As the story goes, William Bonney and Tom Horn met in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Tom was just 15, Billy not much older — though he had five notches on the butt of his Colt. Tom had teethed on pistols in Missouri and didn’t like Billy. A shooting match ensued. Both teenagers were said to have drilled aces out of playing cards, then split them edgeways. Airborne bottles didn’t stand a chance. Legend has it Billy then took Tom around to the Baca Corral, where they’d have some privacy, and lined up 12 matches on a rail. “You go first,” he said. “Light a match. I’ll go next. Like that.”
Perceptive beyond his years, Tom removed two matches. “We’ll shoot five,” he said. “When I’m done, we’ll each have a bullet left.”
The reported sequel is credible as the preamble. From 30 feet, Tom lit two matches. Billy ignited one, clipped two. More certain: each man went on to live by his guns, and to die at the hands of the law.
Arms-length accuracy was the rule for 19th-century revolvers, even among people who used them a lot. On October 26, 1881, the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday met the Clanton gang at Tombstone’s OK Corral. Gunplay was a foregone conclusion, so all combatants should have brought their best game. But after some 30 shots, fired at ranges that averaged six feet, only three men of the eight lay dead!
Despite such abysmal accuracy, short-range shootouts carried grave risk. Medical care couldn’t always stop peritonitis, or infection from dirt adhering to greased bullets. Derringers (after Philadelphia’s Henry Deringer, Jr., whose small percussion pistols evolved under Colt and other makers into cartridge arms) could cause wounds all out of proportion to their power. President Lincoln’s assassination showed that desperate men relied not on bullet energy, nor on accuracy. They simply got close to kill.
Rather than refine their sights to ensure center hits, gunslingers of that era speeded up the actions of their revolvers to put more bullets aloft. English-born Texan Ben Thompson filed off his front sight to quicken his draw. The modification proved useless when he was ambushed.
John “King” Fisher, another pistolero, was also bushwhacked. Self-proclaimed “shootist” Clay Allison got no help from his revolver when a wagon rolled over his neck.
Handguns are still hard to shoot accurately, and distance drains precision. But beyond ranges at which pointing is more practical than aiming, the type of sight on a pistol affects its handling, speed onto the target and accuracy. Experience has a lot to do with preference. And the more you use any sight, the more effective it becomes for you. Of course, application matters.