According to Lake, Earp kept his pistol at the original 12-inch length, but the four other recipients of the Specials cut their barrels down to the standard 7 + 1⁄ 2 inches, or shorter. However, neither Tilghman nor Brown were lawmen at that time. Lake wrote that Ned Buntline commissioned the revolvers in 1876 and that he presented them to Wyatt Earp and four other well-known western lawmen - Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Charlie Bassett, and Neal Brown. The Colt Buntline was further popularized by The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp television series. This accessory gave the revolver better precision and range, Lake claimed, and allowed the user to fire it like a rifle. According to Lake, it had a removable stock that could be easily affixed through a combination of screws and lead-ins. A 16-inch (406 mm) barrel was available, as well. However, it had a 12-inch-long (305 mm) barrel, in comparison to the Colt Peacemaker's 7.5-inch (190 mm) barrel. According to Lake, the Colt Buntline was a single-action revolver chambered for. Lake conceived the idea of a revolver that would be more precise and could be easily modified to work similarly to a rifle.
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The book later inspired a number of stories, movies, and television programs about outlaws and lawmen in Dodge City and Tombstone, including the 1955–1961 television series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Lake later admitted that he had "put words into Wyatt's mouth because of the inarticulateness and monosyllabic way he had of talking". Earp had received the revolver as a gift from Tombstone mayor and newspaper editor John Clum of The Tombstone Epitaph. Corral, October 26, 1881, he carried a Smith & Wesson Model 3 with an 8-inch (200 mm) barrel. There is no conclusive evidence as to the kind of pistol that Earp usually carried though, according to some sources, on the day of the Gunfight at the O.K. 45-caliber and a Winchester lever-action shotgun. According to descendants of Wyatt Earp's cousins, he owned a Colt. As for Cody, he wasn't in North Platte, either, but was in Wyoming scouting for the US Cavalry in pursuit of Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and Sioux bands that had wiped out Custer at the Little Bighorn the previous summer. Actually Earp was under indictment for murder in Dodge City at the time.
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But Buntline only traveled west of the Mississippi once in his life, in 1869, in fact, and at the time of the supposed presentation to Earp in Dodge City, Wyatt and his brother were actually in Deadwood, Dakota Territory mining for gold. Lake claims that Ned Buntline traveled to Dodge City and made the presentations there, then went on up to North Platte, Nebraska, where he made a similar presentation to Cody. Lake wrote that dime novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson, Sr., writing under the pseudonym of Ned Buntline, commissioned the guns in repayment for "material for hundreds of frontier yarns." Although Ned Buntline wrote somewhere between twenty and twenty-four western novelettes and dime novels, the most sensational about William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who Buntline made nationally famous, none mentions Wyatt Earp. Ned Buntline, the pseudonym for dime-novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson. A number of other manufacturers, such as Uberti, Navy Arms, and Cimarron Arms, have made their own versions of this long-barreled revolver. Colt manufactured the pistol among its second-generation revolvers produced after 1956. After its publication, various Colt revolvers with long (10-inch or 16-inch) barrels were called Colt Buntlines or Buntline Specials. Lake attributed the gun to Wyatt Earp, but modern researchers have not found any supporting evidence from secondary sources or in available primary documentation of the gun's existence prior to the publication of Lake's book.
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Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns. According to Lake, the dime novelist Ned Buntline commissioned the production of five Buntline Specials.
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Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N.