Original U.S. Civil War Era Colt Style Unmarked M-1862 Police Pocket .36cal Percussion Revolver with 5 ½" Barrel - Matching Serial 52

Original Item: Only One Available. Introduced in 1862 as the "Police Pocket Model of 1862 of Navy Caliber (.36)", this 5 shot .36 caliber percussion revolver was often purchased by serving Officers as a reserve handgun carried on the inside of their tunics.

At first glance, this appears to be a lovely example of the Colt Police Pocket revolver, however close inspection shows that it is almost completely unmarked. There are no patent markings, no address marking on top of the barrel, or any proof marks. It also does not appear that markings were removed. We did notice however that the loading rammer is not the "creep" style that it should be, which was introduced with the Model 1860 Army Revolver by Colt. Aside from that however, in form it is identical to a the Police Pocket.

While there is no maker marking, the revolver is marked with serial number 52, which is stamped on the left side of the loading rammer, the barrel, the barrel wedge, the cylinder, the frame, the trigger guard, and the grip frame. That makes this a lovely "ALL MATCHING" example, with no parts swapped out over the years! As it it almost certainly does not fall into the standard Colt serial number lists, there is no way to determine when it was made.

However the lack of markings strongly suggests that this revolver was made as a "Ghost Built" copy, very possibly during 1864, when the Colt Factory was recovering from a fire that destroyed the entire east armory in February 1864. During this time, Colt was much too busy to track down examples of patent infringement, as many had popped up to fill the void in the market as Colt rebuilt.

The revolver looks to have seen a good amount of use during its service life, and now displays a lovely polished patina overall on the iron and steel portions, with just a bit of past peppering. The grip frame and trigger guard do not have any nickel plating, and we do not know if they originally did, but they do display a lovely golden "mustard" patina. The walnut grip itself is in very good condition. showing some light wear but also some fantastic grain patterns. Really a lovely piece of wood.

This revolver is still in tight fully functional condition, with a strong hammer pull, accurate indexing, and a strong cylinder lockup. We did not notice any of the usual finicky behavior we often see with revolvers of this age. The bore of the revolver is still in very good condition, showing strong lands and grooves with a partly bright finish. There is some oxidation and fouling in the grooves, as well as overall wear, but for a Civil War era black powder percussion revolver, this is definitely well above average. The cap nipple cones are all clear, and show light oxidation and fouling from powder burn, but no major damage from repeated dry firing.

A lovely Civil War Era Pocket Percussion Revolver, made very much to resemble the Colt M-1862 Pocket Navy. Definitely some fantastic research potential in this lovely piece!

Specifications:

Year of Manufacture: circa 1864
Caliber: .36cal
Ammunition Type: Cap and Ball
Barrel Length: 5 ½ inches
Overall Length: 10 ¾ inches
Action: Single Action

History of the Colt Pocket Percussion Pistols:

The family of Colt Pocket Percussion Revolvers evolved from the earlier commercial revolvers marketed by the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, N.J. The smaller versions of Colt's first revolvers are also called "Baby Patersons" by collectors and were produced first in .24 to .31 caliber, and later in .36 caliber, by means of rebating the frame and adding a "step" to the cylinder to increase diameter. The .31 caliber carried over into Samuel Colt's second venture in the arms trade in the form of the "Baby Dragoon"-a small revolver developed in 1847–48. The "Baby Dragoon" was in parallel development with Colt's other revolvers and, by 1850, it had evolved into the "Colt's Revolving Pocket Pistol" that collectors now name "The Pocket Model of 1849". It is a smaller brother of the more famous "Colt's Revolving Belt Pistol of Naval Caliber" introduced the same year and commonly designated by collectors as the "1851 Navy Model" (and which was a basically a larger, .36 caliber of the Pocket Model, "belt pistol" referring to a weapon sized to fit into a belt holster, as opposed to the saddle holsters generally called for by Colt's larger cavalry combat models). In 1855 Colt introduced another pocket percussion revolver, the Colt 1855 "Sidehammer", designed alongside engineer Elisha K. Root.

The Pocket Model revolvers all have a traditional "Colt-style" frame, generally with brass grip straps and trigger guard, and a case-hardened steel frame. In appearance, the frames are almost identical to the larger 1851 Navy and .44 caliber 1860 Army Models, with the exception of being smaller, and so having a proportionately larger trigger guard. Since they appear so similar to the larger weapons, without an object nearby to give them scale, the Pocket Revolvers tend to give an impression of being larger than they actually are; it is difficult to fit all four fingers onto the slender grip, even for a person with average-sized hands. Except for by noting the relative size of the trigger guard to the frame, it is easy for a casual observer to mistake a .31 caliber Model 1849 for an 1851 Navy (un-rebated frame, slab-sided webbing around a regular pivoting loading lever, octagonal barrel, unfluted cylinder); indeed, the Model 1851 Navy was basically no more than a scaled -up 1849 Pocket Model. Likewise, the larger .36 caliber Pocket Police Models are virtually identical to the 1860 Army Model, with rebated frame and stepped cylinder (to accommodate a size up from .31 to .36, instead of .36 to .44 as with the Army Model), a graceful, flowing webbing surrounding a new style "creeping" loading lever, and a round barrel. The most obvious difference is that the Pocket Police had a fluted 5-shot cylinder, while most Army Models were unfluted, and held six shots. The reason for this close similarity is that all four guns were closely related, and followed similar paths of development; the original .31 caliber Model 1849 was scaled up to create the .36 caliber 1851 Navy Model. Later, the Navy Model was increased in bore size by rebating the frame and enlarging the cylinder, and became the 1860 Army Model. With the success of this project, the .31 caliber of the 1849 Model was similarly increased to .36, using the same method, creating the Pocket Police and Pocket Navy models in 1860.

In 1860, the .36 caliber Police Pocket model was created, after lessons were learned from experimentation aimed at reducing the size of the .44 Colt Holster Pistols (i.e. large cavalry weapons), Colt took advantage of stronger mass-produced steel by rebating the frame of the Navy revolver to hold a larger-diameter 44/100-inch chambered cylinder, basically fitting the power of a large cavalry saddle holster-gun and fitting it into the .36 caliber Navy Model, a gun that could be carried in a belt holster. Previously, it wasn't thought that the smaller frame could handle the power of the .44 round, but the introduction of stronger metals made it possible. Learning the lessons from this, the Colt factory applied the same technology to the .31 caliber Model 1849 Pocket revolvers, using high-strength (for the time) steel for the frame, which allowed them to remove enough material to fit a larger-diameter .36 caliber cylinder which still had five shots (the alternative was to simply retain the original cylinder diameter, and create a 4-shot .36 caliber version. The stronger steels made this sacrifice unnecessary. Other changes including lightweight fluted cylinders, and a round barrel, to offset the added weight, and a "creeping" loading lever as used in the 1861 Army Model; the result was the "Police Pocket Model of 1862", even though production started in 1861. The Pocket Navy was a version similarly up-sized to .36 caliber, but which retained the octagonal barrel and traditional loading lever of the earlier pocket mode. Between 1862 and 1873, Colt records document production of 19,000 of the Pocket Navies and over 20,000 Pocket Police revolvers. Relative to the .31 Pocket Revolvers, the period of manufacture was short and overall numbers were further limited by a fire at the Colt Factory in 1862 and War production concerns.

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