by Terry Wieland
Thirty years ago, the editor-in-chief of Gray’s Sporting Journal, David Foster, summoned me down to Georgia for a discussion about my role as his newly appointed shooting editor. His instructions were simple.
“Tell it like it is,” he drawled, “And let me worry about the heat.”
And what was I to write about?
“Shotguns mostly, some rifles. Hunting.”
“Handguns?” I asked.
David looked at me, reached into his tackle box, drew out a revolver, and took a shot at a rock on the other side of the pond. The bullet dug up the ground beside it, and David growled.
“Handy for snakes,” he said. “Most of us down here carry them.”
Then, “Sure, you can write about them occasionally. What I can tell, our readers like history, they like tradition. Always keep that in mind.” He took another shot, and missed again. But not by much.
For 30 years, I’ve followed those instructions, and written the odd piece on guns like the Colt 1911, and the Peacemaker. The beloved Colt Woodsman has reared its head once in a while, and the reaction I’ve gotten can best be described as muted enthusiasm. Gray’s readers may not be wild-eyed survivalists or Second Amendment extremists, but most of them could tell you that James Butler Hickok favored a pair of 1851 Navies, and I doubt there are many who don’t have a revolver around the house somewhere.
And, for the past 70 years, that revolver is likely to have been a Ruger. After the war, when Colt made the supremely ill-advised decision to retire the Single-Action Army—undoubtedly the most-loved handgun in American history—William Batterman Ruger stepped into the void with, first, the .22 Single-Six (1953), then the .357 Magnum Blackhawk two years later, and the .44 Magnum Blackhawk a year after that.
Although Colt reconsidered its decision and brought back the Single Action Army in 1956, it found itself up against stiff competition as Ruger steadily expanded its line of single-action revolvers.
But why? Why was there such a market for guns that were, to all intents and purposes, an obsolete design? Much of the credit is given to the rash of TV westerns so popular in the 1950s and right through the ‘60s, to say nothing of movies like The Magnificent Seven (the original, in 1960) and all the later Clint Eastwood movies, but Americans’ fascination with single-action revolvers goes far deeper. It’s the mystique of the American west, of the self-reliant frontiersman, and—dare I say it?—the cowboy in general.
