Gun Barons

Gun Barons is a narrative history by John Bainbridge, Jr. about six charismatic and idiosyncratic men whose work on repeating firearms changed the course of American history. Names such as Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington are famous, but few people know what these men did during a pivotal stretch of the nation's past, from the westward expansion of the 1840s through the Civil War and into the start of the Gilded Age.

Driven by personal ambition and fed by war and bloodshed, they helped push the young United States into the front rank of industrial powers. Their weapons helped preserve a divided nation, yet they also planted seeds of a new division that would surface about a century later.

Their inventions carried a strand of American individualism, part myth and part reality, that still underpins modern gun culture. They marketed firearms to ordinary citizens as well as soldiers and became extraordinarily rich. The book shows how their inventiveness reflected the outlook of a whole people, not only the men who made fortunes from guns, and argues that, whether admired or condemned, they helped shape the American character.