Colt Buntline

Colt Buntline
Colt Buntline with 16-inch barrel.
Type	Revolver
Place of origin	United States
Production history
Designer	Stuart N. Lake
Manufacturer	Colt
Produced	1957–1992
Specifications
Barrel length	12 inches (30 cm)
Cartridge	.45 Colt

The Colt Buntline Special is a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. According to Lake, the dime novelist Ned Buntline commissioned the production of five Buntline Specials. Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12 inches (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.

Lake attributed the gun to Wyatt Earp, but modern researchers have not found any supporting evidence from secondary sources or in available primary documentation of the gun's existence prior to the publication of Lake's book. After its publication, various Colt revolvers with long (10-inch or 16-inch) barrels were referred to as Colt Buntlines or Buntline Specials. Colt manufactured the pistol among its second-generation revolvers produced after 1956. A number of other manufacturers, such as Uberti, Navy Arms, and Cimarron Arms, have made their own versions of this long-barreled revolver.

The revolver was first described by Stuart Lake in his highly fictionalized 1931 biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. The extremely popular book turned Wyatt Earp into a "Western superman". Lake's creative biography and later Hollywood portrayals exaggerated Wyatt's profile as a western lawman.

Lake wrote that dime novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr., writing under the pseudonym of Ned Buntline, commissioned the guns in repayment for "material for hundreds of frontier yarns." Yet Buntline, in fact, only wrote four western yarns, all about Buffalo Bill and none that mentioned Earp. According to descendants of Wyatt Earp's cousins, he owned a Colt .45-caliber and a Winchester lever-action shotgun.

There is no conclusive evidence as to the kind of pistol that Earp usually carried, though it is known that on the day of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, October 26, 1881, he carried an 8-inch-barrelled (200 mm) Smith & Wesson Model 3. Earp had received the revolver as a gift from Tombstone mayor and Tombstone Epitaph newspaper editor John Clum. Lake later admitted that he had 'put words into Wyatt's mouth because of the inarticulateness and monosyllabic way he had of talking'.