Killer Colt Read online

  Seated on the museum’s balcony overlooking the “vast quay of Cincinnati,” they shared the stories of their “strange, wild” lives while gazing out at the glorious vista: “the moving city of steamers,—the strangely fashioned flat and keel boats,—the ever bustling crowd thronging the water’s edge,—the gentle Ohio and its beautiful banks,—on the opposite Kentucky shore, the picturesque city of Covington, and in the far distance beyond, hills rising upon hills, and landscapes of varied loveliness.” Before long, the two had become lovers.16

  Their relationship continued for several years. When John was away on one of his frequent business trips, they were “constant correspondents”; when he was in town, “they were constant visitors.” As the time passed, it became increasingly evident that Frances had marital designs on John and was prepared to deploy all of her “allurements” to “make him hers.”

  One evening, for example, they were out for a ride at dusk along the banks of the Ohio. Stopping “at a brook where they were accustomed to let their horses drink,” Frances suddenly announced, “No man can outswim me!” When John took up the challenge, she alighted from her steed, stripped off her clothing, and plunged into the water. John—after watching her for a moment as if in a “reverie”—followed suit. Meeting “his fair antagonist midway across the stream,” he raced her to the opposite shore; whereupon “Frances sprang to the bank and stood there, another Venus from the ocean foam,” allowing John to contemplate her naked form in the moonlight.

  Despite all the favors she bestowed on him, however—which included a constant stream of “little presents wrought by her own hand”—it became increasingly clear that John had no intention of becoming Frances’s third husband. Their relationship grew increasingly strained, particularly after Frances informed him that she was thinking of becoming a professional thespian. In keeping with the view of the theatrical profession prevalent in Victorian America—when actresses were seen as little better than harlots—John sent her a tongue-clucking letter, warning her that if she pursued such a path, she would not only “be set down as a bad woman” but “be ranked among the most worthless.”17

  Mortified by John’s priggish tone, Frances “felt as though she had been baffled and repelled.” She sent no reply to his “offensive letter.” When John—“piqued by her silence”—sent a reproachful follow-up, she ignored that one as well. Finally, after one more failed attempt to get in touch with her, John, acting very much “like a chagrined lover,” “gathered the elegant little presents she had wrought” and sent them back to her, while demanding the return of his own letters.

  Although they managed to patch up this quarrel when he returned to Cincinnati, the incident effectively marked the end of their love affair. Soon afterward, John made an extended trip to New York City. When Frances wrote “for permission to join him” there, he promptly sent a curt letter of refusal.

  Just hours after she received this note, Frances showed up at the home of her sister and brother-in-law, Susan and Joseph Adams. As Mr. Adams would later testify, Frances appeared to be in a state of extreme agitation, plying them with such “strange and confused questions” that he and his wife grew alarmed and urged the young woman to lie down. Flinging herself onto the bed, she lay there in a stupor for several hours before rousing herself and begging her sister to stay by her side.

  While Susan attempted to comfort her, Joseph hurried off to find a physician. In the meantime, Frances’s closest friend, a woman named Lawton, was summoned to her bedside. Throughout the evening, as Frances grew increasingly “frenzied,” her attendants applied mustard poultices to her ankles and stomach and tried to administer calomel and other medications, which Frances refused to swallow. Finally, crying out that her vision was failing, she urged Mrs. Lawton to get a pencil and paper and take down the following letter:

  You say right. I do not love you; for women love but once, and the idol I worship is beyond my reach; but still, I love him yet; but I am grateful for the many favors I have received from you, and the interest you have displayed in my welfare. I have pretended to love you dearly, but in my heart I did not. I have ever admired your talents and respected your person, but your last two letters were of such a nature as to kill even those feelings. You will never see me again; for, a few short hours, and I will be in heaven. Forgive me, for I am dying now.

  To Mrs. Lawton and the others gathered at the scene, this message seemed so “unaccountable” that “they set it down to mere fever-dream incoherence.”

  As midnight approached, Frances “seemed entirely to lose all perception of what was passing. She called in a hurried, frenzied manner for her brother-in-law and sister but could not distinguish any one.” She lingered until early the following afternoon, when she “died with a few short struggles.” That the vital young woman had been carried off with such shocking swiftness struck her survivors as an inexplicable calamity until a note found among her possessions revealed the truth: “that this extraordinary girl had taken one hundred and fifty grams of opium upon receiving the last letter” from John C. Colt.18

  13

  In early 1834, Sam began an extended run at the Baltimore Museum and Gallery of Paintings. Touted in contemporary guidebooks as a “grand repository of sublime works” both natural and manmade, this establishment offered the usual hodgepodge of curiosities, diversions, and wonders. Its most popular attraction, created by a “profound Italian physician and artist” named Joseph Chiappi, was an “obstetric and anatomical cabinet” featuring wax representations of the female reproduction system—an ostensibly edifying display that (like the sleazy “miracle of birth” exploitation films of a century later) served up sexual titillation in a scientific guise.1

  It was during this engagement that Sam—dissatisfied with the model weapons he had been receiving from Anson Chase—secured the services of a new and more sophisticated technician, a Baltimore gunsmith named John Pearson. Their relationship, though productive, proved to be thorny. While Pearson labored ten hours a day in a cramped and underheated workshop, Sam—out on the road with his act—bombarded him via mail with a steady stream of demands and directions.

  The older Pearson bristled not only at his young employer’s high-handed tone but also at Sam’s habitual failure to meet his financial obligations, including Pearson’s salary. In letters that grew increasingly bitter over the course of their two-year business arrangement, Pearson complained that his day-and-night labors had gotten him nothing but “vexation and trouble” and that Sam’s treatment of him was an “insult.”

  “The manner you are using us is too bad,” he railed in one of his letters. “Come up with some money. I am in a devil of a humor and not without a cause.” In reply, Sam (who, as one scholar drily remarks, “was about as good at spelling as at meeting his debts”) did his best to placate Pearson: “make your expenses as lite as possible … Don’t be allarmed about your wages, nothing shal be rong on my part, but doo wel for me & you shal fare wel.”2

  Charging as much as fifty cents per person for admission to his show (a considerable sum at a time when a complete multicourse dinner at Delmonico’s original restaurant in New York City could be had for twelve cents), Sam traveled through South Carolina and Georgia, keeping Pearson mollified—and “at the grindstone”—by sending him whatever money he could spare: seventy-five dollars in February 1835; another fifty in March.3

  One month later, Sam returned to Baltimore, having finished his tour with a swing through Virginia. His performances in Lynchburg and Richmond would be his last. The celebrated Dr. Coult was laid permanently to rest. Henceforth, Sam Colt would devote himself, with absolute singleness of purpose, to the fashioning of a far more heroic persona—one that would eventually take its place in the pantheon of America’s industrial demigods.

  • • •

  Taking rooms in Baltimore, Sam secured both a larger workplace and a helper for Pearson, then set about supervising the construction of a pair of patent models: one pistol, one rifle. T
hey were completed to his satisfaction in early June. On the seventeenth of that month, he traveled to Manhattan to show them to his cousin (and potential investor) Dudley Selden, the distinguished Manhattan attorney for whom John had briefly clerked several years earlier.

  Deeply impressed with the invention—and worried that it might fall prey to the piratical practices of foreign manufacturers—Selden advised Sam to patent it first in Great Britain and France. Accordingly, in the third week of August 1835, Sam—flush with loans from several family members—set sail for England.

  He was gone for just under four months. From a legal standpoint, the trip was an unqualified success. When his ship, the Albany, arrived back in the United States in early December, Sam had his foreign patents safely in hand. According to his most reliable biographer, he brought home another acquisition as well: a sixteen-year-old wife.4

  Historians describe her as a person of “striking beauty” but extremely “humble origins” who “could barely read or write.” The precise circumstances of their courtship (such as it was) remain shrouded in mystery, though she and Sam reportedly met in Scotland. Since he was there for only a week or two between visits to London and Paris, he clearly leaped into the marriage with the kind of haste that, as Dr. Franklin wisely observes, causes couples to repent in leisure.

  The truth of that old saw was proven in the case of Sam Colt himself. Indeed, by the time he returned to America with his bride, he already appears to have been beset by second thoughts. Perhaps, as his biographers have speculated, Sam’s initial sexual infatuation quickly gave way to a sobering realization: that he had saddled himself with an unschooled, socially awkward young wife who was unlikely to help advance his ambitions. In any event, from the moment his ship docked in New York Harbor, Sam Colt “kept the marriage a secret from the rest of the family, and the world at large.”5

  14

  According to the myths of the world, there are times when all heroes must prove themselves by performing miraculous tasks—overcoming obstacles and ordeals that would defeat lesser mortals. To accomplish their quests, they must scale impossible mountains, sail peril-filled seas, descend into the lairs of monsters, negotiate nightmarish mazes, cross bottomless chasms over bridges no wider than knives. Like the classic figures of mythology, Sam Colt, too—according to the official chroniclers and keepers of his legend—had to surmount a succession of challenges and tribulations as he fought his way to his ultimate goal. That perilous “road of trials,” so full of crises and reversals, started shortly after his return from Europe.

  • • •

  Things began promisingly enough. After Sam’s American patent came through in February 1836, he and his investors lost no time in forming the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company for the making of “arms, machinery, and cutlery.” In March, under prodding from influential friends, the New Jersey legislature granted the fledgling operation a charter of incorporation. While construction commenced on an imposing four-story factory on the banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, Sam and his partners leased an old gristmill nearby and set up shop on the ground floor. A gifted craftsman named Pliny Lawton—formerly Christopher Colt’s head machinist at the Hampshire mill in Ware—was brought in as superintendent. Lawton set about at once devising machines for the mass production of the guns, which, until then, had been crafted individually by hand.1

  It soon became clear, however, that Sam’s great expectations were wildly optimistic; that—as inspirational guides were forever reminding young go-getters—the “road to success was never smooth, straight, nor strewn with flowers.”2 On a trip to Washington, DC, that spring, he did manage to generate some favorable publicity in the Washington Post, where a writer named F. S. Burns testified that he had “tried the newly improved pistol of Mr. Colt and found that it shot exceedingly well—in my opinion it will prove a very great improvement in firearms.”3 But Sam’s hopes of winning a far more important endorsement—that of President Andrew Jackson—were quickly dashed.

  Jackson, of course, had an intimate, lifelong knowledge of firearms. Aside from his military heroics—most famously during the Battle of New Orleans, when he and his ragtag forces wreaked havoc on the massed British regulars—he had fought several gun duels in his younger days and still carried the bullets from two of these deadly encounters in his shoulder and chest. Moreover, just a few weeks before Sam’s arrival in the capital, Old Hickory had escaped with his life when a would-be assassin attempted to discharge a pair of pistols at his chest, both of which misfired. As one historian observes, the incident should have given the old warrior “a keen sense of the unreliability of old-time firearms.”4 Nevertheless, when Sam—who had somehow wangled a meeting with the president—demonstrated his invention, Jackson was unimpressed, seeing no need for the army to abandon the kind of single-shot flintlocks that had served him so well against the redcoats.

  Other disappointments soon followed. Despite his intense lobbying efforts—which consisted largely of throwing lavish, wine-fueled dinner parties for Washington officials and dispensing the occasional gift—Sam not only failed to snag any government commissions but also incurred the ire of his powerful cousin Dudley Selden. The company’s single biggest investor and de facto director, Selden repeatedly rebuked the young inventor on his extravagant—and ethically dubious—ways: “You use money as if it were drawn from an inexhaustible mine,” he fumed in one letter. “I have no belief in undertaking to raise the character of your gun by old Madeira.” At another point, he blasted Sam’s readiness to resort to bribery as “dishonorable in every way.”5

  When Sam did manage to win a spot for his guns in an army trial conducted at West Point in the summer of 1837, the results were disastrous. During one demonstration, his rifle discharged several loads at once, producing a mini-explosion. In another, the hammer broke off. In the end—while conceding that Colt’s weapons might have certain limited applications—the ordnance board was “unanimous in opinion” that, owing to their “complicated character, liability to accident, and other reasons,” his revolvers were “entirely unsuited to the general purpose of the service.”6

  There were some encouraging developments along the way. To boost the reputation of his product, Colt—whose grasp of public relations was at least as impressive as his knowledge of firearms technology—joined the prestigious American Institute of New York City, an organization dedicated to the “encouragement of science and invention.” At the institute’s annual public exhibition in October 1837, one of Sam’s revolving rifles was awarded a gold medal, the first of many that would be bestowed upon him. Pioneering a ploy that would be exploited by countless marketers to follow, he touted the award in his advertisements, the first of which appeared in the December 27, 1837, issue of the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer:

  Colt’s Repeating Rifles are now for the first time offered for sale. They have been manufactured at the “Patent Arms Manufacturing Company” at Paterson, and in beauty and workmanship are fully equal to the highest finished Rifles imported from England …

  The Rifles now offered for sale are even superior to those exhibited at the last Fair of the American Institute, for which the Gold medal was awarded. They are put up in mahogany cases, with all their equipments complete.7

  Two months later, in a typically splashy bit of showmanship, Sam—having secured the consent of the mayor and the city council—staged a public demonstration of his rifles at Castle Garden on the southernmost tip of Manhattan. Though the rapid-firing repeaters elicited admiring gasps from the crowd, the price of the guns—$150 apiece (equivalent to roughly $3,500 in current funds)—rendered them prohibitive for the average purchaser. Sales remained stagnant, even as Sam continued to burn through his investors’ money at an alarming rate in an effort to drum up business.

  More convinced than ever that the very survival of his company depended on volume sales to the government, Sam embarked on a bold venture. In February 1838, just weeks after his Castle Garden exhibition, he perso
nally transported ten cases of his rifles—one hundred pieces altogether—to the Florida Everglades, where U.S. forces were bogged down in a bloody effort to dispossess the native Seminoles from their rightful lands. Fifty of his repeaters were purchased by the Second Dragoons and put into immediate action in the grueling guerrilla war. Their accuracy and rapidity of fire—sixteen shots in thirty-one seconds—won a glowing review from the commanding officer, Colonel W. S. Harney. “I do assure you that sooner I would use any other Rifle myself, I would use none,” Harney reported to his superiors in Washington—an endorsement that Sam (a pioneer in the use of expert testimonials for advertising purposes) would be quick to publicize.8

  Even so, the trip was far from the triumph that Sam had hoped for. Half of his rifles remained unsold. On the return voyage, moreover, Sam’s boat capsized in the waters off St. Augustine, Florida. Though he escaped drowning by clinging to the overturned craft for four hours, his luggage—including the trunk containing the army’s $6,250 draft—was lost in the surf. By the time he was safely back on land, he had come to regard the whole trip as a “cursed adventure.”9

  Making his way back north, Sam holed up at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan for a few recuperative days before throwing himself back into the hectic business of promoting his guns. In late fall, he returned to Washington for another costly—and ultimately futile—round of courting public officials. During one demonstration on the White House lawn—so the legend goes—“a squad of men armed with Colt’s repeating rifles” let off a “fusillade that scared the horses of the President’s carriage. The coachman was thrown from his seat trying to control the plunging horses and fell onto a picket fence, impaled.”10 The story is unverified and almost certainly apocryphal, though it does serve as an apt metaphor for Colt’s depressing situation at this period of his life, when his high hopes were invariably punctured in the most brutal way.