Cap Gun - History

History

Cap guns became especially popular when the heroes of cinema and television rode through the West ridding the territories of villains. Many cap guns were named after or endorsed by leading matinee idols like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Dale Evans, Marshal Matt Dillon, or any of countless others.

The "Golden Age" of cap guns was roughly a 20 year period following World War II when television became popular and such companies as Nichols, Hubley, Kenton, Kilgore, Wyandotte, Classy, Mattel, Actoy, Esquire, George Schmidt, and Stevens made millions of cap guns in various versions. While many had their names patterned after a hero or heroine, many cap guns also were named with western-sounding names, like: "Stallion 45", "Pony", "Mustang", "Pioneer", "Cowboy", "Texan", "Colt 45", "Rodeo", and such.

From the end of the war until about 1965, children all over the world emulated their heroes and collected and played with these toy guns. However, when the Western television shows began to fade away and the heroes retired, the popularity of the toy guns also diminished and eventually all of the famous cap gun manufacturers either sold out to other toy companies or started manufacturing other types of toys.

There were many types of cap guns, including guns from small Derringers, to larger rifles, and even working miniatures of most of them. One of the last famous ones to sell widely was a toy rifle named after the television show, The Rifleman, which aired from 1958 through early 1963. There were other shows that lasted longer, such as Gunsmoke (which had 20 seasons lasting through 1975) but those did not have as much 'kid-appeal' as the earlier shows, and the sales of toy cap guns began to decline.

The pistols generally were in 3 styles, the semi-automatic, the revolver (that actually had a revolving cylinder carrying a disk of caps) and the mock-revolver that looked like a regular revolver, but opened to load a roll of caps. Almost all of the early models used either roll caps or circular disks of caps, but in 1950 Nichols Industries came out with a large model called the Stallion 45, which had a revolving cylinder into which individual bullets were loaded, which each had two parts. The circular cap was placed into the 2-piece bullet and then when the gun was loaded and fired, it seemed more realistic. Eventually several companies used this idea and a few years later Nichols invented a plastic bullet that was inserted into a hollowed out version of the regular 2-piece bullet and when the gun was fired, the plastic pellet shot out of the end of the barrel. Eventually Mattel also came out with a model called Shootin' Shells.