I've heard the Colt Walker was the most powerful hangun untill the 44 magnum came out. If true, that says a lot about Walker.
I read it was the 357 magnum which came out in 1935 but who knows. It is a powerful gun able to be loaded with 60 grains of BP. I only plan to load this one to about 45 grains.
Then there is this from Wikipedia:
The 1847 Colt Walker was the largest and most powerful black powder repeating handgun ever made. It was created in the mid-1840s in a collaboration between Texas Ranger Captain
Samuel Hamilton Walker (1817–47) and American firearms inventor
Samuel Colt (1814–62), building upon the earlier
Colt Paterson design. Walker wanted a handgun that was extremely powerful at close range.
[1]
Samuel Walker carried two of his namesake revolvers in the
Mexican–American War.
[2] He was killed in battle the same year his famous handgun was invented, 1847, shortly after he had received them. Only 1100 of these guns were originally made, 1000 as part of a military contract and an additional 100 for the civilian market, making original Colt Walker revolvers extremely rare and expensive to acquire. On October 9, 2008, one specimen that had been handed down from a Mexican War veteran was sold at auction for US$920,000.
[3]
The Republic of Texas had been the major purchaser of the early
Paterson Holster Pistol (No. 5 model), a five shot cal .36 revolver, and Samuel Walker became familiar with it during his service as a
Texas Ranger. In 1847, Walker was engaged in the
Mexican-American War as a captain in the United States Mounted Rifles. He approached Colt, requesting a large revolver to replace the single-shot Aston Johnson holster pistols then in use. The desired .44-.45 caliber revolver would be carried in saddle mounted holsters and would be large enough to dispatch horses as well as enemy soldiers. The Colt Walker was used in the Mexican-American War and on the Texas frontier.
[1]
Medical officer
John "Rip" Ford took a special interest in the Walkers when they arrived at
Veracruz. He obtained two examples for himself and is the primary source for information about their performance during the war and afterward. His observation that the revolver would carry as far and strike with the same or greater force than the .54 caliber
Mississippi Rifle seems to have been based on a single observation of a Mexican soldier hit at a distance of well over one hundred yards. The Walker, unlike most succeeding martial pistols and revolvers, was a practical weapon out to about 100 yards.
[1]
The Colt Walker was quite powerful, with modern replicas firing modern FFFg black powder producing energy levels in excess of 500 foot-pounds (680 J) muzzle-energy with both picket bullets and 0.454-inch-diameter (11.5 mm), 141-grain (9.1 g) round ball bullets. The black powder Colt Walker is often regarded as the most powerful commercially manufactured repeating handgun from 1847 until the introduction of the
.357 Magnum in 1935, having a
muzzle energy nearly exactly the same as a 4-inch-barreled (10 cm) handgun firing a .357 Magnum.
[8] The Colt Walker has long maintained a unique position and mystique among handgun users, and its name is often used as a common expression of any overly large generic handgun example.
In the 1968 book
True Grit, 14-year-old Mattie carries a Colt Dragoon. However, possibly due to the Walker's bigger size, a cartridge-converted Colt Walker was used as Mattie's weapon in the
1969 film based on the book, though Wayne's character referred to it as a Colt Dragoon nonetheless. In the
2010 remake of the film by the Coen Brothers, she carries a Dragoon, as originally described in the book
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