In part one of Great Old West Guns we looked at Cowboys and Indians, two topics that have been at the heart of countless western films and television shows for decades. Even early silent films dealt with this historic narrative of our American West, all of which, in one way or another, brought about our nation’s fascination with Colt’s Single Action revolvers (among others), the holsters that carried them, and the men, and sometimes women, who used them. Some of the world’s most talented gunsmiths, engravers, manufacturers, and leather crafters were called upon to duplicate the guns and gunleather of historic figures of the American West, and none were more interesting than those of famous frontier lawmen.
Great Frontier Lawmen Guns
Paramount among the most celebrated were Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Bill Tilghman, whose storied histories have been brought to life in books, television shows and motion pictures. In the photo above, taken in Dodge City, that’s Masterson standing third from the left, and Wyatt Earp seated second from the left. They have been portrayed in movies and television for decades, but rarely was the historic nature of their guns and holsters featured. Most often they were fictionalized to add to the story, such as Wyatt Earp’s 12-inch barrel length Buntline Special, which he never owned, or TV’s Bat Masterson and his nickel plated 3-1/2 inch barrel length Colt Single Action with stag grips.
From 1958 to 1961, there were 108 episodes of the television series starring Gene Barry as the dapper frontier lawman. And while he may have been the television persona, the real Bat Masterson was a gentleman honed from frontier life as a roughneck, buckskin clad buffalo hunter, skinner, and Cavalry scout, a life Masterson lived long before his days as sheriff in Dodge City.
Bat’s Colt
The gun and holster pictured are handcrafted reproductions of one of Masterson’s 4-3/4 inch engraved Colts ordered from the factory. The .45 Single Action was custom built by Pietta and hand engraved in Italy by Dassa Brothers, copying the detailed engraving from the original gun. The cartridge belt and double drop loop holster were duplicated by Alan and Donna Soellner of Chisholm’s Trail from photos of Masterson’s original J.S. Collins/Cheyenne Wyoming rig.
By the time Bat Masterson received the original nickel-plated six-shooter he was already a legend, as famous as his friends Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman. While most only knew Masterson by his reputation as a Dodge City lawman, old friends like Earp and Tilghman had known him in his younger days as a buffalo hunter named Bartholomew Masterson. It was during the early 1870s that he decided to change his name to William Barclay Masterson. By then most folks already knew him as Bart (short for Bartholomew), but he preferred Bat, and the nickname stuck. This was more than a decade before he wrote the letter to Colt’s in July 1885 placing an order for what would be the seventh of eight single-action revolvers he would own.
Guns Blazing
In 1876 Bat had been involved in his first shootout. It was in in Sweetwater, Texas, with a cavalry sergeant named Melvin A. King. The fight was over a woman named Mollie Brennan, and as Wyatt Earp wrote of the event, “King walked into the Lady Gay saloon and opened fire on Masterson and Brennan, killing her and hitting Bat in the hip. Masterson managed to get his gun into action and cut King down with a clean shot to the heart.” There are several versions of how the shootout unfolded, some with King ambushing Masterson and Brennan, another as a standup gun fight in the Lady Gay, but they all end the same, with Mollie Brennan killed, Bat severely wounded and King dead. The injury left Masterson with a permanent limp and thus the need for what would become his famous cane.
Return to Dodge City
By 1876, Dodge City had grown from a rough-hewn buffalo camp into a bustling cow town. When Bat returned late that spring he found an unruly city with little law enforcement, a town that the Hays City Sentinel had christened “the Deadwood of Kansas,” and it was in Dodge City where Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, William Tilghman and Masterson would earn their early reputations as lawmen settling this unsettled berg.
In 1876 Bat served as Under Sheriff of Ford County for Bassett, replacing him in 1877 after Bassett had served two consecutive terms. His first act after becoming County Sheriff, not surprisingly, was to appoint Charlie Bassett as Under Sheriff, the two essentially exchanging badges. During his tenure in Dodge City, Bat appointed many of his old associates as special deputies when situations became thorny. He called upon Wyatt Earp, as well as appointing his younger brother James Masterson and friend Bill Tilghman, Deputy Sheriffs.
In 1879 Masterson began his last office as a lawman in Kansas, being appointed a U.S. Deputy Marshal. Ironically, though he had faced down countless cowboys on rampages through Dodge, and pursued murders, bank robbers, cattle rustlers and thieves, in his entire career as a lawman, Bat never killed anyone he apprehended. Many were wounded, but none were shot dead. His reputation for having killed 27 men as a peace officer was all legend, and Bat was wise enough to let the tales stand, as fear of his gun was as effective a weapon as the gun itself. Bat only killed one man in a shootout, his first and only, Melvin A. King.
One of the “Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma”
In the Old West there were good men and there were bad men, and then there were lawmen. Among the few who wore a badge and could claim to have walked the straight and narrow their entire careers were a trio of Deputy U.S. Marshals who came to be known as “The Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma,” Henry “Heck” Thomas, Chris Madsen, and William Tilghman. By no means was there a leader among them, they worked together and independently, but of the three, perhaps the most famous was William Tilghman, who spent 19 years as a Deputy United States Marshal working the badlands of Oklahoma.
One of the longest working lawmen of the Old West, Tilghman carried a badge and a gun for more than 50 years, befriending such luminaries as Wyatt and Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, and Ben Thompson. In 1878 he accepted the offer from Bat to become a Deputy Sheriff in Dodge City. Tilghman’s courage and honesty led to his being appointed both City Marshal and Undersheriff. He stayed on in Dodge until April 22, 1889, the date when Oklahoma was opened to settlement. Tilghman was among the earliest arrivals in the Oklahoma territory, establishing his first home at Guthrie. His reputation as a Dodge City lawman had preceded him, and in 1891 he was appointed a Deputy United States Marshal for the Oklahoma Territory.
Tilghman & His Favorite Colt
Tilghman and his fellow Deputy U.S. Marshals were largely responsible for wiping out organized crime in Oklahoma, and particularly in Perry, a lawless, wide open boomtown that Tilghman brought under control after becoming City Marshal in 1893. In Perry, Tilghman was both the city law and a U.S. Deputy Marshall, thereby giving him unrestricted jurisdiction.
It was during this period that Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Co. produced a beautifully engraved Single Action Army with a 4-3/4 inch barrel, which was presented to Tilghman by the citizens of Perry, Oklahoma. It was inscribed on the backstrap, “For William Tilghman Dec. 15. 93.” It remained one of his favorites and saw very little use. That gun was duplicated by Pietta from photos of the original and hand engraved to match by Dassa Brothers in Italy. The entire “Three Guardsmen” ensemble (pictured) was made for a cover feature in Guns of the Old West. Based on the originals, the holsters and cartridge belts were recreated by Alan and Donna Soellner of Chisholm’s Trail Leather.
Lonesome Dove & Gus
Not every famous lawman was a real person, but we are as familiar with Gus McCrae as Masterson or Tilghman. He was the creation of novelist Larry McMurtry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, a novel that was as broad in scope and as harsh in reality as 19th century Texas. McMurtry created flawed characters and built upon their strengths and weaknesses, never veering from the truths that come from crossing over the line one time too many. In his tale of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call’s adventures, and those of the men who rode with them, we caught a glimpse of what the old west was probably like; harsh, unforgiving, and demanding of one’s humanity.
Translating the book from the written page to the television screen in 1989 was the work of McMurtry’s long-time friend, screenwriter Bill Wittliff. Every detail of the little border town of Lonesome Dove was kept as exact as possible to the descriptions in the book, and everyone who lived in or passed through the town was a character you could relate to at one level or another. The intricacies of period dialogue, attitudes, and manner of dress, right down to hats, clothes and guns, took you back to Texas in 1876.
I spoke at length with Wittliff 15 years ago when I was writing the Guns of the Old West cover features on The Guns of Comanche Moon and Lonesome Dove and the 20th anniversary of Lonesome Dove. He explained the long trail he and the filmmakers had followed in making the original novel into what has become a legendary western film.
Wittliff on Guns
“Every gun we used was chosen out of the book,” said Wittliff, “and property master, Eric Williams was very diligent about it.” Gus McCrae’s Walker Colt, or as Wittliff called it, “Gus’ horse pistol,” was based on the descriptions in Lonesome Dove, but in the book it could have been either a Colt Dragoon or a Walker. It was decided that the latter would be more impressive on screen. “Pretty much Lonesome Dove was made by a bunch of Texans, and Larry’s book and the mini-series is sacred material down here,” he declared.
Little need be said about Robert Duvall’s portrayal of former Texas Ranger Gus McCrae to establish his character, it remains arguably his best work and Duvall’s favorite role in his long career. For the Guns of the Old West article it was necessary to recreate all of the principal guns and gun rigs from Lonesome Dove, and that task again fell on Alan and Donna Soellner of Chisholm’s Tail. The most detailed and interesting gun rig was Gus McCrae’s, requiring the Soellners to research the original pieces that were housed in Albert B. Alkek Library on the Texas State University-San Marcos campus, along with other guns and memorabilia from the film.
As Alan pointed out at the onset, “There’s a lot of detail that often goes unseen, even on the big screen.” These were the intricacies the Sollners wanted to recreate. The buckle worn by Robert Duvall as Gus McCrae, for example, was the late Texas Star buckle with the fat star. The movie buckle was cast from an original battlefield dig up and was solid brass. The Soellner buckle on the Gus rig is made from a copy of the same buckle!
More Gus
The Gus holster is a typical Texas Slim Jim design of the era, as is the aged black military belt. The cartridge box and knife sheathe are perhaps the most detailed and interesting parts of McCrae’s gear, aside from the gun. While Gus may have carried an old percussion-era Walker in the book, the reproduction Walker in the television mini-series was converted to fire .45 Colt blanks. The gun can clearly be seen having a full length cylinder without percussion caps and a channeled recoil shield on the right side, however, the conversion had no loading gate or cartridge ejector. For the article, renowned gunsmiths R.L. Millington and Kenny Howell created a .45 Colt conversion using a Colt Walker reproduction, with Howell doing the long cylinder conversion and Millington handling the aged finish to closely match the gun used by Duvall.
Looking back, Wittliff regarded Lonesome Dove as a great American epic. “I think Larry got his hands around who we are as a people and who we would like to be as a people. Larry was the first one to own this story, I was to some degree, because I wrote the screenplay, the second one who got to own it, the third who got to own it was everybody who worked on the mini-series. But now, in my opinion, because so many people have made that story and all those characters a part of our history, Lonesome Dove belongs to all of us. It is a most phenomenal thing.”
Own your own Kirst Lonesome Dove Walker
Walt Kirst is the father of modern percussion pistol cartridge conversions and was the first to build a Kirst Konverter to fit the Colt 2nd and 3rd Generation and Uberti Walker cap and ball revolvers. Historically, there were numerous conversions of Colt Dragoon models in the 1870s (some sold in recent years by Rock Island Auction Co.), but a Walker conversion would be a very rare gun and only one is known to have been recorded in the Colt Factory Archives. Back when Lonesome Dove was filmed there were no Kirst conversions, the gun was custom built.
Today you can order a Walker conversion cylinder with breechring and loading gate directly from Kirst and do your own conversion installation, or send Kirst your Walker, and for an additional fee they will build it for you (as pictured). Either way, owning a Gus McCrae Walker conversion is a lot easier today than it was when gunmaker Kenny Howell built the copy of “Gus’ horse pistol” for Guns of the Old West.
For more information: kirstkonverter.com.
