Armed to Survive

The turbulent environment of the frontier milieu served as a dramatic stage for virtually all of the arms manufactured in America from 1800 to 1900. Successive developments in the firepower of domestic weaponry proved particularly dramatic, advancing from the ubiquitous single-shot arms of 1800, through the multibarreled and revolving-cylinder repeating firearms of the 1830s and 1840s, on to the repeating magazine guns of the 1860s and following. The numerous historical images provide somethi