Colt used the phrase “new and improved” to entice buyers, and published advertorials about his guns in magazines. To stoke sales, he suggested dangers around every corner; he wrote to the Mormon leader Brigham Young, advising him to buy Colt revolvers as a defense against “raids of savages” and “white marauders.” Later, he named several streets in Coltsville, his factory town, after prominent Native Americans—Sequassen, Wawarme, Masseek, Curcombe, and Weehassat—the names conjuring the images of Indian-fighting that had burnished his weapons’ reputation.
“What Colt invented was a system of myths, symbols, stagecraft, and distribution,” the historian William Hosley writes, in “Colt: The Making of an American Legend.” His guns were sold not just as tools but as a way to access “the celebrity, glamour and dreams of its namesake.” As Haag shows, other gun manufacturers soon picked up on the strategy. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which was also trying to grow its civilian market by adopting a policy of “scattering” its guns—rejecting higher-volume orders in favor of smaller buyers who might disperse its weaponry more broadly—began advertising its products as ideal for “single individuals, traveling through a wild country.” Gun manufacturers, Haag writes, began to employ “predicament” advertising, in which lone travellers were portrayed facing bears or outlaws. The only way out was through violence.
Last year, versions of these nineteenth-century messages persuaded Americans to buy nearly twenty million guns. In 2020, gun violence took the lives of twenty thousand Americans; add in suicides, and more than forty-five thousand lives were ended by firearms. Yet, if the messages were familiar, the guns themselves were transformed. In 1620, John Billington, the man who would become America’s first convicted murderer, arrived on the Mayflower; in 1630, he killed John Newcomen, a fellow-member of the Plymouth Colony, after they got into an argument in the woods. According to one story, as Billington took aim, Newcomen fled toward the shelter of nearby trees—an evasive maneuver that had every chance of success, given firearms technology at that time. Back then, reloading a gun was an arduous process, requiring the shooter to drop the weapon from the shoulder, point its muzzle upward, pour in gunpowder, shove in a bullet alongside a small piece of cloth, push both down the barrel with a ramrod until the bullet was seated against the powder charge, and then prime the firing mechanism. If the weapon had a cutting-edge flintlock ignition system, the shooter would additionally need to half-cock the hammer of his weapon, open a little pan sitting on top of the rifle, pour in gunpowder, close the pan, and set the hammer to full cock before taking aim. (Billington aimed true, and his rudimentary bullet crushed through Newcomen’s shoulder, killing him soon after.)