I have been side-tracked lately from knife collecting by a desire to fulfill a childhood fantasy. As a child I played a lot of cowboy and indian and US cavalry. Most kids my age had cap-guns and they were mostly revolvers like the old west six-shooters. My pistol of choice was a life size Hubley copy of a Colt revolver. It was made of metal and very realistic. Back then toys were really expensive but well made. They lasted a long time. Maybe it's nostalgia or advancing senility but I wanted to have a modern handgun representative of the Old West. I looked at a bunch of foreign reproductions and decided they did not quite fulfill what I was looking for. So, to make a short story shorter, I bought an American made Ruger BlackHawk in .357 Magnum caliber. We have been going through some terribly cold weather so I have not been out to shoot it yet but here is a photo of it with a modern custom Bowie by a talented maker named Matt Lamey.
Sure enough not long after buying the Ruger a friend called and said he had a line on a real Colt "Peacemaker" in 45 Colt. He picked it up for me and called to say he had good news and bad news. He said It was a mint condition pistol in .45 Colt, but it was not a Colt. It was a copy by a company named AWA, American Western Arms. I did some research on the internet and discovered that AWA was sued by Colt for making too close a copy and they went out of business making the "Peace Keeper" (note the name difference). The price was very good (about 1/2 market value) and the pistol is a beauty in the famed Colt .45 cartridge so I bought it too. I can see why Colt sued AWA. The previous owner actually thought it was a genuine Colt.
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