Cowboys and Samurai: Weapons and Armor of the Time

 Everyone in the Wild West is strapped, and a lot of people who play RPGs tend to flip over to the armory after a little while. So let's talk about it.

This image is apparently from a film called SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO. Every instance I could find capitalized the whole name.

In our last post about this setting I suggested that folks interested in running games or telling stories would best be served by one of two methods:
- either deciding how the US Civil War would go in your version of this alternate timeline (or waiting for me to decide the larger details myself down the line here) and beginning more or less immediately post-War...
- or going with the 1840s because when it comes to classic Western tropes and plot opportunities it's one of the best possible times.

I also alluded to 1840s weapons and armor being in a really excellent goldilocks zone where most kinds of gear work for various cool character concepts. The 1840s is probably the last gasp of black powder being the big fish in the pond of weapons technology; black powder guns aren't the hyper-efficient killing machines of the modern era.

You get one shot before a lengthy reload, and that's including the use of self-contained paper cartridges with percussive caps in breech-loading guns. Loose powder cap-and-ball revolvers had reloads that took minutes, and revolvers using paper cartridges (invented 1808 but not in wide use until the 1830-40s) still required a good minute or so to recharge; this is not the age of the Single Action Army quite yet. The infamous Sharps rifle (invented in 1848 and incredibly rare by a standard game of C&S) only improved the rate of fire from 2-3 rounds per minute in ideal conditions to 5-6; that is a massive relative boost, but it's still limiting. One of the gun's widely-considered actual revolutions is that you could conveniently fire, reload, and fire again all while prone; not so easy with muzzle-loaders. Most breech-loaders created early enough to be in mass distribution by the time of a standard C&S game aren't quite that efficient, either--think less Sharps and more Ferguson--and all black powder weapons of this time still have the issue that if you use them in a long protracted battle, barrel fouling decreases reload speed and accuracy while increasing the chance of dramatic misfire.

What's more, that shot is not guaranteed to be accurate. Smoothbore muskets are cited accurate at up to 300 feet/100 yards/91 meters (rifled muskets effectively double that) but we're talking ideal test conditions in excellent weather, a relaxed shooter with no external stressors, and good luck with the unfortunate ballistic qualities of the bullets of the time; these were not the extremely aerodynamic bullets we have access to today. By 1849 you're much more likely to find someone with a rifle in hand than a smoothbore, but it's still not always guaranteed. Handguns, at this time either one-shot muzzle-loaders, slow-loading cap-and-ball revolvers, or slightly-less-slow-loading cap-and-cartridge, have a potential accuracy up to modern pistol distance (max approx. 50 yards) if the bullet has a snug barrel fit and the shooter is personally capable of a high-skill shot.

The action-Western trope of walking through a gunfight with near-perfect accuracy definitely kicks ass because it emphasizes the skill required to survive something so awful with so few resources and chances, but it's not exactly realistic; aiming and killing is hard when you're under the extreme stress of other people aiming to kill you in turn. The implied skill of a hero who rarely misses is greater so also, in part, because the guns just aren't very good compared to what we're used to nowadays.

A painting of Pontiac's War (1763-65), a fascinating piece of history. Skirmish-level combat with black powder weapons often involved uncomfortably close quarters.

Hell, when you really get down to it old-school black powder is not even guaranteed to be all that effective for killing next to a modern gun. Unfortunately, to illustrate what I mean here, I do have to blab a bunch of dry numbers. Apologies.

There's this meme about how muskets were fifty-cal weapons, and it works as a joke because we just sort of intrinsically understand that it doesn't tell the whole story. When you want to talk about how much force a bullet is actually imparting on a target, the most important number in the calculation for joules applied is muzzle velocity. Bullet size obviously matters, but in the main it's not the vital aspect for today's discussion. We're used to smokeless powder guns which can punch at fairly high speeds (an AK has a muzzle velocity of 700 meters/2300 feet per second, an M4 shoots at 960 meters/3150 feet per second), but the most popular rifle likely to be found in the 1840s, colloquially known as the "long rifle," or "Kentucky rifle," had a muzzle velocity of ~480 meters/~1600 feet per second, and that's at the high end of its performance assuming a good, snug bullet fit and the target is close; not at range where energy has bled off because the bullets of the time had trash aerodynamics. The military equivalent Springfield 1855 (and 1861) had extremely similar stats until they were converted to use 45-70 cartridges. The most common smoothbore weapon of the late 1700s/early 1800s, the "Brown Bess musket," had nearly identical muzzle velocity assuming a proper tight-fit bullet, but this was harder to achieve because it had no rifling.

For reference, these longarms are only hitting about four times harder than a modern hunting compound bow (many heavy-poundage models are rated near 350 feet per second) in absolutely perfect machined circumstances. Obviously still deadly, but there's a large asterisk here. You have more cover available that won't get utterly blown through. Body armor, as we'll explore below, is viable. Even just putting a lot of brush and other gunk between you and a shooter to slow a shot down. There are more ways to mitigate being shot at by one of these weapons.

If we bring up the infamous revolver, things slow down more. For reference I'll use the Colt Model 1861 Navy, probably my personal favorite cap-and-ball handgun: a muzzle velocity on the high end of ~300 meters/1000 feet per second; only three-ish times more powerful than our modern hunting bow, but not nearly as accurate at range and it loses a lot of that power outside of close gunfights.

(Note: loose black powder used in muzzle-loaded weapons of the era are the standard I'm using when discussing how deadly the propellant was. There were closed-cartridge black powder rounds like the 45-70, guaranteed to fit snug in its gun and effectively revolutionize punching power in firearms. But the 45-70, to stick with our example, wouldn't come into production until 1873, outside the range of when a typical C&S game is expected to take place)

I'm saying a lot of words and typing a lot of numbers, but my point is relatively simple: these aren't modern rifles with supersonic rounds and semi- or fully-automatic actions. They're so much simpler and not nearly as relatively effective, and the space left is room for the whole gamut of basically every personal weapon system we've come up with since one caveman hit another.

A reenactor Cherokee brave. In any discussion of black powder combatants using these and other weapons effectively, Native American warriors will inevitably share focus; they were incredibly good at integrating and combining various weapon systems on a small scale.

We have this ongoing meme in modern America that it was the gun that won the West, and like...I guess. Sure. Kind of. Guns were the fancy new tech when the Colonial period really began, and damn near every indigenous warrior really wanted one once exposed to them (all across the world, in fact. The New Zealand Musket Wars are a fascinating part of history I suggest you look into). Colonists traveling West did so with smoothbore muskets and long rifles on their shoulders, and the revolver is iconic on a similar level to the Japanese katana (and, historically, about as ineffective and overrated relative to its pop-culture legend). After a while, you had American soldiers, cowboys, filibusters, and rogue capitalist-warlord goons using lever-repeaters and breech-loading 45-70 rifles and cartridge-fed revolvers while locals were still fighting with old traded smoothbore muskets and Kentucky rifles acquired a couple decades prior; and some were still using bows. What's more, by then there were so few Natives able to resist that, looking back, it certainly seems the gun was the invincible focal point to the current status quo of colonial dominance on the North American continent.

What actually happened makes more sense if you're familiar with how aggressive colonialism occurred all around the world. We think of the gun as having won the West because it was the big flashy thing we used, but what actually won the West was a long history of treachery, back-stabbing, playing locals off each other, material superiority re: steel and iron-use, and logistical superiority because colonial Americans were fighting focused campaigns of genocide against many peoples who didn't really realize that such intense and brutal conflict was being pointed in their direction until it was too late to respond appropriately. When you get right down to it, the guns only helped.

Getting back on track, guns still have a relative dominance on common use at the time but there is space for other kit. Every ronin worth his salt has a revolver or a rifle or--later down the timeline--a repeater on his horse's saddle, but sometimes his sword still sees work. In fact it's a style-oriented point of the setting that, no matter how much the Japanese love guns as much as Americans historically, many settler-Japanese samurai and ronin use blades for duels of honor often enough that other colonials of the American continent have picked the trend back up themselves.

If a warrior wishes to operate in silence and cut away some horses or kill stealthily in a raid, an axe and knife are still very effective (there's a TV and videogame trope about bows killing people silently. They do not. People, in fact, scream when you stab them but can't cover their mouth. I have no idea where this idea of instant-kill bows came from and it bugs the hell out of me), and if you want to hunt while saving valuable powder and shot--or strike without giving away your position in a cloud of smoke--then a bow is just as good for killing at range as it has been for the past several thousand years.

A painting of the New Zealand "Musket Wars," showing Maori warriors with an assortment of muskets, taiaha combination war club-spears, close-quarters jade and wood clubs and steel blades, and javelins. Some weapons age like the finest of wine.

Want to play a practical ninja from the Cascade mountains who uses whatever strange tool gets the job done, from shuriken to bows to shotguns? A native brave with an axe, knife, and old heirloom musket? A cowpoke with a revolver, an old cheap machete, and a dream?  A reactionary traditionalist samurai who sticks to his bow, spear, and sword out of respect for the old ways? A retired cavalry officer wandering around challenging ronin to duels with his saber and pistol? Any of these archetypes and many more (including combinations!) fit right in with a setting that runs on black powder; C&S takes place in the tail end of the ultimate period for quirky adventurers and weapon anachronism.

At the same time this anachronism lets us get kind of whacky with armor, something anyone who loves Westerns knows will occasionally happen. It's impossible to talk about Westerns and armor without bringing up the infamous Fistful of Dollars finale, and some Western games like Red Dead Redemption 2 (Online, in this case) have used bullet-proof plate armor for a fun set piece. The way these particular pieces of media use them is not all that realistic, but they're based on some degree of historical precedent, which is just as important!

In our own timeline, starting from about 1847 we start seeing instances of bullet-proof armor being sold and developed in isolated attempts at bringing body protection back into circulation; the results are actually incredibly interesting. The Koreans were the first to really figure something out, with a "soft," ballistic vest known as "myeonje baegab," constructed of layers of cotton. It was even used in actual conflict against the United States in 1871 when we attacked Ganghwa Island. Results varied, and the general consensus of soft ballistic armor was that it was impractical to mass produce and didn't protect efficiently enough to wow leaders of state, but it was still capable of sometimes stopping black powder rounds fired from range or at off angles.

The concept would be improved upon by independent American and European physicians and inventors from the 1880s on until in the very early 1900s we had more than one example of working practical soft armors made of layered cotton and silk that were effective against black powder weapons; Alfonso XIII of Spain's life was saved by one such vest when he was shot by an attacker in 1901. The only limiting factor to this protection was its cost, as each individual vest cost about US$800 in 1914; equivalent to a little over US$50,000 in 2022. Despite this, by 1900 there were multiple recorded instances of American gangsters running around with $800 silk vests capable of being worn under daily garb.

We also have instances of criminals creating what we call "rigid," body armor, typically out of steel or iron from other products. For example, Australian criminal Ned Kelly made a rigid cuirass, fauld, helmet, and pauldrons out of plough blades. Four of his men fought in this panoply in defense of a besieged hotel (at the time he had a bounty worth two million in modern cash), and they were actually effective for a time, though extremely cumbersome and difficult to move in. In another instance that feels downright Napoleonic, the American gunfighter Jim Miller wore a steel breastplate to battle multiple times, and it saved his life on no fewer than two occasions where it proved to be rather effective against shotguns and handguns; in one of these instances it absorbed the fire of a sheriff fully unloading a revolver in Miller's direction.

Ned Kelly's improvised panoply. Note certain sharp dents that indicate incoming bullets halted. Also note how incredibly uncomfortable it must have been to wear, as the whole thing weighed about 96lbs (44kg) and the weight wasn't well-distributed.

All of this is really frankly incredible news if you want to offer armor options to your players in-game (probably as some kind of very high-end reward or temporary set piece boost, considering the cost), as there is a great deal of precedent setting it up. Especially with the settler-Japanese present: silk is one of their defining "crops," since its introduction from China early in Japanese history. It's an aspect of the setting that Nambokudo and Kyokuhokudo have access to silk farms, and there would be extreme interest from individual daimyo and the overall daimyo councils in keeping this resource limited to themselves as an exclusive trade item.

Note: if I were to finally write out an adventurer's module, it would be built around the players' involvement either in or against an East-Coast American conspiracy to steal a supply of silk worms for themselves to set up a local supply. The mere rumor of a loose or rogue supply of silk worms "in the wild," as it were would attract every mover and shaker on the continent. This may seem odd to readers, but there's certainly precedent: silk was one of the trade staples out of China and for a fair amount of relatively recent Japanese history (at time of setting, at least) control of the silk trade was absolutely crucial to the point of occasional Shogunate edicts. It doesn't naturally occur in Northern America, and now in this history settler-Japanese presence makes silk an extremely crucial resource; one they control.

With access to silk and cotton on the same continent in a black powder era, it's extremely likely that we'd see some of these "eight-hundred dollar vests," in use. It's also likely that the rich Western tradition of rigid body armor, whether intentionally-made or improvised, would continue. The presence of some kind of protection outside of "don't get shot," would further narrow the gap that black powder weapons dominate, allowing just a little bit more wiggle room for this age of anachronism. In our own history samurai not only loved guns but also frequently strove to upgrade their body armor, so as to be effective against Portuguese black-powder weapons. This gives us some hint at potential setting vibes.

I have a suspicion I've covered most of the fun conversation points regarding weapons and armor in Cowboys & Samurai's preferred starting period, but if there's anything I've missed or you're curious about, please ask! I love the idea of interacting with anyone who reads my work, such as it is.