They thought about making it the Super Soaker, but, you know, water restrictions.
They thought about making it the Super Soaker, but, you know, water restrictions.
Most Excellent post, dude!
Not exactly. When Walker met with Colt in 1846 he was not Ranger, he was a soldier serving in the US Army in the prosecution of the Mexican-American War. In these days of Kumbaya Wokeism, many don't want to remember the Indians as bloodthirsty savages, but the Texas Rangers were formed in 1823 specifically to protect the Texican settlers who the Mexicans had lured into building homesteads in Comanche territory, in the full knowledge that this would bring them into direct conflict with the most war-like Indian tribe of all.
Walker he had been a Ranger in the days when the Comanche had them outgunned because all the Rangers were armed with was two single-shot flintlock pistols. A Comanche warrior could loose 20 arrows in the same time it took a Ranger to reload just one of his muzzle-loading sidearms. Which no doubt was what inspired him to see the potential in Colt's revolvers.
But Walker didn't design anything, he just told Sam Colt how the Colt's Paterson revolver could be modified to better suit his needs. He gave Colt the specs and Colt did the designing.
Colt's greatest gift was not as a firearm designer but as an entrepreneur. For instance, he had raised funds to build his Paterson revolver by selling hits of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) to the public in a sort of "traveling medicine show."
But the Paterson wasn't enough to keep the lights on and Colt went bankrupt trying to sell them, so he wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to sell Walker whatever the hell he wanted, so long as he paid cash up front.
The sale of 1100 of the Walker revolvers kept Colt afloat long enough to come up with the 1851 Navy revolver, which sold so well (+/-275,000 copies in total) that by 1855 Sam Colt was making more guns than any other private manufacturer in the world.
So not only did Colt's Walker revolver keep Sam Colt from going back into the carnival sideshow business, it was a stepping stone in the evolution of the revolver, and it was instrumental in gaining an advantage in the war for control of Texas (and the rest of Comancheria).
So I'd say it definitely deserves to be enshrined as the official firearm of the State of Texas.
Your photo isn't quite right - California's official gun is the green model, that shoots compressed pellets of BS (instead of nerf projectiles), in an effort to "combat climate change"...