The Guns Didn't Stop for Sam Colt

January 10th, 1862. In a grand home in Hartford, Connecticut, one of America's richest men took his final breath. His name? Samuel Colt. From a poor child, he went to being worth over $15 million at the time of his death (that was about $413 million today), but death doesn't care about wealth.

Samuel Colt died young -just 47 years old - from something as mundane as gout. Hardly the dramatic end you expect from a man who literally reshaped the American frontier. What's even more surprising is that at the Colt factory, his pride and joy state-of-the-art marvel of the industrial revolution, for them on January 10th, it was just another day.

The records show business as usual. That morning workers cranked out 100 Colt Navy revolvers bound for Cincinnati; that afternoon another 50 to New York. No note in the margins, no tribute no mention of the man who made it all possible.

Colt was more than a businessman. He was a showman, an inventor, a self-made success who rose from indentured childhood labor to international fame. His name was known across the globe in an age when news traveled by horseback and steamship, and yet his greatest legacy wouldn't come until after he was gone.

A full decade later, the legendary Single Action Army revolver rolled out under his name. "The gun that won the American West" is something that Colt never even lived to see.

That's the power of a legacy. It outlives obituaries; it outlives ledgers. Over 160 years later, we're still talking about Samuel Colt, the man who made guns that made history. That's not too bad for a man who didn't even get a footnote in his own factory on the day he died.

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