A man who held a grudge against a noted New Mexico desperado lay in wait to shoot him from ambush. But when the outlaw cane riding along practicing the "double roll" with a six-shooter in each hand, his enemy hidden beside the trail did not dare to shoot.

To the "bad man" of the old Western frontier the swift use of a pistol was as necessary an accomplishment as it is for a cowboy to ride a bucking horse; otherwise he stayed bad only a very short time. To the professional killer of killers, the peace officer, who was the law in all the border towns, the placer camps and the railroad camps, the authority of a quick, unerring pistol was the only backing that meant anything. Border etiquette was rude; justice, if sometimes tardy, was none the less stern, and every man who held his own was bred to the use of arms.

Skill in the use of the pistol, upon which a man attained great reputation, was invariably inborn. But there were plenty who learned to shoot well simply because they had to. Everybody who was not a reasonably good shot went back to where he came from, and quickly; even some most creditable performers found it expedient to take the back trail – "and take it good and fast." Only a genius, good or bad, could uphold a reputation for skill with the pistol, for speed counted quite as much as accuracy. That means a good deal when it is remembered that it was the religion of the frontier not to miss.

With the clumsy monstrosities which they were able to obtain, form the heavy "monkey-wrench" cap-and-ball revolver to the more modern but just as cumbersome six-shooter using metallic cartridges, the genuine six-shooter men all learned to "throw lead" quick and straight without taking sight. To do this, even if he had the natural gift of the born dead shot, required a man to practise hard and long; for although he might have the necessary sense of direction well developed, the hand and the wrist had to be trained to fit the pistol, since the pistol did not fit the hand and the wrist.

But a Wild Bill Hickok, a Billy the Kid, or a Pat Garrett, never would admit that he ever practised, and writers who know nothing of firearms and have small regard for the truth have made capital out of the assumption that such men did not have to practice. As a matter of fact, they practised a great deal. Moreover, they did not possess the phenomenal skill accredited to them.

The outlaw Slade, the most overrated desperado in the history of the country, who actually shot but one man in all his career, and that man only after he had been captured and bound by others, is said to have been able to shoot the buttons off a man’s coat at "fifty paces." Now, a six-shooter has nothing in common with a fine target pistol, bored and sighted especially for shooting holes in paper bull’s-eyes; the former is supposedly built for quick work, and will deal a knockout blew with a fair degree of accuracy. It is not probable that Slade had a special target revolver, or that he was equipped to load his own ammunition with the nicety so vital to accurate shooting in the early days of metallic cartridges. But granting him both advantages, the fact remains that the standard sizes of bull’s-eyes for fine target revolvers and pistols at the present time are: 1-inch at 12, 2-inch at 20, 4-inch at 30, and 8-inch at 50. And a test will prove to anyone that it is difficult even to see a dark button (largest obtainable) on any average coat of dark color at half the distance at which Slade is said to have been able to shoot them off.

Pat Garrett, one time sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, and the man who killed Billy the Kid, as good a shot with a six-shooter as the old frontier ever know, is quoted as saying it was, in his opinion, mighty good shooting to hit a 1 ½-inch bull’s-eye twice out of five shots at fifteen or twenty paces. "I would call that very good shooting myself," said he, "if I took careful aim and did my best."

In the palmy days of Alder Gulch, of Yuba Dam, of Abilene and Fort Dodge, form Montana to Southern California, from Iowa to Texas, everybody went armed. The entire code of good conduct was built upon the ability and readiness of property-loving, honest men to shoot quick and straight, and these men it was, not the incoming "tenderfeet" from the East, who set up the law and hired the town marshal.

And it was in the encounters between peace officers and professional bad men that the greatest skill with the six-shooter was shown. It did not require great expertness for a gambler to shoot another across a card table, or for a killer to shoot a victim down in cold blood, as Plummer, the Montana desperado, Joe Fowler of Texas, Jim Curry of Kansas, and others of their stripe frequently did. But when it came to an actual gun fight, with an even break on both sides, it called for unusual skill for a man to come off with his life. And so every man prictised and practised hard

Although the religion of the frontier was not to miss, it does not follow that this practise consisted in fine shooting such as the average target expert of to-day indulges in. To practise shooting by sighting along the barrel was not only a waste of time, but a very dangerous habit to get into. A man even at fifty yards was a pretty big bull’s-eye, which it should not require fine sighting to hit. And any man who might find himself serving as a target was pretty apt to "go for his gun," and draw and fire quick as lightning.

The man who was very "quick on the draw," and who would shoot straight the instant his pistol flashed from its scabbard, ranked high as a utilitarian pistol shot; there was no other standard.

To accustom his hands to the big, cumbersome pistols of those days, the man who coveted a reputation started in early and practised with them just as a card sharp practises with his cards, as a shell-game man drills his fingers to manipulate the three walnut shells and the elusive pea, or a juggler must practise to acquire proficiency. When he could draw, cock and fire all in one smooth lightning-quick movement, he could then detach his mind from that movement and concentrate on accuracy in shooting.

That required even more practise, for no time should be wasted in taking aim, and unless the hand grasped the handle just right and held the pistol in exactly the proper relation to the wrist, on then sensitive ball-and-socket joint of which the aim in pistol shooting always depends, he mussed. He knew that he intuitively extended his pointed finger straight at his target, without taking aim, and that he could shoot a pistol straight without sighting if he could so familiarize his hand and the pistol that he could point as straight with the barrel of the pistol as with his finger. This he learned to do through practise, but not, however, until he had trained an obstinate wrist and still more obstinate trigger-finger to work under the handicap of an unnatural position; for the revolving pistol did not fit the hand naturally and never will. Even to-day the best target pistols of the revolver type, either with or without the cylinder, in the use of which there is no need for haste, since they are made for nothing but fine target shooting, do not conform to the hand.

It was necessary for out aspiring six-shooter man to accustom himself not only to the exact manner of grasping the handle of his gun so that it pointed where the wrist pointed, but he also had to learn all over to point straight with his wrist twisted sharply downward and out of its natural pointing position. For instance, if he should point his six-shooter at the breast of a man five paces away, the wrist was bent downward to such an angle that the half of the trigger finger not hooked around the trigger pointed at the feet of the man who was his target. And with this finger, nature had endowed him with the ability to point straight at anything!

In short, the crude six-shooter, with its walkingstick handle and its trigger so placed that the trigger finger had to reach down for it at an angle of 45 degrees, had a tendency to shoot too high and to the left.

Some of the best-known six-shooter men, good and bad, were never able to conquer themselves to the extent that they could do good work with the six-shooter as it come to them. They resorted to various expedients to fire the weapon without having to pull the trigger. Some removed the dog from the lock, so there was nothing to catch in the sear and hold the hammer cocked, the pistol being fired when the hammer cocked, the pistol being fired when the hammer was released by the thumb. This also facilitated quick firing. Another way was to remove the trigger, and still another was to tie it back to the guard.

In case of a fight at close quarters, occasionally a man would "fan" his gun, instead of shooting in the regular way. This was accomplished by holding the weapon in the left hand, close to the body, and rapidly "fanning" the hammer with the edge of the palm of the right hand, the trigger being held back constantly by the left forefinger. In this way all five shots (it was not safe to carry a six-shooter fully loaded, so the hammer was set on an empty chamber or an exploded shell) could be fired in about two seconds. This was five times faster than a man could fire in the ordinary way, but there was not much certainty about where the bullets were going to hit, as fanning the hammer destroyed the aim.

The early Western frontiersman was a good shot with the six-shooter, not because he was well armed, nor because he was a born dead shot, but because he practised. To obtain even greater proficiency in the handling of his pistol practically every man skilled in weaponry drilled himself in various ways, the most popular practise, perhaps, being the "roll." Ergo, the roll was not only good practise, but it was a deadly trick when well mastered. It was that same notorious Billy the Kid, who killed twenty-two men before he was himself slain at the tender age of twenty-one, that first demonstrated this. Rounded up by a peace officer who got the drop on him, he surrendered his six-shooter butt foremost, and as the officer extended his hand to take it the outlaw whirled the pistol over and killed his man.

The roll was performed by suspending the gun on the trigger-finger by means of the trigger-guard and then whirling it, forward or backward, around this axis. A skilful six-shooter man could whirl a loaded gun in either direction, catching the handle, cocking the hammer and firing at each revolution. A very skilful man could do the double-roll, with a gun in either hand. But it took an artist to roll one gun forward and the other backward, an fire them alternately. An average man practised the simple single roll with an empty gun, as a slip of the thumb or a short circuit of the nervous system might easily result in the performer quite unexpectedly shooting himself through the stomach.

Because of good service rendered, the single-action, heavy six-shooter was the recipient of the adulation of a majority of those, sentimental and otherwise, who came to the border towns after men of sterner stuff had pushed on farther and taken the border with them. Many of these late comers wore out belt after packing around a two-pound six-shooter, happy in the belief that by adopting the weapon of the departed frontier and learning to shoot tin cans with it, they garnered somewhat of the fading glory of the past. As a matter of precaution, lest his fearlessness might be underrated, an occasional one of these rear guard six-shooter men turned bad. And although all such were invariably rounded up neatly by a plain, unsympathetic town marshal wearing a derby hat and carrying a nickel-plated self-cocking revolver of half its size and weight, the glory of the big, blue blunderbuss was not allowed to wane. Manufacture and dealer assisted in this. In the case of the former there must be an outlet for the big pistols, which were going out of fashion on the frontier. Of course the dealer carried in stock the pistol which "had a reputation" and on which an anxious manufacturer allowed him a generous margin of profit.

Meanwhile, even so severely matter-of-fact a six-shooter artist as Billy the Kid, who courted trouble in that most tumultuous and out-of-the-way corner, Lincoln County, New Mexico, used a double-action or self-cocking revolver, and would have no other. That was a hard blow to the memory of the old reliable single-action gun. But the Kid must kill or be killed, and he had no sentiment.

The double-action revolver’s great drawback was its long and heavy trigger-pull. Only a genius like Billy the Kid could handle one well. Instead of making improvement in design and construction, however, the pistol manufactures next brought out pocket revolvers. Belt guns had gone out of fashion with the settling of the West, and even the cowboys in the range were looking for a lighter arm. But the little pocket revolvers, with their small handles, their light weight and their short barrels, were fearfully and wonderfully inaccurate, They kicked up tremendously, because of three things: they were light, they were not properly balanced, and the handle was so made that it was impossible to hold it firmly enough to counteract the upward jump of the muzzle at the explosion of the charge. Again, the handle of even the heaviest of the old-fashioned six-shooter was never meant to aid the shooter in pulling the trigger-smoothly and without any sidewise twist as the trigger-finger tightened on the trigger. So the pocket revolver, with its much smaller handle and, in the case of a self-cocker, long and heavy trigger-pull, required the most careful sighting and holding to do even fair shooting.

As a matter of fact, had there been more actual use for the pocket revolver it would have been discarded as hopelessly impractical. But it went into the pocket, was not much thicker than a pipe case, weighed a third less than the old belt guns, and served well enough for purposes of reassurance. Men and women who bought them for protection and never fired them except on Fourth of July, thought them good weapons. They served police officers for firing into the air, and in the target models they gave satisfaction because a man had "all the time there was" to take sight in target shooting and cocked his "self cocking" revolver with his thumb, often using both hands in the operation.

And to come down to the present time, although the rapid-fire competitions in military revolver shooting have demonstrated that the revolving pistol has not kept pace in improvement with the repeating rifle, we still see the same old revolvers. A safety device has been added to the pocket models, and the latest "improvement" is the adaptation of the original over-grown handle of the single-action belt gun to the double-action pocket revolver to facilitate steadier holding. This is, of course, nothing more than a manufacture’s trick to palliate disgruntled shooters; for it is not the handle that makes the heavy single-action six-shooter more accurate than the double-action gun, but the combined advantage of greater weight, longer barrel and lighter trigger pull.

The double-action pocket revolver should have an entirely new and different handle to counteract its necessarily peculiar trigger-pull and its tendency to kick up. And even with this very great improvement it would still be a decade behind the times.

The average man or woman to-day who buys a pistol wants a light, compact, safe weapon for protection against the chance foodpad or burglar. Many who would like to buy pistols refrain form doing so because they have neither the time nor the inclination to become expert shots, and fear that, under the circumstances, they would surely be at a disadvantage in an encounter. This belief, of course, is founded upon the generally known unmanageableness of the revolving pistol, or ordinary revolver.

Even police officers, bank cashiers, messengers and others whose vocations require them to have some skill with a pocket-arm, recognize the handicap which the revolver places upon them, being, as it is, so awkward and unreliable in any but the well-trained hand.

The Savage Automatic Pistol is something entirely new and different in pocket arms. If we’d had the Ten-Shot Savage Automatic in the old days there wouldn’t have been any tenderfeet, because you can’t help but point it straight, just as you can’t help but point straight instinctively with your finger. And when you pull the trigger you don’t ever throw your aim off, because the handle stops what little kick is left after the action has blown back an reloaded. And you don’t need to worry about being quick, because the pistol attends to that too.

A tenderfoot with a Savage Automatic and the nerve to stand his ground, could have run the worst six-shooter man the West ever knew right off the range.