detroiter711
Inactive
Hey all, just curious what is your preferred .44 the 1860 Colt or the 1858 Remington and why?
It can be done in less than 5 seconds. That alone should tell you that yes it was done. Sometimes you just have to disregard history books and understand that the people back then were humans with brains like us. If we choose and prefer reloading spare cylinders they would have had the thoughts as well. Especially if their lives depended on it.As a matter of curiosity, but is there any proof to that? As I understand it, there's no proof that swapping cylinders on a Remington Percussion revolver was done on anything beyond an individual level. No accounts or archeological evidence supports it (very few, if any, cylinders have been found on Civil War Battlefields, as far as I know). There's no mention of swapping cylinders in any issued manuals/tactics books from the period of the Civil War, and no mention is made is in diaries of folks who were engaged in major cavalry fights like Brandy Station or Wilson's Creek. I also tend to think that it would've made much more sense to just carry multiple revolvers instead of multiple cylinders. It'd take a whole lot less time to draw and cock another pistol than to swap cylinders.
I rarely ever see Civil War photos of people with Remingtons, and almost never with a Remington on a horse. Maybe it just wasn't that common to begin which could be why there are not many cylinders lying around or any documentation. But i don't know much about the Civil War. Perhaps things like cylinders were even looted? I do know many soldiers were poor and most couldn't afford a revolver let alone two, so i don't know what a spare cylinder cost in contrast to a gun but it seems like a likely option. In my opinion i think carrying around 10 pounds of revolvers is more Hollywood than reloading. I sure wouldn't want to do it in battle.Jmar,
I said it was likely done on an individual level, to a very small scale. It was almost certainly not done by large masses of men in battle. Nobody has found a bunch of Remington revolver cylinders littering battlefields of the Civil War. You mentioned that it could be done in less than five seconds, which I don't doubt, but is that under duress? Mounted on horseback, in what was, in most cases, very close quarters? Why carry an extra cylinder when an extra handgun was easier, more reliable and a helluva lot faster to put into action than fumbling around with an extra cylinder or, in the case of a Colt attaching a barrel? Again, it's not mentioned in any accounts or diaries from folks who were in battles or even a shootout back in the day.
My 2 cents on the subject, but I strongly believe that cylinder swapping is, by and large, a Hollywood invention