I must confess that I did my own part in damaging what remained of the Frontier Six-Shooter, which the serial number dates to 1882. The lock works were still intact and there was a crude brass blade soldered in place as a front sight. Well that front sight was first to go when I decided I wanted to unscrew the barrel and went at the job with a vise and a pipe wrench thinking the sight would give my wrench some good purchase. Gosh that old blade came loose quickly!
Next to go was the cylinder pin, which I could not budge by conventional means and eventually yanked out with a pair of pliers, mangling it pretty darned well. It's now lost to the years along with the hand and hand/trigger spring. The final insult was when a high school pal and I were comparing notes, and it turned out that he, too, had been given a black-powder Colt SAA to fool with by his father, who thought he had made it unfireable by removing the firing pin from the hammer. I gave Dan the intact hammer from my Colt and he was in business.
Of course, the unknown miner or some other previous owner had begun the deconstruction process by removing the ejector and housing and cutting the barrel to 3 1/2 inches. Somewhere else along the line, somebody carved 13 notches in the walnut stock butt. As a kid and a "Gunsmoke" fiend, I would imagine that each notch represented an actual gunfight, but the notches could very well have stood for packrat or rattlesnake kills. The miner also bobbed the holster and cut holes in it for a retention thong. As the old saying goes, if it only could talk ... IT WOULD PROBABLY SCREAM BLOODY MURDER!
