Robert Lautner - The Road to Reckoning

I suppose we were also caught in this financial bust, which would cause my father to take to the road, and I also presume that as a businessman my father paid attention to patents and newspapers. But he shared none of this with me. What I have to tell you now is that in April 1837 we traveled to Paterson, New Jersey, in our gig, my father almost jumping all the way and my books and my aunt Mary left behind.

My aunt was not happy about my going on the road, although I regularly traveled with my father around New York, probably more as a sympathy for his sales than for my companionship, which was mute at best, but I gathered from their talk that we would not come home for supper this time.

‘You cannot take him, John!’ She said this as a fact rather than a plea for my safety. ‘You’ll be gone for months! And what for his schooling?’ This was a good reason for me to run. My aunt had wishes to end my homeschooling. She had subscribed to the Common School Assistant , and along with the Christian Spectator and Cobb’s Explanatory Arithmetick this had become her higher learning.

She had become enamored of a new model of teaching from Europe. A studious Swiss named Fellenberg had developed an institutional method that mingled poor and wealthy children. His concept being that the poor in society would be taught the trades and education needed for their place, and the rich would be taught the arts, literature, and politics of their standing. By seeing the poor at their work the rich children would appreciate their contribution to the country, and by observing their betters side by side and seeing them learn how to be leaders and intellectuals the poor would understand the way of things and appreciate that their aspirations were taken care of. I figured I was for the better half of the school and if that mister Fellenberg thought poor children were apt to admire their betters he had never seen the Bowery, and I for one would have none of that.

‘What is a boy to do out in the west?’ she insisted.

This statement was lost on me. Even at twelve I knew that I would have no limit of things to do out beyond the mountains. My own thoughts of danger were less important than having the opportunity to be away from my aunt’s lavender chiffon and her yardstick rule, which I never saw measure anything except how much blame my knuckles could take. Besides, we were talking only as far as Illinois and Indiana in those days. I am sure my father had no intention of entering the wilds of Missouri.

‘Tom is coming,’ my father said. ‘I cannot leave him here. I will need him.’

Against tradition I was not named for my father. We were a book-reading family and he had named me after the Tom in a Washington Irving tale published the year before I was born. It had the Devil in it.

He looked on me with the same strained face that I had awoken to on that winter morning when my mother passed.

He had sat at the end of my bed that dawn, wringing his hands, rocking like a just and sober man down to his last coin with the landlord at the door and plucking at his fingers to count where he had gone wrong.

‘I cannot.’ He gave the look to me but spoke to my aunt. ‘I will not leave him.’

He packed us on that little four-seat Brewster bought from Broad street the year before the fire, in the months when my mother began to look better.

No room for books or toys. And I never noticed that I left these things. My heart was already on the road.

Our house was near the river in Manhattan and we took a ferry from Pier 18 to Jersey. Jude Brown stomped and complained on the boat all the way and I had to wrap my arm around his neck to comfort him. There in Paterson, New Jersey, my father met with a young man in a black ulster coat and striped trousers and with a fine mustache that he must have been working on hard to remove his youth. He looked and spoke like a sailor and by that I mean he was short but strong and cussed casually when it seemed unnatural to do so in company you hardly knew.

My father was impressed with him instantly. This young man had convinced some New York investors who still had capital to part with their money to fund a firearms company set up in a corner of a silk-works, and there was no doubt in the man that the military would take up his design. It was an absolute certainty. His assurance to us.

My father shook his hand like he was pumping water.

I am sure that this smiling young man had no trouble extracting money from those cigar smokers with their handlebar mustaches and silk coats that they had trouble buttoning up. At twenty-two years or thereabouts he had certainly beguiled my father, a man twice his senior. I would later find that just a few years before he was taking laughing gas around county fairs from a wagon colored like a circus tent and for a half-dime turning the hayseeds into even bigger fools. I suspect he may have had this gas pumped into the factory, so deliriously enthused was my father, and even I myself, who was most suspicious of any person who did not have a key to my house, followed him around the factory like a puppy.

My father willingly signed on for a job for which he would not be paid. Another five minutes and my father would have been paying him. We were being let in on the ground floor of a great enterprise. I noted when we left that there was another gentleman who was also waiting to be let in on this secret ground floor.

It was commission work and I will accept that that is still work, for my father earned the same for the spectacles he sold, but he still had a stipend for his day-to-day living. But people needed spectacles as they were. They did not require reinventing. At the time, beyond his charming of us both, I saw no prospect in this mister Colt reinventing the pistol.

He called it the ‘Improved Revolving Gun,’ improved being normal devious bluffen brag for a stolen idea and snake oil sold from a buckboard.

This young man, Samuel Colt, now famous throughout the world for ‘improving’ the act of murder, was aware as any that Collier’s revolving flintlock was a fine gentleman’s gun and that the percussion cap had led to the development of the new Allen pepperbox pistol, which put several shots in a man’s fist, mostly the shaky hands of gamblers and barkeeps and others of ill repute whose reputations mister Colt wished to expand by his own invention.

His ambition was to bring unto the world a gun that could be machine made by a labor-line rather than a craftsman. A factory gun. A cheaper gun. The parts could be interchangeable, fixed on the fly (which, in my opinion, was admitting to its faults), and, with a good-sized factory, his arms could be mass-produced for the military.

He had made several hundred revolving carbines and pistols and had provisionally sold some of these down in Texas to the independents (they were fighting with the Seminoles again and always with the Mexicans) and mister Colt claimed that he had won the U.S. patent for his revolving gun the day after the battle for the Alamo began, although he had applied a year before, and, as he declared, if only providence had come sooner the outcome may have been different. He assured my father that he was to be one of the few who would change the course of the history of warfare.