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:
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, lecture 1 (1858)