The Six-Shooter That Made The Legend

Everything you think you know about the 1873 comes from the movies. The real thing was slower, stranger, and far more interesting — and the reason it still matters is hiding in how you had to load it.

Jake Warren

Writes about Western firearms history and replica collecting. Updated 29 August 2026 · 9 min read

My nine-year-old asked me why the cowboys in films always run out of bullets at the worst possible moment. I told him six-shooters only hold six, and he looked at me the way children look at a parent who has just been caught not knowing something.

He was right. I did not know. What I found out took three weeks and completely changed how I look at an object I had been seeing my whole life without ever once actually seeing.

Part oneWhat Actually Happened In 1873

In 1873 the Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company delivered a revolver to the United States Army. Officially it was the Single Action Army. Almost nobody called it that. They called it the Peacemaker.

It fired a .45 calibre cartridge. It went to cavalry troopers, and then to ranchers, lawmen, gamblers, road agents and everyone in between, and within about twenty years it had become so completely fused with the idea of the American West that we are still drawing its outline today.

It came in three barrel lengths and the length told you something about a man's life. Seven and a half inches was the cavalry gun, for men on horseback who needed reach. Five and a half was the artillery model. Four and three quarters was the short one, carried by people who expected to need it out of the leather in a hurry, and that is the one almost every film puts in the hero's hand.

One correction while we are here, because nearly everybody gets it wrong, including me for years. The phrase “the gun that won the West” gets welded onto this revolver constantly. It belongs at least as much to the Winchester Model 1873 rifle, which arrived the same year. The Colt's own earned name is the Peacemaker. Worth knowing before you say it confidently in front of somebody who reads.

The nicknames people actually used tell you how they felt about it. They called it the hog-leg, for the shape of it. They called it the thumb-buster, for reasons your thumb explains to you after about forty cocks. Nobody bothers to nickname a tool they are indifferent to.

Part twoWhy It Was Slow — And Why That Was The Design

This is the part that answered my son's question, and it is the part almost nobody knows.

Single action is a phrase that gets thrown around loosely and it means something exact. The trigger does one job: it drops the hammer. It does not turn the cylinder. It does not cock anything. Before every single shot, you pull the hammer back with your thumb, which rotates the cylinder one position and locks it in place.

Thumb. Aim. Squeeze. Six times.

And then you are empty, and here is where a modern person's assumptions fall apart completely.

There is no cylinder that swings out to the side. That did not exist on this gun. To reload, you pull the hammer back to a half-cock position, which frees the cylinder to turn, and you flip open a small gate on the right-hand side of the frame. Then you rotate the cylinder by hand and push each empty case backwards out through that gate, using a spring-loaded rod that lives under the barrel.

1. Half-cockPull the hammer back to the first click. The cylinder is now free to turn.
2. Open the gateA small hinged flap on the right side of the frame, behind the cylinder.
3. Push the empties outRotate the cylinder round, one chamber at a time, working the ejector rod under the barrel. Six times.
4. Feed six back inThrough the same little gate. One. At. A. Time.
5. Close the gate, lower the hammerNow you have six shots, and the whole sequence starts again.

So when a man in a film is crouched behind a water trough with brass in his teeth, that is not drama. That is just what reloading was.

Part threeFive Beans In The Wheel

And then there is the detail that made me put the book down.

Those revolvers had no safety worth the name. If the hammer was resting on a loaded chamber and the gun fell on it — off a saddle, out of a holster, down a staircase — it fired. Into a leg, usually. Men learned this the way men learn everything, which is one at a time and badly.

So they stopped loading six.

They loaded five, and left the chamber under the hammer empty. Five beans in the wheel is what they called it, and old shooters still say it today. Your gun holds six and you carry five, forever, because the sixth one is the one that shoots you.

That is a nine-year-old's favourite fact in the world, incidentally. He has told his entire class.

Part fourThe Legends People Invented

You may have heard of the Buntline Special — the revolver with the absurd twelve-inch barrel that Wyatt Earp supposedly carried, a gift from a dime novelist named Ned Buntline.

Think about what that actually means, though. This gun was so famous that people invented legends about it and the legends held for ninety years. Nobody writes fan fiction about a tool nobody cares about.

And the real numbers got strange in their own right. A revolver the Army bought for roughly the price of a good pair of boots — the specific one Pat Garrett was carrying the night he shot Billy the Kid — sold at Bonhams in 2021 for $6.03 million. It is the most anyone has ever paid for a firearm.

There is one more piece of quiet genius worth knowing. Colt chambered a version in .44-40 and rolled the words Colt Frontier Six Shooter along the barrel. The point was that the round was the same one the Winchester rifle used. One box of ammunition, one belt, two guns. A long way from a town, that was not a feature. That was the difference between being armed and not.

Part fiveWhat You Can Actually Hold Today

Somewhere in the middle of all that reading I did the thing you are not supposed to do, which is go looking for the object.

The real ones are real firearms, and that was not a road I was going down with a nine-year-old in the house. The all-metal replicas run three hundred dollars and up, and they are the exact shape, weight and colour of a working gun, which is its own problem the first time somebody sees one through a window.

What I ended up with instead was a toy. I mean that plainly, and you should not buy it under any other impression.

It is a black polymer 1873 pattern replica with a wood-grain grip and a small silver medallion set into it. There is a bright orange muzzle on the end that is not a sticker and does not come off. It fires soft foam darts about the length of a hallway. It is under fifty dollars.

But it loads the way the real one loads.

Six brass shells come in the box, and ten soft darts. You push a dart down into a shell. You feed the shell into the cylinder. You do that five more times. You thumb the hammer back for every single shot, and it clicks and turns exactly the way the originals did. When you are empty, you open the gate and push them back out, one at a time.

It does not throw the shells clear on its own, and I have watched people complain about that in reviews of things like this, which tells me they did not understand what they were looking at. Neither did the original. That is not a limitation. That is the entire mechanism the last hundred and fifty years of Western mythology was built on top of.

If it ejected automatically, the whole ritual would collapse into three seconds and nobody would still be doing it a year later. Why the slow reload is the product

The part that surprised me

I did not buy it for my son. I bought it for me. It became ours inside four days.

What I did not anticipate was how much easier it made teaching him things. You cannot really teach a child about muzzle awareness with a foam cannon that fires forty rounds a second, because nothing in his hands makes the lesson mean anything. But hand him something that fires once, deliberately, only when he consciously cocks it, and holds six, and takes a full minute to reload, and every word lands, because the object itself is setting the pace.

He loads five and leaves one empty and tells me why. He is nine. He will remember that for the rest of his life.

One word on that orange muzzle, because people ask. Do not remove it, and if you are buying this for a young person, tell them not to remove it. Search around this category and you will find realistic replicas with no orange tip, and underneath every one of them are comments from people saying some version of “I would love this but I am not carrying it out of my house.” That orange band is the reason nobody who walks past your window has a bad afternoon.

Part sixWhat Other People Say About It

Where To Find It

The Outlaw 1873

$49$98

Sale on now — up to 60% off + free gifts

• 6 reusable brass-look shells & 10 soft foam darts in the box
• Wood-grain grip with silver medallion
• Bright orange muzzle — permanent, not a sticker
• Single-action hammer, gate loading, exactly like the original
• Ships tomorrow

Check Availability →

🛡 90-day money-back guarantee

If none of the history above did anything for you, do not buy the toy either. That is genuinely the test. This is not a fast dart war and it will lose that fight badly against anything with a magazine.

But if you read the part about the loading gate and felt something, you already know.