Quote:
Originally Posted by Frazod
I'm pretty sure that the big loop lever on the rifle was a Hollywood invention.
The partisans who rode with Quantrill would generally carry four, or sometimes six, pistols into combat, so that they could fire a large number of rounds without reloading, and were extremely proficient shooting two guns at once on horseback. They also short loaded their pistols, so that they wouldn't kick as much, which helped with accuracy while firing from a moving horse. It also helped them conserve gunpowder.
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The rifle was a Winchester 1873 and yes, it had the loop on the lever.
Now I have no idea if that was a common way of trying to get it cocked from horseback or not, but I gotta believe it had been done before...
Short loads were pretty common for some of those pistols because the cylinder would blow up if you overloaded 'em. There was a trick to preventing it I can't remember off the top of my head; something like loading beeswax into the back of the cylinder to keep the charge from leaking out into the next chamber, but my memory was that they just used smaller loads and that fixed it.
The Walker Colt seemed pretty notorious for it. And you can blame Unforgiven for this information because I went down a rabbithole years ago after Little Bill said something about the Walker Colt having a propensity for blowing up on guys. So I looked it up and sure enough - pretty common problem. It seemed to be a design problem with the Colt but some other pistols had metallurgy issues that created similar headaches.