Why the Revolver Patton Is Remembered For Wasn’t the One He Trusted

The revolver in almost every photograph of George Patton was designed in 1873. The one he is said to have called his killing gun was barely 6 years old when he carried it to war, and it came with a certificate, a serial number, a signature, a printed guarantee of what it would do, and at what distance. Two revolvers, one belt, both wearing ivory.

One of them he proved with a notch he cut himself by hand with nobody to check the work. The other was proved by a company [music] that put it in writing and mailed it to him in a tube. Picture those two grips side by side on one hipline, nearly identical, and only one of them is the gun you think you’re looking at.

If he trusted the newer one, why is it almost never in the frame? And somebody paid for that answer. [music] Start where the picture was made. Europe, 1944, Third Army moving hard, and the man in front of it wearing a belt built to carry two revolvers. On the right hip, a Colt Single Action Army, serial number 332088.45 [music] Colt, 4 and 3/4 inch barrel, silver plated, the scrollwork cut by Colt’s chief engraver, Cuno Hellfritsch.

>> [music] >> Ivory panels carrying his initials on one side and a spread eagle on the other. On the left, when he wore it at all, a Smith & Wesson .357 Registered Magnum, [music] registration number 506, shipped out of Springfield, Massachusetts in the fall of 1935 to a Lieutenant Colonel then stationed in Hawaii.

Same ivory, different centuries. Photographers worked his right side, nearly always his right side. When Milton Perry, then curator of history at the West Point Museum, published his study of Patton’s pistols in 1957, he could point to one known photograph of the general wearing both guns at once. One. The Colt came first, and it came as a costume.

March 1916, El Paso, a second lieutenant with Pershing’s Punitive Expedition assembling around him. His unit carried the government’s automatic, the M1911 issued free. He walked into the Shelton-Payne Arms Company and spent close to $50 of his own money on a revolver whose design was older than he was. Two months later, he found out what it could do.

May 14th, 1916, three Dodge touring cars on a bad road near Rubio, Chihuahua. 10 men, a foraging run for corn that turned into a raid on the San Miguelito ranch. Julio Cardenas, who commanded Pancho Villa’s personal bodyguard, was killed there along with two other men. Cardenas left no account of that afternoon. Nobody wrote his side down then or since.

Afterward, Patton cut a notch into the ivory. No one signed off on that notch. No one measured it. It was a claim made by the man making it on the surface of a thing he owned. And the letter he sent his father afterward doesn’t quite say what the notch says. He wrote that he fired five times with his new pistol.

He wrote that he learned only later who he had hit. His own report describes shooting a man’s horse out from under him at close range. The story that hardened into legend, Patton alone dropping Villa’s bodyguard chief with a single-action Colt, is not exactly the story Patton told. >> [music] >> Here’s what makes that Colt genuinely strange.

Three years before he bought a design from 1873, Patton had already won a public fight against tradition, and he won it by proving the old weapon was wrong. He’d trained under a French master at the cavalry school at Saumur, and he came home convinced the American saber was built backwards. The curved blade was made for the cut.

He wanted the point, a straight double-edged blade driven forward rather than swung. He was a second lieutenant with an opinion about ordnance, which is usually a very short story. This one wasn’t. The Army adopted the Model 1913, the Patton saber. Springfield Armory turned out more than 35,000 of them before the First World War ended.

He was made the Army’s first Master of the Sword at Fort Riley, and he wrote the manual that taught the new method to everyone else. Picture a 27-year-old lieutenant standing in front of an Ordnance Board arguing the geometry of a blade and walking out with the Army’s next saber under his arm. So, the antique on his hip in 1944 wasn’t sentiment.

Sentiment is what you fall into. This was selected because the Colt was never only a weapon. It was working equipment for a persona, and the persona had a job. Be visible from a mile off. Be recognizable to 18-year-olds who had never seen a general in their lives. Be the thing the wire services photographed when they photographed the Third Army.

Print did the rest. Newspapers described the grips as pearl, and that detail traveled the way small wrong details always do until it came back at him from a reporter’s mouth. On the 1st of August, 1944, in front of his own officers, he corrected it in the crudest language he could reach for. Only a pimp in a Louisiana whorehouse, he said, carried pearl-handled revolvers.

These were ivory. You know that line. You almost certainly don’t know it in that form. The version everyone can recite, the cheap New Orleans whorehouse, was written for the 1970 film 25 years after the man was dead. The sourced wording and the famous wording are not the same sentence. Sit with that a moment.

The most quoted remark a man ever made about his own guns reaches us in a screenwriter’s phrasing. He built a reputation out of ivory and got paid back in other people’s language. That’s the entire cost structure of a legend, and by 1944, he was standing all the way inside it. Meanwhile, 2,000 mi from any battlefield, a different argument about handguns was running in American magazines.

It was every bit as personal, and the men fighting it had just as much riding on being right. By the early ’30s, police departments were being outshot. Cars had steel bodies. Some men wore improvised armor. The standard .38 was not answering the question, and Colt’s .38 Super had become the benchmark everyone was measuring against.

Two writers were pushing on that problem from opposite corners of the country. One was Elmer Keith, the Idaho wildcatter, big bore reputation, a man with a lifelong habit of loading past what the printed tables allowed and then telling you about it in and he’s owed his full title here. Sharpe sat on the technical staff of the American Rifleman.

He wrote Complete Guide to Handloading, a book that ran through roughly 20 editions and sat on the bench of nearly every serious American handloader for a generation, and The Rifle in America, which historians still open today. He was not a hobbyist with opinions. He was the profession’s instrument panel. Understand what a byline meant in 1933.

No forums, no comment sections, no way to argue back except a letter that might run 3 months later. A monthly magazine folded next to a cup of coffee on a kitchen table in Pennsylvania was the authority, and an argument at a gun counter on a Saturday morning started with three words, he wrote that.

Both men wanted more out of the .38. Both were writing toward the same conclusion. Only one of them was going to end up with his name attached to it, and neither one of them got to decide which. If you’re still here, you already care about the part most people skip, not who carried what, but who got believed.

Stay with me because the turn in this story doesn’t happen on a battlefield. It happens on a piece of paper and it’s closer than you think. On the 8th of April, 1935, Smith & Wesson finished [music] the first of them. They called it the Registered Magnum and there had been nothing like it in the American trade.

Every revolver was built to the individual order, barrel length to the quarter inch, your choice of sights, grips, finish. Three hand-picked [music] fitters did the assembly and the actions that came off that bench are still talked about by people who have handled thousands of revolvers since. Then came the part that matters here.

Inside the frame and the yoke cut, each gun received a registration number of its own, >> [music] >> separate from its serial number, and the owner received a certificate, his name on it. The registration number, the serial number, the barrel length, the front sight, the rear sight, the distance the revolver had been sighted for, the type of hold, the ammunition it had been sighted with, signed personally by Douglas B.

Wesson, vice president of the company, grandson of the man who founded it. It shipped in a mailing tube. It was meant to be framed and hung. Registration number one went to J. Edgar Hoover. Number two went to Phil Sharp. $60 in the middle of the depression, roughly twice what a patrolman paid for his service revolver, and comparable to a high-grade shotgun.

They sold thousands anyway to police departments and federal agents and doctors and film actors. And here’s the detail that keeps nagging at this story. Of all those certificates offered, only about half the registration cards ever came back to the factory. Half the men who paid for certified proof never bothered to claim it.

Douglas Wesson himself is hard to hear directly. He reaches us mostly as a signature at the bottom of a certificate and as the voice of a company magazine, the firm talking more than the man. But, the firm did something worth watching closely. Having built its entire pitch on measurement, on paperwork, on numbers a stranger could verify, Smith & Wesson sent Wesson to Wyoming to shoot a moose.

The company’s account is specific. An antelope at better than 200 yd that needed a finishing shot, an elk at 135, a moose at 100, the last two down with one shot each. They published the results, and their argument was blunt. Game on the ground told a man more than any column of figures ever could. The response was not applause.

There was hard public criticism of taking large game with a handgun at all from people who thought the whole demonstration was a stunt dressed as data. The company answered by gathering reports from around the world, accounts of large animals taken with the new cartridge, and stacking them up like affidavits. Read that again.

The certificate people needed a body to point at, which is the first real crack in the tidy version of this story. Patton with his pocket knife and his ivory, Wesson with his signature and his sighting distance, they were never opposites. They were both hunting for something a stranger would accept as proof.

They just reached for different currency, and one of those currencies photographed better. In October of 1935, one of those revolvers went out to Hawaii, registration number 506, 3 and 1/2 in barrel, the short one, the carrying length, not the long tube Wesson had used on his moose. The buyer was a lieutenant colonel named Patton, 49 years old, sitting in a peacetime army in the middle of the Pacific while Europe rearmed, and nobody in Washington wanted to say so out loud.

He bought it within months of its release. $60 was list. Smith & Wesson discounted 20% for military and law enforcement, which brought it to 48. Collectors who’ve studied the surviving order paperwork say the discounted figure carries Douglas Wesson’s own initials, a detail repeated more confidently than the record strictly supports.

What arrived in Hawaii was plain wooden grips, no engraving, [music] nothing photogenic about it at all. Now, hold that against the man. By 1935, he was among the most deliberately styled officers in the United States Army. The helmet, the boots, the belt, the ivory, the angle he stood at, >> [music] >> every visible thing about him was a decision.

And here he is, quietly buying the most technically advanced revolver on Earth in the least decorated configuration offered at a discount on an island where almost nobody was going to see it. Why does a man who controls every detail of how he looks buy something he intends to barely be seen with? Set the two objects on a table side by side and look at what each one can actually prove.

The Colt is the famous one. What survives to support it is a notch in ivory that Patton cut himself and a story printed by other people, a story his own letter home doesn’t fully match. He wrote that he fired five times. He wrote that he found out afterward whose horse he’d hit. The legend gives him a clean single-action kill on Villa’s bodyguard chief. The paper does not.

The Smith & Wesson is the one almost nobody photographed. What survives to support it is a registration number stamped inside the frame, a shipping date, a factory record, a discount, a barrel length chosen for carrying rather than showing, and an entire certificate system built for one purpose so that a man’s claim about his gun could be checked by a stranger who had never met him.

Every documented thing we know about which revolver Patton actually trusted comes from the modern side. Everything on the famous side is a story. He owned both standards of proof. He wore one and used the other. And nowhere in his diaries, his letters, or his papers has anyone yet found him explaining why. Then in 1941, something happens to the plain gun.

According to the Patton Museum, that’s the year the Registered Magnum received its ivory. It was not simple work. The revolver wore a grip adapter, and standard Magna panels don’t seat properly over one. So, the ivory had to be thinned to clear the flanges, and the grip screw moved lower down, so the initials would center correctly on the panel.

Somebody sat at a bench with a file and ivory dust on his hands, fitting a working revolver to look like a famous one, by eye, matching a legend he had probably only seen in a newspaper. Note the year. America isn’t in the war yet, but the man knows he’s going. He doesn’t switch guns. He doesn’t put the modern one in a drawer and carry the Colt alone.

He camouflages it. That’s not vanity, or not only vanity. That’s a man solving a problem with the tools he’s got. The persona required ivory. The job required the .357. So, the .357 got ivory, and the contradiction vanished into a photograph. One gun was the argument he made to the world.

One was the argument he made to himself. After 1941, he stopped letting anyone tell them apart. And by the time a camera caught him wearing both, they matched. That was the point. Which brings us to the phrase this entire story rests on. The killing gun. You’ve heard it. Every article about Patton’s revolvers uses it, including the ones arguing exactly what this film is arguing, that the Smith & Wesson was the serious weapon, and the Colt was the show.

Go looking for it in his own hand, and it isn’t there. The phrase traces back through the published accounts to aides and relatives, people who said he called it that. It appears in Whit Collins’ 1971 piece in Guns & Ammo, and it runs through the collector literature from there, repeated often enough and confidently enough that it took on the texture of a quotation.

No letter of Patton says it. No diary entry says it. No document has surfaced with those words in his own writing. Sit with the shape of that for a second. The central claim about the gun he trusted reaches us the exact way the 1916 legend reached us. Secondhand, from people close to him, told and retold until it set hard.

He spent his life managing what got said about him, and the one line that opens a window onto his private judgment is a line we cannot prove he ever said. So, what is actually in the record? Less than you’d want, and it’s oddly specific. He owned more handguns than the two everyone knows, a .380 automatic, a Colt Detective Special, others that surface in photographs and then drop out of the story entirely.

He rarely wore both revolvers at the same time. The famous pairing is largely something assembled after the fact out of two separate guns and one belt. There is exactly one moment in the Second World War we can put a date on. Sicily, the 22nd of July, 1943. A cart stalls on a narrow bridge, two mules refusing to move, an American armored column backed up behind them while German aircraft worked the road.

Patton shot the animals and had them pushed off the bridge. The column moved. The farmer screamed at him. People told that story about him for the rest of his life and then for decades after it. The accounts describe that bridge in detail. Not one of them records which gun he drew.

The most photographed, most reported, most argued over general in the theater, and the single detail this story needs, nobody standing there thought was worth writing down. The revolver’s paperwork is better than the war’s. Meanwhile, the other man in this story was building his own trap, and he built it out of his own sentences. In 1937, Philip Sharpe published Complete Guide to Handloading.

In the chapter on the .357, he laid out his claim in plain language. The cartridge, he wrote, was born in the mind of the author, Wesson. He described the hunting trip with Colonel Wesson, where the thing took shape between them. Then, further down that same chapter, he put it in print that he had not designed the gun, and had not designed the cartridge, and that he had cooperated on both only in a minor way.

Same book, same subject, pages apart, nobody has established why. Maybe caution about liability in a decade when a technical writer could be held to account for what appeared under his name. Maybe the specific discomfort of a man who insisted in print that he was independent of the gun industry, and then found himself standing in the middle of that industry’s biggest success of the decade.

The record doesn’t say, and the men who might have known are gone. Elmer Keith, for his part, wrote in Sixguns that he had worked with Doug Wesson directly, and had sent him the first of his own bullets used in the work. He was not a man who left a claim on the table. Two writers, two books, two claims. And the one who had been closest to it wrote the sentence that took his own name back off.

That retraction cost him more than he could have known because reference books are written by people who read other reference books. Open one modern source on the .357 [music] Magnum, and you’ll find three names: Keith, Sharpe, Wesson. Open another, a standard ammunition encyclopedia, and the credit goes to Smith and Wesson, full stop. No individuals at all.

A company invented it. That’s what an unclaimed claim looks like 50 years down the line. Sharp went to the war as an ordnance officer checking other men’s numbers in other men’s laboratories. He kept working afterward, the technical staff, the articles, the additions rolling on and on. In January of 1961, a second heart attack killed him at 57.

He’s buried at Arlington, a captain among captains, and registered Magnum number two, his gun, the second one ever registered, the physical residue of that argument, sold at auction in 2019 for better than $50,000, cataloged in large part on the strength of whose gun it had been. The market remembered him.

The reference shelf couldn’t decide. He wrote the book everyone used. He lost the line everyone quotes. So, what did the other kind of proof cost the other man? Everything the ivory was built to do, it did. Soldiers who had never seen a general recognized him at 400 yards. That was the entire purpose, and it wasn’t vanity.

It was a command instrument, deliberately designed, maintained daily, and effective in exactly the way he intended. Then Sicily, August 1943. Two slaps in two hospital tents, delivered by a man who did not believe combat fatigue was a real thing. The correspondents had it within days. Eisenhower ordered apologies.

Patton was pulled out of the fighting and left standing on a shelf while other men ran the invasion he had spent his entire life preparing for. And then the army found a use for what was left of him. His name and his reputation were sent to England as part of a deception, feeding German intelligence a phantom army under a commander who wasn’t there.

His image was deployed to a place he wasn’t, doing work he wasn’t permitted to do. Think about the arithmetic in that. He had made himself so recognizable that the reputation could operate without the man inside it. And then it did. He came back, fought his war, and died in December of 1945 after a car wreck on a road in Germany in a hospital bed with his boots off.

Both men were consumed by the proof they chose. One was erased by paper. One was replaced by his own photograph. The certificate system didn’t survive either. Orders came in faster than three men could hand fit revolvers, and the backlog stacked up through the late ’30s. In September of 1939, with Europe already at war, Smith & Wesson quietly stopped building each Magnum to individual order and stopped stamping registration numbers into the yoke cut.

There was no announcement anybody remembers. A practice simply ended. Production stopped altogether in early 1941 when the factory turned to arming a country. The last certificates went out signed, tubed, mailed, and then the desk they came from was needed for something else.

Picture the inside of a revolver frame where a number used to be stamped. Blank now. Just steel and a war on. Individual proof does not scale, and 1941 needed scale far more than it needed craftsmanship. The bespoke object with a man’s name on the paperwork became a war order and then a catalog line. What came back after the war had a number instead of a name. The .

357 returned to production in 1949. In 1957, Smith & Wesson stopped calling it anything at all and gave it a model number, the 27. Then came the plain one, >> [music] >> the Model 28, the Highway Patrolman. Same power, none of the polish, priced for a department instead of a collector. >> [music] >> That’s the gun that ended up on 10,000 duty belts across America.

The certified, hand-fitted, individually registered object finished its life as standard equipment for men who had never heard of registration number 506 and never needed to. The [music] Colt went the other way entirely. Single action army production essentially stopped at the Second World War. It came back in 1956 [music] and not because anybody needed it, it came back because of television westerns.

The tool won the century, the costume won the screen. So, here’s where it all sits now. Both revolvers are behind glass. The museum at Fort Knox lists them among its holdings, though at least one published account places them at West Point instead, which is its own small joke about how carefully this story gets told. The Colt draws the crowd.

The card beside it usually repeats [music] the 1916 legend rather than the letter. The Smith & Wesson sits in the same case, correctly labeled, largely unread. Somewhere in a collector’s file, a certificate still lists a barrel length, a set of sights, a sighting distance, and a type of hold, signed by a man whose family name is stamped on the frame.

And at the Library of Congress right now, volunteers are transcribing Patton’s 1916 diary a line at a time. Strangers working for nothing trying to establish what the man actually wrote, while the only sentence anyone can quote about those ivory grips was written for a movie in 1970. Two men will argue about this in a gun shop this weekend.

Both will cite the same second-hand line. Neither will have read the letter. If you’ve got a side in that one, put it in the comments. The gun that proves who you are or the gun that comes with paperwork. Like it if it held you and subscribe if you want the next argument.