Really, do you want stereotypes? Because this is how you get stereotypes.
Hola mis amigos, bienvenidos a armas olvidadas ... armas olivi ...
Thanks for tuning in to Forgotten Weapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum,
and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at a Colt Model of 1902 Military pistol
that's in their upcoming April of 2020 Premiere Auction.
And this is in it's original configuration, complete with
fancy mother of pearl grips, and a marking on the
top of the slide that you can't see from there.
This is a pistol that was actually special ordered,
one of a contract of 800 guns of just this configuration,
for the Ministry of Army and Navy in Vera Cruz, in Mexico.
This is a .38 calibre Colt, so if you are not familiar with the early Colt automatic pistols,
I have a video or two on the subject that I'll link at the end of this.
But basically the Colt Models of 1900 and 1902 were in ... the .38 ACP cartridge.
The .45 ACP hadn't been invented yet.
Colt would continue to sell 1902 .38 calibre (as they called it, "38 rimless smokeless"),
pistols until actually well after World War One.
These pistols remained for sale, and for a little while remained in production, even after the introduction of the 1911 pattern in .45.
Because there were people who preferred the .38. And in Mexico in particular it was a pretty popular pistol.
In fact a ... total of like 2,400 of these pistols were sold to dealers in Mexico,
which accounts for like 13% of their total production, and that's really quite a lot.
So, let's take a look at this and I'll show you the engraving up here,
as well as a closer up view of these fancy mother of pearl grips.
So this pistol is one of an order for 800 distributed into three separate shipments, all in this configuration.
And they were shipped to a Mexican dealer by the name of A. Combaluzier, ... something like that.
The first shipment was 1908, this particular gun came out of the second shipment,
which went into the mail on May 12th 1910. And the last shipment was in July of 1911.
100 guns shipped with this particular one.
These were sent to, well Combaluzier was in Mexico City
and these pistols were ordered through his company on behalf of the Comandante Militar de Vera Cruz
for the Ministra de Guerra y Marines, so the Army and Navy Ministry, as run by the Commandant in Vera Cruz.
And they specifically called for these mother of pearl grips that,
well, they wouldn't be my first choice, let me put it that way.
These are on a Colt Model of 1902 Military pistol, as ... was this whole contract.
These are distinguishable by having a square bottom of the grip here and this lanyard loop.
The serial number on here is 32,815 which would put this at 1910 production.
It has the last version of the slide legend, the most simplified one
where it just refers to "Colt Pt F Mfg Co", instead of Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company.
The calibre is "38 rimless smokeless", or .38 ACP.
Definitely not to be mistaken for .38 Super which came later and was definitely
more powerful, and not safe to use in a pistol like this.
And then all the guns in this 800 piece contract have a Mexican Eagle crest,
so that's ... the Mexican Eagle with a snake in it's talons over a prickly pear cactus.
And that's engraved into the top of the slide, and it looks like that was done after the slide was blued.
And someone didn't quite put 100% effort into it because it's slightly off centre, it's kind of pulled off to the right.
According to the main reference book covering this contract,
which is a book called "Colt's .38 Automatic Pistols" by Douglas Sheldon,
the author says he inspected half a dozen of these, and every single one of them
(including this one by serial number, by the way),
the crest was off centre like this. So someone set up the jig to do this engraving
at the Colt factory and just didn't really care 100%. And the result is off-centre crests.
These were not the only Colt 1902 Militaries shipped to the Mexican government.
There was this order specifically with these grips and that engraving,
but there were also a bunch of totally stock standard 1902 Militaries that were ordered,
again by the Military Commissioner of Vera Cruz.
And these guns would be used by the military, and they would also show up in the Mexican Revolution.
So there's ... just a cool photo that I came across on Ed Buffalo's website
showing a pair of miners, well, a miner and his daughter, and his daughter is carrying
one of these guys, not one with the fancy grips, but a standard 1902 Military
in a cool period style holster. You can check that out
right there, I'm zooming in on the holster. You can see it clearly is a Colt 1902 Military there.
So it's neat to have that historical connection, you can see where these pistols actually ended up in some cases.
So I think there are two main takeaways from this pistol, and the first one is
there are so many cool little stories behind special orders and sub-variants and different models of firearms.
The story behind this, like the idea that the Military Commandant of Vera Cruz was special ordering guns in this configuration,
I think that's super-cool. And it's one of the most interesting elements of firearms history and study to me.
The other takeaway is that you can't necessarily judge a gun's authenticity just based on stereotypes.
You would never expect mother of pearl grips like that to have been part of a mass-production
legitimate military order, and yet they actually were.
So, 99% of the time you can look at a pistol like this and go, "Well, those grips are wrong."
But there is that 1% of the time when you'd be wrong and those grips would be right.
If you want to add this to your own collection, because it's a really scarce example of a pretty small contract,
it is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island, so you can check it out in their catalogue.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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