Originally Posted by
Lightfoot
I have a good true story to illustrate how useful these weapons were/are:
My brother who at the time was a reenactor and had a number of black powder guns went deer hunting during Virginia's black powder season. He took his Hawken rifle and a Colt pistol. He spent all day hunting without seeing a deer until almost the end of the day. While resting a deer wandered up within 50 feet of him. So he aimed his Hawken at the deer and fired. Or rather attempted to fire. The cap had fallen off. The click hadn't spooked the deer so he took out his Colt and fired it. Unfortunately the warmth of the day had caused the grease used to cover the front of the cylinders to run. All the cylinders went off at once and in the process caused the pin that holds the barrel on the colt to fall out. He was left holding the handle of the gun with no barrel or cylinder. The deer ran off.
And, as a side note most of the standard issue guns at the beginning of the civil war did not take cartridges. They were cap and ball guns and required considerable time to load since you had five to six cylinders to fill with powder, pack a ball into, cover in grease to keep the firing cylinder from igniting the others, and then you had to put caps on all the cylinders.
As far as I can find out, few used the Texas Ranger technique of carrying additional preloaded cylinders. Apparently the practice had died out even in the Texas Rangers by the time of the Civil War and had been largely forgotten. It was revived for a short time by the Texas Rangers after the war and used in the Indian fights.