It's a nice idea, but we have no actual evidence that anyone ever carried spare cylinders and reloaded that way. Karl Kasarda, at InRangeTV has done a good deal of research, and he's unable to come up with any real world examples of this happening. That doesn't definitively prove no one ever did, of course, but does indicate that it certainly wasn't commonly done. One reason for this is probably because the practice would be actually quite dangerous. A loaded cylinder, with percussion caps on the nipples is fine in the revolver because the percussion caps are protected by the pistol's recoil shield. A detached, yet loaded cylinder, on the other hand, has completely exposed percussion caps that would fire one or more chambers if the cylinder were ever dropped and landed cap side down -- which would also entail the muzzle end pointing up and in the general direction of the shooter who just dropped the cylinder. Not a good thing. Clint's gun in this movie is coverted to fire metallic cartridges, but such Remington conversions featured a seperate back plate with six individual firing pins behind each chamber, which would also be exposed, leading to the same danger.
The reality is that almost everyone in the frontier era who felt he might need a quick reload carried a second gun. And the Civil War guerrillas in Missouri and Kansas carried multiple revolvers on their belts and holstered on their saddles.
reply
share