The Nice and Sweetly Six Shot Horse Pistol

Spurious Antiques Review, Editor Ichabod Spurious.

Civil War Weapons: The .58 N&S Horse Dragoon Pistol

  The Nice and Sweetly Six Shot revolving horse dragoon pistol was truly a remarkable handgun in its day. In 1855 single shot handguns were still common, but with Colt developing their line of revolver based handguns, other manufacturers began to see the need for a multi shot weapon.  Early revolvers were not fully accepted by the public or even the U.S. military at the time.  Jebadiah Sweetly of the Fredericksburg firm Nice and Sweetly had come to believe that a large calibre revolver would fill a gap in the market.  To be clear, the weapon was intended to kill the horse of an opponent rather than the man himself, and as such a rifle calibre was used.

Fluster, with his horse pistol

The Model 1855 Dragoon Horse Pistol was created using rifle parts, a 12 inch cut down .58 rifled barrel was married to a very large rotating cylinder, and a percusion cap system used to ensure that all six chambers did not ignite at once.  Testing on the factory range found it to be a hard-hitting, hand bruising powerful weapon.  The addition of an attachable shoulder stock gave the weapon the ability to be steadied, and an effective range of 200 feet.  Modern tests reveal that it was muzzle velocity equivalent of the much vaunted .44 magnum, a century before that gun was created, but the Sweetly delivered delivered a bullet weight a 525-625 grain Minie rifle bullet, or 278-grain ball. 40 or even 50 grains of powder would be loaded in the pistol, double that of Sam Colt’s revolver

Sadly for Sweetly the weapon lost out against the more traditional Harpers Ferry single shot dragoon pistol produced in the same year.  It was reported that when General Winfield Scott fired the Sweetly he declared that a man would have to have the shoulders of a bull wrangler to carry it, much less to actually loose off all six shots.  More worryingly he also expressed personal doubts about the weapons safety.

Despite the use of the weapon among the Texas Rangers, Captain Quincy Palance Whitmore was said to have killed the horse of the renegade Indian Chato Bronson with a Sweetly Horse dragoon pistol, doubts about the weapon continued, and few were sold.  As Quincy himself would reminisce about the campfire and after a bottle of Indian Joe Bourbon, “That thar far’arm, got itself a piece of Hellfire and Tarnation up its barrel, yes sir!”

The first shades of Yankee blue going on

At the beginning of the Civil War as the firm of Nice and Sweetly began their serious gun running enterprise, Jebadiah sold on all of his remaining stock to gullible young officers.  Few of these weapons, or their new owners survived the war.  As the quality of Nice and Sweetly percussion caps declined reports of the sudden ignition of all of the charges in the revolver’s cylinder became more widespread.  The effect was an explosion that invariably killed the owner of the gun, and anyone stood within five feet of him.

Fluster with his weapons

 The weapon features prominently in the letters of   Lieutenant Winfield Armstrong Fluster to his Mother, Mrs Chlamydia Fluster, now held in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania Museum Archive.  The young Lieutenant purchased a Horse dragoon revolver from Nice and Sweetly on the eve of of the war, and carried it through the 1st Manassas Campaign.  He speaks eloquently of the weapon in a passage describing the action at Blackburn’s Ford:

“... and so we came through the trees to see the Bull Run, a stream more glorious for its name than its appearance.   A Regiment of men stood guarding the stream.  ‘Who are you?’ called a voice from in front.  I declared, ‘We are Massachusetts men,” at which they opened fire, with a great smokin’ Volley,  killin’ many of my brave boys.  I hauled out the Nice and Sweetly and fired into the trees.  It knocked me down to the ground with a terrific recoil, bruisin’ my dignity.
One of their men shouted, ‘they got artillery over there,’ but we were already moving back up slope. ..”

Left to right: Bobby Beauregard, Jubal Krebbs, Lt. Fluster, and Capt Sherman Parker

This article was published in the Spurious Antiques Review, Editor Ichabod Spurious.
Dodgy Dave Publications, Massachusetts.