Frontier Arms of the Mormons BY H A R R Y W. G I B S O N
Sawed-off percussion type Colt revolver carried by Porter Rockwell, i fah State Historical Society collections.
1 REARMS BECAME DECISIVELY important for the Mormons on the Missouri frontier of the 1830s. Those disastrous years, marked by increasingly violent confrontation with the Missourians and ending in Mormon expulsion from the state, shaped the role of guns and the attitude toward them by the Mormons for the entire frontier period. T h e violence, fury, and passion of those years vividly demonstrated that guns could quickly become the ultimate resource when all other law has vanished. T h e weapons acquired and used by the Mormons in Missouri were as varied and individual as the smiths who made them and the frontiersmen who fired them. With mass production and large arms companies still in the future, personal weapons were essentially h a n d m a d e , one-of-a-kind arms. This variety makes identification Mr. Gibson is a superintendent in School District No. 3, Hamilton, Montana.
