget centerfires and look at rimfires. All the manufacturers made them, even Colt and Remington, and rimfires are really what got Smith & Wesson started.
Prices for something like a Colt New Line are far lower than a Peacemaker; a Remington Smoot revolver is a lot less money than a Model 1875. And Smith & Wesson made a bajillion rimfire revolvers during and after the Civil War, including the Model 1 (a pocket revolver in .22 caliber), the Model 2 (a “belt-sized” revolver in .32 caliber) and the Model 1 ½ (a pocket-sized revolver in .32 caliber). While rimfire .32s might not be the stereotypical handgun of choice for cowboys on the range, Smith & Wesson made hundreds of thousands of these pistols, and gunfighters kept them around in case of social work at close quarters. Wild Bill Hickock was known to have a Smith & Wesson .32, which would have been quicker to reload than the .36-caliber Colt percussion revolvers he was famous for carrying. George Armstrong Custer also owned Smith & Wesson tip-up revolvers, although they did nothing for him at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Speaking of which …
Look at European revolvers
Custer, and many other soldiers, gunmen and law-abiding folks of that era, owned European revolvers. The Belgians, in particular, were well-known for copycatting American designs; the British had no need of copycatting, because they made their own excellent designs. The big-bore Bulldog-style revolvers had a lot of hitting power in a small package, probably more than the small American rimfire pistols.
You can find such handguns at considerably lower prices than their Colt/Remington/etc. counterparts. Respected brands like Webley & Scott will be more, of course, but there are many others that are bargains. And there’s nothing wrong with a good Webley; those revolvers were a big part of building the British Empire during the late 19th century.
Look at less-popular American revolvers
Not all the big American revolver brands’ revolvers command the same price. Peacemakers rule the roost, and then everything else that John Wayne and Louis L’Amour made famous. But you can find something like a Colt Model 1877 for a lot lower price when compared to a Single Action Army in the same condition, from the same year.
Cynical collectors and shooters might point out there’s a good reason for that—the Colt Thunderer and Lightning models were considered much more fragile than the Peacemaker. And maybe they were, but you probably aren’t buying it to protect yourself in a frontier shootout; maybe you aren’t planning to shoot it at all, and in that case, who cares? John Wesley Hardin, Doc Holliday and other shootists of the Wild West thought well enough of the double-action Colt, as we talked about recently.
There are several other similar candidates that were relatively common in the old frontier days, but don’t hold as much public interest today. Colt’s first pocket pistol, the Model 1849, is easy to find at a good price, since they made more than 300,000 of them. Those old .31-caliber percussion revolvers armed many a prospector in the California Gold Rush, and thousands upon thousands of them were scattered around the Wild West for decades afterwards. You can see old Civil War photos with soldiers packing these revolvers; they might have been underpowered, but they were a lot better than having nothing.
It’s the same with other percussion revolvers of the Civil War era. Starr revolvers are relatively affordable. Manhattan Navy revolvers (a copy of the Colt 1851) are still not that expensive. While they may have never armed the hero of a spaghetti western, revolvers like this very much settled the Wild West, and a gunhawk of that era was probably a lot closer to Josey Wales, riding around loaded-down with whatever percussion revolvers he could scrounge up than the overly-sanitized hero of most westerns, with a shiny Peacemaker that never needed reloading in a movie gunfight.
Look at Derringers
Derringers aren’t as popular with collectors as revolvers, but they were present all over the Wild West as hideout guns. Prices vary wildly on derringers, but you can certainly find lesser-known models for low prices.
The bottom line
The idea that the Wild West was settled by a man with a Winchester 1873 and a Colt Peacemaker in the 1840s is entirely the fault of Hollywood. Settlers, soldiers, lawmen, badmen and natives used a wide variety of weaponry, and a lot of it is still quite affordable, if you are willing to look beyond the models that collectors have overpriced over the past 75 years.
