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It rode on the hip of Buffalo Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, Judge Roy Bean and Pat Garrett, the sheriff who hunted down Billy the Kid. Its official name was the Single Action Army® Revolver. It was commonly known around saloons and lawmen's offices as The Peacemaker®. The gun was a Colt .45.

==Oliver Winchester - a Different Type of Firearm Entrepreneur==

Born in Boston in 1810, Oliver Fisher Winchester was a New England contemporary of Samuel Colt but his route to weapons immortality was markedly different. When Winchester left the family farm it was to work in construction. He eventually migrated into the mercantile trade. He manufactured men's shirts and plowed the profits into the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut in 1855. As Winchester's talents were strictly on the business side, the work of building firearms was left to men like Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, who make names of their own in the gun world.

No gunfight ever erupted between the Colt and Winchester companies, still both in an altered existence in Connecticut, for bragging rights over the claim to be the one gun to have "won the West." America has created no myth larger than the "Old West" so there is plenty of shoulder room for the two to co-exist: the Colt revolver as the weapon of the lawman cleaning up a frontier town and the Winchester rifle taming the frontier.

==References==

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[[Category:United States History]] [[Category:19th Century History]] [[Category:History of Science and Technology]][[Category:History of the American West]]

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