Killer Colt

by Harold Schechter

  • • •

  If Freudian theorists are to be believed, the figure of the evil stepmother, so familiar from the Brothers Grimm, is rooted in unconscious childhood fears of maternal rejection. Less psychoanalytically inclined scholars, on the other hand, see the prevalence of wicked stepmothers as a reflection not of infantile fantasy but of historical reality. Two hundred years ago, women of procreative age died at an alarmingly high rate. Husbands frequently remarried and sired children with their new wives, who, in the natural way of things, treated the offspring of their predecessors less tenderly than their own.4

  Christopher’s new wife, Olivia, was no fairy-tale ogress. But with her husband struggling to reestablish his finances, she was obliged to impose a strict new regime on the household, beginning with the discharge of the servants. Within five years of her marriage, moreover, she had given birth to three babies of her own.5

  Having been raised as pampered members of the local gentry, the children of Christopher’s first marriage suddenly found themselves in radically reduced circumstances, expelled from the ranks of the social elite. Apart from the youngest, nine-year-old James, they were now expected to earn their own keep. Christopher, Jr.—who had worked up a small business running errands for the neighbors—was permitted to remain at home, adding his earnings to the household funds.6 The others were sent into the world.

  Within months of Margaret’s death, her younger sister, Sarah Ann, was farmed out to relatives who, by all accounts, treated her little better than a menial.7

  John, who had begun to entertain dreams of a military career, hoped to enter West Point. His new stepmother, however, made it clear that such an ambition was beyond the family’s means. Instead he was sent to work at the Union Manufacturing Company in Marlborough, Connecticut, a textile mill that produced the blue cotton stripe fabric used to clothe slaves in the Southern plantations. John so excelled at his work that, within a year, he was promoted to assistant bookkeeper, familiarizing himself with the so-called double entry system of accounting favored by New England merchants.8

  As for Sam, he was indentured to a farmer in Glastonbury, Connecticut. History records few details of his departure from the family home. Most of his biographers, however, agree on one point. When he left, he took his gun.9

  5

  However deep the bonds of affection between them, whatever traits of character and temperament they shared, Samuel Colt and his big brother, John, differed radically in at least one crucial regard. By the time he reached adolescence, Sam had already conceived his life’s purpose and pursued it with a fierce determination for the rest of his days. Nothing would deflect him from his goal. Though he would travel widely, his wanderings were always in the service of a single ambition. His aim (to use the obvious metaphor) was as narrowly focused as the view through a marksman’s sight.

  By contrast, to chronicle John Colt’s career is to chart a distinctly meandering course. Though possessed, like his younger brother, of seemingly boundless energies and a bold enterprising spirit, there was a haphazard quality to his pursuits. In search of success, he would lead a nomad’s existence, trying his hand at assorted moneymaking schemes around the country. In the original meaning of the term—“following a winding or erratic course, rambling, roving”—John Colt’s life was distinctly devious. Whether the word also applied to him in its more common sense—cunning, crooked, untrustworthy—would, in later years, be a subject of heated debate.1

  • • •

  John Colt saw Manhattan for the first time in 1826, when he accompanied his father there on a business trip. The previous fall, at a ceremony to mark the opening of the Erie Canal, Governor De Witt Clinton had prophesied that the 350-mile waterway would transform New York City into the country’s “emporium of commerce.” Less than a year later, that prediction was already coming true, as barges laden with the bounty of America’s heartland made their way to the great, booming port.2

  The burgeoning metropolis—“with its domes and spires, its towers, its cupolas and steepled chimneys”—impressed the sixteen-year-old boy as a wonderland. He was particularly struck by the hum and bustle of the South Street docks, lined with merchants’ shops and warehouses and bristling with the masts, spars, and rigging of countless sailing ships and packets.3

  A month and a half after he returned to his job at the Union Manufacturing Company, John vanished, only to turn up three weeks later in Albany, New York. Though the facts are sketchy, he appears to have run off to New York City before making his way northward by steamer, evidently in the vague hope of realizing his dream of entering West Point. A chance encounter with a family acquaintance at a hotel in Albany alerted his father to John’s whereabouts.

  By then, Christopher Colt had moved his wife and family to a cottage in Ware, Massachusetts, where he had become the sales agent for the Hampshire Manufacturing Company, makers of cotton and woolen yarn and cloth, as well as “machinery, castings and gearings” used in the production of textiles.4 Writing to his son in Albany, Christopher urged the sixteen-year-old to return home and come work at the mill. Though John’s supply of cash was, by then, running perilously low, he refused, informing his father that he was determined to further his education.

  To lure his prodigal son back home, Christopher acceded to his wishes, offering to pay for his tuition at an academy near Hartford. John promptly enrolled, pursuing his studies with a diligence that “astonished everyone.” After just one quarter, however, Christopher—apparently under pressure from his parsimonious new wife—withdrew his financial support and demanded that John “return home in the next mail stage.”

  • • •

  John’s sister, Sarah Ann, was living at home again, earning her keep by teaching at a female seminary.5 The two were now the oldest children in the Colt household—the ones with the clearest recollections of their privileged past. The memories of their indulgent mother—and of the luxuries they took for granted while she was alive—only heightened their resentment of Olivia.

  Still bent on completing his studies, John seethed when his stepmother urged him to abandon his academic ambitions and return to his job in Marlborough. Under the family’s current straitened circumstances, she informed him, John must “dismiss his extravagant expectations” and reconcile himself to a life of “privation.” The most he could expect from his parents was a meager allowance—a “mere pittance.”

  Given the state of their finances, Olivia’s extreme frugality was surely a matter of simple prudence. To John, however, her lectures “upon the necessity of not rendering himself a burden to his parents” rankled bitterly.

  His anger was compounded by the plight of his older sister. Brought up in a world of wealth and “fashionable society,” Sarah Ann was now reduced to a life of extreme deprivation, “cut off from indulgences and opportunities of seeing and being seen freely granted to other young ladies, even some of inferior standing.” On the few occasions that she ventured a complaint, her stepmother would remind her of the family’s “narrow means” and insist that Sarah stop “thinking about dress and frivolous parties and so forth.” Sarah soon learned to bite back her unhappiness, sharing her feelings only with her brother, who was “cut to the very soul by what he regarded as an indignity to his only remaining sister.”

  Eventually John could no longer endure the situation. Approaching E. B. Stedman—Margaret Colt’s bereaved fiancé, who had remained close to the family after her death—John unburdened himself to the young merchant and revealed his intention “to quit his father’s house and never more to be indebted to him for support.” The sympathetic Stedman responded by “placing fifty dollars in his young friend’s hands” and exclaiming, “Should you ever need assistance, let me know; and while I have a dollar, I’ll divide it with you.”

  Sometime in 1827—the exact date is unknown—seventeen-year-old John Colt departed from home, becoming, as one newspaper later put it, a “voluntary exile from the parental roof.”6

  His sister,
Sarah Ann, would choose a different mode of escape.

  6

  In the agrarian past, when farming “was as much of a trade to be learned as that of cobbler, miller, or blacksmith,” it was standard practice for the sons of New England yeomen to undergo formal apprenticeships. For terms of varying duration, boys were indentured to local farmers who, in exchange for the unstinting services of their young charges, agreed to provide them with room, board, and a modicum of basic education while training them in the traditional “art of the husbandman.”1

  According to the terms of one typical indenture from the 1820s, the apprentice agreed to serve his master “well and faithfully” and “his lawful commands everywhere at all times readily obey.” In addition:

  He shall not waste the goods of said master, nor lend them unlawfully to any; at cards, dice or any unlawful game he shall not play; fornication he shall not commit, nor matrimony contract during said term; taverns, ale-houses or places of gaming he shall not haunt or frequent; from the service of his said master he shall not absent himself, but in all things and at all times he shall carry himself and behave as a good and faithful apprentice ought, during the whole time or term aforesaid.2

  In later life, Sam Colt had little to say about his year in Glastonbury, other than to remark that “he did not find there a very gentle master and certainly was in no danger of being spoiled by over-indulgence.”3 That the eleven-year-old boy was subjected to unfamiliar rigors is not surprising. Even under the best of circumstances, farming was a grueling affair. The journal of one of Sam’s contemporaries offers a vivid glimpse of the numbing monotony that constituted early nineteenth-century farm life:

  July 28th I mow’d ½ the day, ½ plow’d hops.

  29th I plow’d and hoe’d hops.

  30th I sow’d some turnips. It rained.

  31st I helped Father plow with my oxen.

  August 1st I was haying.

  2nd I was plowing my stubble. It rain’d.

  3rd I went and plow’d corn.4

  Even Sundays did not offer much relief from the grinding tedium. Though Sam’s master, a “robust Christian,” strictly observed the biblical prohibition against work on the Sabbath, certain indispensable chores—carrying firewood, feeding the livestock, milking the cows—were still demanded of the boy. Attendance at church, where the minister would typically deliver a sermon of several hours’ duration, was mandatory. And the “blue laws” inherited from New England’s Puritan founders still forbade any activity resembling fun. (As late as 1837, certain Connecticut towns enforced a law declaring “that no one shall run of a Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from church.”)5

  By most accounts, Sam did manage to sneak away on an occasional Sunday afternoon for a ramble in the countryside. Legend has it that he would bring his prized flintlock pistol and that, on one occasion, he yielded to temptation and discharged the gun, shattering “the taut quietude of a Puritan Sabbath.”6

  He also found refuge in the pages of a book. Though Sam—as per the provisions of his indenture—was sent to a local schoolhouse to learn the three Rs, he would always be an indifferent student (as the rudimentary spelling abilities he carried into adulthood would attest). Nevertheless, he was reputedly enthralled by a volume belonging to his Glastonbury master. This was a massive Compendium of Knowledge, one of three books that constituted the entire household library (the others being the family Bible and a farmer’s almanac).

  Like other works of its kind, the volume that so fascinated young Sam Colt contained information on a dizzying range of subjects, from Greek mythology to colonial American history, from beekeeping to poultry breeding, from the proper method for making malt to the correct cure for hoof-and-mouth disease. The chapters that riveted Sam’s attention, however, were not the ones on literature or philosophy, horticulture or medicine, astronomy or phrenology. They were the sections that explained the workings of galvanic batteries and the formula for making gunpowder.7

  • • •

  His year of servitude over, Sam returned to Ware and went to work at the Hampshire mill alongside his father. Unlike his older brother Christopher, Jr.—who would go on to become a pioneer in the American silk industry—Sam had little interest in textiles per se.8 But with his unquenchable mechanical curiosity, he was continuously fascinated by the workings of the water-powered manufactory: “the clicking, whirling looms, the darting bobbins … the machines replacing what before he had known only as a winter’s evening task, spinning and weaving by the fireside.”9 In the person of William T. Smith, supervisor of the mill’s “bleeching and colouring” laboratory (in Sam’s typically heterodox spelling), he also found a kindred spirit who shared his love of chemistry and who, by most accounts, encouraged the adolescent boy’s earliest experiments with homemade explosives.10

  Sam was able to pursue his interests with a more learned instructor when, after three years at the mill, he went off to nearby Amherst Academy. Founded in 1814, the school (the academic seedbed out of which Amherst College would shortly spring) was an educationally progressive institution that prided itself on, among other accomplishments, its early adoption of that state-of-the-art instructional device, the blackboard. (“It is surprising and delightful to see the interest which it kindles in even the dullest scholar,” exclaimed the author of an 1827 report prepared for the board of trustees, who foresaw the day when this pedagogical marvel would become common in the classroom. “By rousing the curiosity and holding the attention beyond all other means, it would almost completely banish that weariness which makes the schoolhouse a place hated to so many children and that listlessness and idleness which renders that time spent there so often worse than lost.”)11

  In addition to its classical curriculum—ancient languages, moral philosophy, grammar, arithmetic, and so forth—the academy offered courses in subjects “just beginning to be taught in schools outside of colleges.”12 Among these was chemistry, taught at the time of Sam Colt’s attendance by a gentleman named Rufus Graves.

  One of the founders of Amherst Academy, Graves was an unprepossessing fellow whose “sluggish and phlegmatic appearance” belied his prodigious energy.13 A Massachusetts native who had earned a divinity degree at Dartmouth College, he had, in the course of his exceptionally varied career, run a tannery, helped construct the first bridge over the Connecticut River, founded the Putnam Drug Company (one of the longest continuously operating businesses in early New Hampshire history), served as lieutenant colonel in the Sixteenth U.S. Infantry, and been a chemistry instructor at Dartmouth.

  Insofar as Graves remains known at all today, it is among enthusiasts of the paranormal, the types who relish tales of abominable snowmen, UFOs, and other such pseudoscientific phenomena. This dubious distinction is owing to a short piece Graves published in an 1820 issue of the American Journal of Science. Titled “Account of a Gelatinous Meteor,” the article describes Graves’s observation, on the evening of August 13, 1819, of a “luminous meteor” of “a brilliant white light” that streaked through the sky over Amherst and crashed beside a nearby house. The following morning, Graves located the spot where the “fire-ball” had ostensibly fallen to earth and discovered

  a circular mass of jelly about eight inches in diameter and about one in thickness of a bright buff colour with a fine nap upon it, similar to that of milled cloth. On removing this nap, a buff-coloured pulpy substance, of the consistency of soft soap, appeared, having an offensive suffocating smell, producing nausea and giddiness. After a few minutes exposure to air, the buff colour was changed into a livid colour resembling venous blood.

  Graves’s supposedly sensational discovery—which has since been identified as a common species of plant called myxomycetes, or slime mold—did nothing for his ultimate scientific reputation. It did, however, earn him a place in the history of what folklorists describe as the centuries-old belief in “star jelly,” a tradition that runs from Shakespeare’s day to the 1950s cult film classic
The Blob.14

  Despite his credulity when it came to blood-colored jelly from outer space, Graves was esteemed as a lecturer. As a member of his class, Sam would have witnessed and participated in simple experiments designed to introduce young students to the basic principles of chemistry: combining sulphur with hydrogen, for example, to produce sulphuretted hydrogen gas, the “essence of that nauseous scent” that “is generated in all dirty sinks and other places abounding such filthy substances.” Or inserting a piece of burning candle into a glass tube filled with pure oxygen to demonstrate “the necessity for having oxygen diluted with nitrogen; for if the atmosphere were pure oxygen, all combustible substances, when once inflamed, would burn without control to the destruction of all the living beings.”15 From one of the textbooks then in use at Amherst, John White Webster’s A Manual of Chemistry, Sam also would have learned of a phenomenon that would figure importantly in his adult life: “the feelings of excitement” induced by the inhalation of nitrous oxide.16

  • • •

  John Colt’s movements in the months following his flight from the “parental roof” are impossible to trace with certainty. By late 1827, he appears to have made his way to Baltimore, where he found work as a mathematics teacher at a ladies’ seminary and (though the records on this are ambiguous) may have begun dabbling in real estate investment.17 Residing at a downtown hotel, he is said to have befriended an elderly engineer by the name of Everett, who—impressed with the young man’s “celerity at figures”—offered him a high-paying supervisory job in what was then a booming field: the canal business.

  The stunning success of the Erie Canal had set off a wave of canal construction in surrounding regions, particularly in Pennsylvania, where a complex system of waterways would soon crisscross the state. The project to which John was assigned involved a three-quarter-mile stretch of the so-called North Branch Canal, designed to transport coal from the rich anthracite fields just below Wilkes-Barre to urban markets in Delaware, New York, and New Jersey.18