Wheelgun Wednesday: Starr 1858 - Fast Shooting Cap-And-Ball Firepower

Except for very, very rare exceptions like the Chiappa Rhino, revolvers more or less look the same these days, and function mostly the same as well. There’s a pattern to follow. But in the 1800s, designers were still figuring things out, trying new ideas to make better handguns. One of those was the 1858 revolver from entrepreneur/designer Ebanezer Starr. This was one of the earliest double-action handguns in the world, particularly in the U.S.

Old-school six-shooters @ TFB:

• Wheelgun Wednesday: Civil War Lever Action Revolver
• The Guns of "Django Unchained"
• Wheelgun Wednesday: Tiffany & Co. Embellished Revolvers
• The quest for high-capacity firearms

Arms Race

The Starr, like several other firearms of the late 1850s and early 1860s, was a case of the almost-right gun at the right time. The U.S. Army wanted firearms, with war on the horizon, and so did private individuals. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Starr made about 23,000 double-action revolvers, and according to the NRA, the U.S. Army bought most of those; Starr made examples in .36 caliber, especially for the Navy, but most were .44 models. The NRA says these were a significant portion of the sidearms officially issued to Union cavalrymen, in particular, more than 12 percent (the Navy also bought a couple of thousand as well). According to the NRA, only Colt and Remington sold more revolvers to the government than Starr did.

There were another 25,000 single-action versions of the revolver also sold to the military, plus thousands of private sales. In other words, there were a lot of these double-action Starr revolvers floating around during the Civil War.

But while Starr made about 50,000 of these revolvers, you don’t hear a lot about them in the Wild West after the Civil War ended. Why was that? It might be because they weren’t necessarily well-regarded to start with (more on that in a minute). I’ve read that the U.S. government sold a lot of the six-shooters off to Europe after 1865, including France and Germany, which would explain why they don’t pop up a lot in dime novels. Or maybe Colt and Remington and Smith & Wesson had better PR agents after the Civil War—considering Starr went out of business in 1867, that’d certainly explain a lot.

You never hear of legends like Doc Holliday or Bass Reeves or John Wesley Hardin or Tom Horn using these revolvers, and they don’t really pop up a lot in oater films either. The most famous Western to feature the Starr was Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood finds out he can’t shoot his old cap-and-ball revolver straight and opts to use his shotgun instead.

British gunmakers had been building double-action revolvers for nearly a decade before the Starr revolver debuted; the Beaumont–Adams and other similar handguns were popular enough that they forced Colt to shut down their factory in the U.K. However, in the U.S., single-action revolvers were far more popular than the British guns, and that’s what Americans were used to—cock the hammer, pull the trigger. Repeat as needed.

The Starr didn’t have the exact same manual of arms as the double-actions of today, where you just squeeze the trigger once, which works every part of the action—rotating the cylinder, cocking the hammer, and tripping the sear so the hammer drops.

Essentially, you were squeezing two triggers with a single movement, and as you can imagine, that resulted in quite a heavy trigger pull. You weren’t supposed to cock the hammer for single-action fire; you could cock the hammer with the front trigger and then trip the rear trigger on its own for single-action fire. But again, it was different from what soldiers were used to, and the double-action version wasn’t necessarily well-liked, despite its faster-shooting capability. The U.S. Army’s request for a single-action version makes sense, especially because it came in at $12 apiece, instead of the $25 that Starr charged for the double-action version.

Depending on who you believe, some of those complaints about the Starr were overrated anyway—some shooters and collectors think they were better-built than Colts or Remingtons, and less likely to jam, and some owners like the fact that the Starr has an easily-removable cylinder. But don’t go thinking that Wild West gunfighters carried a belt full of spare cylinders to reload their pistols; there’s no evidence that happened.

Buying a Starr

You can buy a Pietta reproduction, but the original Civil War-era Starrs are not that hard to find, and not that expensive. There’s one for sale at Guns International for $1,295, and if you look around, you’ll see this restored version sold for much less a few months back. Look overseas, and you can find examples for a lot more.