Period Use
One legend has it that the pocket models were popular with Civil War officers who did not rely on them as combat arms but as defense against battlefield surgeons bent on amputating a limb. Richard Francis Burton was a devotee of Colt Revolvers and carried a selection of them on his mid-eastern journeys including the trip to Somalia and Ethiopia in 1855. A Pocket model receives prominent mention:
" My revolvers excited abundant attention, though none would be persuaded to touch them. The largest, which fitted with a stock became an excellent carbine, was at once named Abu Sittah (the Father of Six) and the Shaytan or Devil: the pocket pistol became the Malunah or Accursed, and the distance to which it carried ball made every man wonder".
Other anecdotal accounts indicate that Bloody Bill Anderson, the Civil War raider, preferred the Pocket Police model.
Read more about this topic: Colt Pocket Percussion Revolvers
Famous quotes containing the word period:
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: youth is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)