Killer Colt Read online

  • • •

  First identified by Joseph Priestley in 1773, nitrous oxide—“laughing gas”—became known to the world through the work of Sir Humphry Davy, the great British chemist who began to experiment with the substance twenty-six years after its discovery. Working at a research facility called the Pneumatic Institute—established to explore the therapeutic use of certain gases in the treatment of consumption—Davy spent fourteen months inhaling from six to twelve quarts of the gas four or five times a week, often while sealed inside an airtight “breathing chamber.” His ecstatic accounts of the “sublime emotions” he experienced during this period—reported to the Royal Institution of London in 1802 and published in his treatise, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide—set off a craze for public demonstrations of the “exhilarating gas” in both England and the United States.

  In mid-nineteenth-century America, such demonstrations became a big part of show business, conducted before sell-out crowds in various smalltown and big-city venues: hotel ballrooms, Masonic halls, lyceums, young men’s associations, dime museums. Presenting himself as a highly qualified scientist, chemist, or physician, the lecturer would invite willing audience members onto the stage and, by means of an oversized rubber bladder, administer a “potent dose” of the gas to the volunteers. Their resulting behavior—laughing, singing, dancing, declaiming, leaping about the stage, and, in general, making public spectacles of themselves—served as a rich source of amusement for the spectators, well worth the standard twenty-five-cent admission.7

  That Sam Colt would turn to performing as a way to earn money seems completely in character. His flair for the theatrical had been evident since childhood, most notably in the raft-blowing experiment he had staged with such ballyhoo on the Fourth of July, 1829. In later years, his phenomenal success would owe much to his genius for showmanship and self-promotion. A brilliant manipulator of “myths, symbols, and stagecraft,” he turned himself into America’s first industrial superstar, “a man whose personality became so widely associated with his product that ownership provided access to the celebrity, glamour, and drama of its namesake.”8 Given his early fascination with chemistry—fostered by his friendship with William T. Smith, supervisor of the bleaching and dyeing lab at the Hampshire mill—it is equally unsurprising that he would set himself up as a laughing gas lecturer.9

  Employing the ancestral (and presumably more high-toned) spelling of his family name, Sam assumed the role of “the Celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London, and Calcutta.” Decked out in frock coat and high hat, and sporting a newly grown mustache and beard to make him look older than his eighteen years, he embarked on a tour of the eastern seaboard. Arrived at his destination, he would drum up excitement with a newspaper ad. The following announcement of an 1833 appearance in Lowell, Massachusetts, is typical:

  Dr. Coult (late of New York, London, and Calcutta) respectfully informs the Ladies and Gentlemen of Lowell and vicinity, that he will lecture and administer Nitrous Oxide, or Exhilarating Gas, this evening, Nov. 29, at the Town Hall. The peculiar effect of this singular compound upon the animal system was first noticed by the English chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy. He observed that when inhaled into the lungs, it produced the most astonishing effects on the Nervous System; that some individuals were disposed to involuntary fits of laughter, others to recitation, and that the greater number had an irresistible propensity to muscular exertion, such as leaping and running, wrestling, boxing & c., with innumerable fantastic feats. In short, the sensations produced by it are highly pleasurable, and are not followed by debility.

  Dr. C. being a practical Chemist, no fears need be entertained of inhaling an impure Gas; and he is willing to submit his preparation to the inspection of any Scientific Gentlemen.

  Dr. C. has exhibited the extraordinary powers of this Gas in many cities in America, to numerous audiences of Ladies and Gentlemen of the first respectability. He has administered it to more than 20,000 individuals and has taken it himself no less than 1,000 times.

  The persons who inhale the Gas will be separated from the audience by means of a network, in order to give all a better opportunity of seeing the exhibition. Dr. C. will first inhale the gas himself, and then administer it to those who are desirous of inhaling it.

  Such individuals as wish to inhale the gas in private parties, will be accommodated by applying to Dr. C. at the Merrimack House.

  Tickets 25 cents each to be had at the principal Hotels and at the door. Seats may be secured between the hours of 12 and 3 o’clock. Doors open at 6 1/2 o’clock; entertainment will commence precisely at 7.10

  Colt seems to have been a hit wherever he played. A newspaper item about his appearance at Trowbridge’s Albany Museum in October 1833 conveys the excitement that typically attended his performances:

  We never beheld such an anxiety as there has been during the past week to witness the astonishing effects of Dr. Coult’s gas. The Museum was crowded to excess every evening; and so intense was the interest which was manifested that the doctor has been compelled to give two exhibitions every evening.

  The effect which the gas produces on the system is truly astonishing. The person who inhales it becomes completely insensible, and remains in that state for about three minutes, when his senses become restored, and he sneaks off with as much shame as if he had been guilty of some little mean action. No person will begrudge his two shillings for the gratification of half an hour’s laugh at the ludicrous feats displayed in the lecture hall.11

  Precisely how much money Sam earned during his time on the road is unclear, though all his profits went directly to the various gunsmiths at work on his models. For three years, he lugged his equipment—bottles, retorts, funnels, hoses, and his big India-rubber gasbag outfitted with a wooden spigot—from city to city. Besides Lowell and Albany, he played Baltimore and Boston, New Haven and Philadelphia, Natchez and New Orleans, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Portland, Maine. His journeys eventually took him as far north as Halifax, Nova Scotia, and westward all the way to Cincinnati.12

  12

  Cincinnati’s Western Museum was established in 1820 with the high-minded goal of serving as a “citadel of scientific knowledge.” Originally located in the Cincinnati College Building, it began as an assemblage of natural history odds and ends: glass-encased displays of fossils, seashells, stuffed birds and reptiles, geological specimens, Egyptian antiquities, Indian artifacts, and the like. There was also a small library of scientific treatises and a collection of color sketches by the museum’s assistant curator and resident taxidermist, the young artist-naturalist John James Audubon.1

  Unfortunately, the public seemed less interested in these edifying exhibits than in the novelties offered at a competing establishment, a supposed “fine arts” museum called Letton’s that featured, among other attractions, waxwork effigies of historical figures, a horseshoe reputedly dating back to the sixteenth century, a mummified mermaid, an armless woman, and an “Enormous Elk.”2 Within two years of its founding, the Western Museum went bankrupt.

  Its fortunes revived when it passed into the hands of an enterprising French émigré named Joseph Dorfeuille. Relocating the museum to a heavily trafficked intersection by the waterfront, he proceeded to transform it from a somber scientific institution into the kind of popular showplace that, as one English commentator observed dryly, defined the notion of museum in nineteenth-century America:

  A “Museum” in the American sense of the word means a place of amusement, wherein there shall be a theatre, some wax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes. In order that there may be some excuse for the use of the word, there is in most instances a collection of stuffed birds, a few preserved animals, and a stock of oddly assorted and very dubitable curiosities; but the mainstay of the “Museum” is the “live art,” that is the theatrical performance, the precocious manikins, or the intellectual dogs and monkeys.3

  Within month
s of taking charge, Dorfeuille had reinvigorated business by installing such crowd-pleasing attractions as a seven-legged pig; the absolutely authentic aboriginal war club used to slay Captain Cook; the tattooed head of a New Zealand cannibal; a waxwork tableau depicting the butchering of a wife by her hatchet-wielding husband; and “the head, right hand, and heart of Mathias Hoover, a murderer of local renown,” preserved in alcohol-filled jars.4

  It was another exhibit, however, that turned the Western Museum into a bona fide sensation, a must-see attraction for visitors to the Queen City. This was an elaborate funhouse display variously known as “Dorfeuille’s Hell,” “Dante’s Inferno,” and the “Infernal Regions.” The apparent brainchild of Mrs. Fanny Trollope—the British novelist and caustic observer of American manners, then residing in Cincinnati—this “stupendous and colossal entertainment” was realized by the museum’s young waxwork modeler and chief inventor, Hiram Powers, later to become America’s most celebrated sculptor.

  Born and raised in Vermont, Powers had migrated to Ohio with his family in 1819 at the age of fourteen. Two years later, he found work as a stock clerk in a Cincinnati grocery store, where, in his spare moments, he gave vent to his creative urges by sculpting mounds of butter into hissing rattlesnakes, gaping loggerhead turtles, and other “horrid forms.” When the grocery failed, Powers went to work at a local clock and organ factory, displaying an aptitude that soon got him promoted to head mechanic. Among his accomplishments during this period was the construction of a mechanical organ equipped with life-sized angelic automatons that “moved, sounded trumpets, and rang bells.”5

  During a visit to Dorfeuille’s museum, Powers was so taken with a replica of Jean Antoine Houdon’s marble bust of George Washington—then the most popular piece of statuary in America—that he promptly enrolled in a local artist’s studio, where he soon mastered the art of making plaster casts. Before long, he came to the attention of Dorfeuille himself, who hired him as the museum’s full-time “wax-figure maker and general mechanical contriver.”

  Powers’s skills as both sculptor and technician found their fullest expression in the creation of the Infernal Regions. An antebellum precursor of the kind of “animatronic” spook house epitomized today by Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and similar theme park thrill-rides, this lurid spectacle—located in the museum’s cramped, darkened attic—offered customers an effects-laden tour of the horrors of hell, complete with automated demons, writhing sinners, swirling smoke, artificial flames, and a “continuous clamor” of hair-raising sounds. To provide an extra—and quite literal—jolt, an electrified iron grating was installed between the spectators and the moving wax figures, so that (as Mrs. Trollope put it) “should any daring hand or foot obtrude itself within the bars, it receives a smart shock that often passes through many of the crowd.”6

  While this mechanized spectacle quickly established itself as the museum’s biggest draw, Dorfeuille continued to offer live entertainment as well, including the ever-popular administration of nitrous oxide, whose amusing effects on audience volunteers were celebrated by one anonymous poetaster:

  Have you ever been at the museum

  When D—— was giving the gas?

  By jokers, it’s funny to see ’em

  When candidates plenty he has.

  Some fence, some caper and shout

  And some of them act like a fool,

  And others will tragedy spout—

  I suppose they have learnt it at school.7

  Early on (as this bit of newspaper doggerel indicates) Dorfeuille himself “gave the gas,” though he had evidently quit performing by the time “Dr. Coult” arrived in Cincinnati.

  We know of Sam Colt’s appearance at the Western Museum from a letter sent to him many years later by none other than Hiram Powers, who began a long-lasting friendship with the six-gun inventor in Cincinnati. By the time this letter was composed in 1851, Powers was living in Florence, Italy, where he had won international renown as the creator of The Greek Slave. A life-sized marble statue of a chained female nude, this piece achieved a level of popular success that no other American sculpture has ever rivaled (at least partly, no doubt, because it afforded Victorian gentlemen the chance to ogle a naked, nubile woman under the pretext of contemplating fine art).

  In his letter to Colt, Powers reminisced about a memorable incident at the Western Museum:

  I shall never forget the gas at the old museum, nor your sly glances at the ropes stretched around the columns, when about to snatch the gas bag from the huge blacksmith, who glowered so threateningly at you, while his steam was getting up—nor his grab at your coat tail as, froglike, you leaped between the ropes—8

  Since Powers’s letter constitutes the only record of Colt’s visit to Cincinnati, there is no way of knowing exactly what transpired on the trip, beyond the comical episode involving the intoxicated blacksmith. Still, it is safe to assume, as have various historians, that Sam spent a good portion of his time there in the company of his brother John, who was not only residing in the Queen City during this period but was himself an occasional lecturer at Dorfeuille’s.9

  • • •

  While maintaining himself through public speaking, teaching, and assorted mercantile pursuits, John continued to work on his textbook. To illustrate the basic principles of his method, he included hundreds of sample ledger entries. Many of these were drawn from his own experiences. One entry, for example, refers to “sundry notes” owed to Edmund B. Stedman, the fiancé of his late sister Margaret. Another mentions “bills payable” to Robert Trumble, a college friend from John’s days at the University of Vermont. Other friends and relations whose names appear in the book include his cousin John Caldwell; his business associate Joseph Law; and his youngest brother, James.10 Thanks to this practice, Colt’s “treatise on book-keeping” is an unexpectedly autobiographical work, offering provocative clues to his personal life.

  One item has struck scholars as particularly intriguing. In a section labeled “Inventory of my Property with which I commence business,” Colt includes the following:

  Rec’d from the executors of my father-in-law’s estate, as follows:

  Sundry Notes, amounting to $ 4,500

  A deed for 1,000 acres of Texas land valued at 5,000

  Cash—deposited 10,000

  19,50011

  Based on this notation, biographers of the Colt family have speculated that, sometime during his travels around the Southwest, John had acquired a wife with property in Texas.12 What became of her—assuming that she existed at all—is unknown. Death, divorce, or abandonment are the likeliest possibilities. Whatever the case, John appears to have been free of any marital entanglements during his residence in Cincinnati. Certainly there was nothing to prevent him from pursuing a romance with an adventurous young woman named Frances Anne Frank, stepdaughter of another of Joseph Dorfeuille’s competitors.

  • • •

  While certain scholars insist that the idea for “The Infernal Regions” originated with Mrs. Trollope, others attribute it to Frederick Frank, proprietor of an eponymous showplace located above a drugstore on the southwest corner of Main and Upper Market streets. Like Letton’s, Frank’s establishment had begun as a “gallery of fine arts” before being converted into a garish dime museum. For the price of admission—a quarter for adults; fifteen cents for children under ten—visitors were treated to the usual array of “unprecedented attractions,” from anatomical curiosities, to a “cosmoramic tableau” of “the bustling streets and markets of Cincinnati,” to live performances by the likes of thirteen-year-old Master Kent, “the greatest Juba dancer living,” and Mr. Jenkins, “the celebrated Singer and Delineator of Yankee Eccentricities.”13 According to some historians, Frank was also the first Cincinnati showman to present a lurid exhibition of the torments of hell, featuring waxwork figures of cavorting “imps, devils, and goblins.”14

  Performing daily at Frank’s Museum was his twenty-one-year-old stepdaughter, Fra
nces Anne, an enchanting (if “uninstructed”) singer who accompanied herself on the organ. In addition to her “sweet, rich” voice, Frances was endowed with other natural charms:

  Her form, of the medium height, was perfectly symmetrical, though inclining to fullness. She had the foot of Cinderella, and hands and fingers long and exquisitely turned. To a fine bust, she added a countenance stamped with the heroic—the forehead broad and high—the complexion animated and transparent—the eyes large, full, black, and fiery—the hair very dark brown and luxuriant.15

  Despite her youth, Frances had already been married twice and was the mother of an infant girl. At fifteen she had eloped with a riverboat gambler, then divorced him after two years of wandering “from wretchedness to splendor and from splendor back to wretchedness.” Shortly thereafter, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a “young German of considerable wealth and rank.” That union—which produced Frances’s child—ended when her husband died after squandering his fortune “in three years of reckless luxury.”

  Whether John met Frances while visiting the museum as a customer or appearing there as a lecturer is unknown. In any event, he was immediately “enraptured by her beauty and manner” and “found no difficulty in engaging her in conversation.” They immediately formed a close and increasingly intimate friendship.