Curious Relics #138: Two Years Too Late – Remington Model 1875 Part I
Welcome, if you are a newcomer to this fun bi-weekly segment of AllOutdoor.com! The last time around, we spent four parts on the Colt 1862 Police using an Uberti replica as our hands-on gun. If you missed any of it, you can find Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV at their respective links. Today we are kicking off a brand new four-part run on a revolver that always struck me as the fella who showed up to the dance about twenty minutes after everybody else had already paired off. The Remington Model 1875.
Once again we have an Uberti standing in for an original, this time the nickel-plated “Frank” out of their Outlaws and Lawmen line, and there is a good reason it is that specific gun and not one of the plain ones. I will get to it. One thing up front, though. Usually with a big-name American gun I have to spend half the article digging the facts out from under a century of tall tales. This time it is the opposite problem. There is no factory ledger for the 1875, no archive letter service, and from what I have read, there is no definitive book on it either. So when I hedge a number in this series, that is why. Let’s dive right in!
Curious Relics Coverage on AllOutdoor:
- Curious Relics #134: Last Gun Sam Colt Made – Colt 1862 Police Part I
- Curious Relics #135: Two Guns, One Name – The Colt 1862 Police Part II
- Curious Relics #136: By the Numbers – The Colt 1862 Police Part III
- Curious Relics #137: Little Colt Speaks – Colt 1862 Police Part IV
Welcome to our recurring series of “Curious Relics.” Here, we want to share all of our experiences, knowledge, misadventures, and passion for older firearms that one might categorize as a Curio & Relic – any firearm that is at least 50 years old according to the ATF. Hopefully along the way you can garner a greater appreciation for older firearms like we do, and simultaneously you can teach us things as well through sharing your own expertise and thoughts in the Comments. Understanding the firearms of old, their importance, and their development which lead to many of the arms we now cherish today is incredibly fascinating and we hope you enjoy what we have to share, too!
Waiting on Rollin White’s Patent
To understand why the Remington 1875 exists at all, you have to remember that for most of the 1860s nobody in America could legally build a cartridge revolver except Smith & Wesson. Rollin White’s bored-through cylinder patent was locked up tight, and S&W had the exclusive rights to it. Colt sat on their hands. Remington sat on their hands. Everybody sat on their hands and kept building cap and ball guns while the future waited on a piece of paper to expire.
It expired in 1869, and the floodgates opened. Conversions started showing up everywhere, which we have covered before with the Richards-Mason guns. Then in 1872 Colt’s new Model P won the U.S. Government service revolver trials, and the following year the Ordnance Department put in an order for 8,000 of them in .45 Colt for the cavalry. That gun is the Single Action Army, and I do not have to tell you how that turned out for Colt.
“‘RAC’ Colt U.S. Contract Model 1873 Single Action Army Revolver.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/84/3278/rac-colt-us-contract-model-1873-single-action-army-revolver. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
Remington saw the same thing everybody else saw. Big contracts, foreign and domestic, sitting there for whoever had a large-frame centerfire revolver to sell. So they scrambled to build one.
History Abridged: The Remington Model 1875
Remington was not new to revolvers. Their first was the Beals Pocket back in 1857, and over the following decade they refined the design through a whole string of .36 and .44 caliber percussion guns. The high point was the New Model Army launched in 1863, which became the second most widely issued Union revolver of the Civil War with something like 120,000 built by 1875. Most of us know it better as the 1858 Remington. Solid frame, full top strap, cylinder that drops right out when you pull the base pin. It was a tank, and it was the obvious skeleton to build the new gun on.
“Remington-Beals 1st Model Pocket Percussion Revolver.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/5035/199/remingtonbeals-1st-model-pocket-percussion-revolver. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
The Model 1875 kept all of that. Solid frame, top strap, easy access lock work, removable cylinder. It also kept something it did not need. On the percussion gun, that space under the barrel held the loading lever. On the cartridge gun there is no loading lever, but Remington filled the space anyway with a steel web running from the front of the cylinder about two thirds of the way up the barrel. Collectors call it the sail and it is the single most recognizable thing about the gun. Whether it actually does anything is up for debate. Most sources call it purely cosmetic. At least one argues it improves the balance and serves as a guide when you holster the thing. I am skeptical of the balance claim since it is hanging extra steel out front, but I will hold off on the holster guide idea until I have run this gun in and out of leather a few dozen times.
“U.S. Inspected Remington New Model Army Percussion Revolver.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/4097/3229/us-inspected-remington-new-model-army-percussion-revolver. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
The 1875 had an identity crisis right out of the gate. Remington first introduced it as “the 1874 Model.” Over the next few years, their own catalogs called it the Remington No. 3 Revolver Model 1875, the Remington Improved Army or Frontier Revolver, and the Remington New Model Army Revolver.
Take your pick. The chambering wandered too. It was originally planned around a .46 rimfire before Remington changed course and built it for a proprietary centerfire round of their own design, the .44 Remington Centerfire. That cartridge was chambered in exactly one firearm ever made, and you are looking at it.
“Remington Model 1875 Single Action Army Revolver.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/4095/87/remington-model-1875-single-action-army-revolver. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
Where the 1875 legitimately beat the Colt was construction. The Colt frame is three separate pieces, the frame, the backstrap, and the front strap with trigger guard, and it takes six screws to hold the whole business together. Seven if you run two-piece grips. Remington forged the frame and the grip frame as one solid chunk with three screws total, one for the grips and two for the trigger guard. Fewer screws to back out on you at the worst possible moment.
Remington leaned on that hard in their advertising, and they were not wrong to. The 1876 International Exhibition report also singled out the light base pin that pulls straight out once you release its catch, the ejector housing being pinned and screwed to the gun rather than just hung on the barrel, and the ejector spring coiling around the base pin instead of around the ejector rod. It even noted that some folks thought the Remington was better looking than the Colt.
None of that mattered. Colt had a two year head start, the Army contract, and the name. The Remington looked enough like a Peacemaker at a glance that buyers did not see anything new in it, and the .44 Remington cartridge went absolutely nowhere.
Remington’s big swing was Egypt. The Khedivate government ordered 10,000 revolvers and Remington got loud about it, running an 1876 advertisement that claimed outright superiority over every other pistol on the market on the strength of having already sold ten thousand for immediate delivery. Then it came apart. Egypt was already several hundred thousand dollars behind on payments for an earlier order of Rolling Block rifles, so Remington cancelled the revolver contract. How many actually reached Egypt is not settled. The Remington Historical Society says few if any. Other sources say a handful. Muddying it further, Egyptian contract guns with a JWR cartouche on the grip are real and turn up at auction now and then, so something shipped. The nickname stuck either way and you will still hear the Model 1875 called the Egyptian Model today.
The rest of the official orders were small potatoes. Around 1,000 went to the Mexican government in .45 Colt, marked with a Mexican liberty cap and sunburst and stamped either “RM” or “RdeM” depending on which source you are reading. Norm Flayderman puts roughly 1,300 guns total with U.S. government agencies, of which 639 nickel-plated revolvers were bought by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1883 for tribal police on the western reservations. One of those officers was Marcellus Red Tomahawk, the man who shot Sitting Bull in December 1890. Everything else Remington moved was straight commercial sales.
They tried to win on price and could not manage that either. In the 1878 catalog a blued 1875 ran $18.00 and nickel ran $18.75, which put it right on top of the Colt at somewhere between $17.00 and $18.00. Nickel outsold blue anyway despite costing more. By 1888, under new ownership, the price had been cut to $12.50 blued and $13.50 nickel while the Colt held steady around $17.00. Even with that gap, Colt outproduced Remington roughly four to one over the same stretch of years.
The company did not survive the decade. E. Remington & Sons went into receivership in 1886 and sat there for two years. In 1888 Marcellus Hartley of Schuyler, Hartley & Graham, who also owned Union Metallic Cartridge, teamed up with Winchester Repeating Arms to buy the whole outfit and reorganize it as Remington Arms Company. Model 1875 production wound down somewhere in there. American Rifleman puts the end at 1887 with the bankruptcy. Most other sources say 1889, which probably accounts for leftover parts getting assembled and sold off. Both are defensible and I am not going to pretend I know which one is right.
Total production is more of the same. Sources vary but roughly 25,000 to 30,000 is the figure you will see most often. The full spread of published estimates runs from 25,000 up to 40,000, with most authors camping on the low end. Nobody actually knows, and I will explain exactly why in Part III when we get into dating these things, because it is one of the more maddening situations I have run into in this series.
The Frank James Connection
Now, about the man whose name is on the gun sitting on my desk. Frank James surrendered to Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden in Jefferson City on October 5, 1882, six months after his brother was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford. He handed over his cartridge belt, his Slim Jim holster, and the revolver in it, and he said he was handing over something no living man but himself had been permitted to touch since 1861. Great line… Also impossible, since the gun in that holster was a Remington Model 1875 and it did not exist until Frank was in his thirties.
“The Remington 1875 Revolver: Celebrating 150 Years.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/riac-blog/remington-1875-for-sale. Accessed 3 Aug. 2026.
With those two, the legend usually gets there well ahead of the paperwork. The other things he said that day hold up better. Asked why he carried a Remington instead of one of the Colts everybody else was running, he called it the hardest and surest shooting pistol made. Asked why he paired it with a Winchester 1873, he said the cartridges of one filled the chambers of the other, and that a man in a close hot fight with a dozen people shooting at him needs all of his ammunition to be the same kind. That answer only works in one caliber, because the original Winchester 1873 was never chambered in .45 Colt. His Remington was a .44-40. The Autry Museum in Los Angeles has the surrendered revolver today, and their record backs it up, listing it as .44-40 with walnut grips and a lanyard swivel on the butt.
Which brings me around to the Uberti Frank. Uberti built it as a tribute to the man and to the gun sitting in that museum case, and it wears full nickel plating, pale ivory-look grips, and the lanyard loop to sell the idea. Anybody who has seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is going to recognize that silhouette from somewhere else too. Sam Shepard’s Frank James carries a nickel Remington 1875 through his scenes early in the movie, and there are a couple of holstered closeups where you get a long look at it. Nickel, pale grips, lanyard loop. Uberti’s own copy only mentions the historical gun, so I am not going to claim the movie was the inspiration, but I do not think you have to squint very hard here. The one place all three part ways is the chambering. The Uberti is a .45 Colt because that is what they built the Outlaw in, and Frank’s was not. I’d have to assume that’s to make this a more sellable product, so no faulting anyone there.
End of Part I: The Remington Model 1875
I always hate to cut these off, folks, but that is a good stopping point. A well built revolver that did almost everything right and still got run flat by a competitor with better timing and a better address book. I have a real soft spot for guns like this one. Next time we are getting into the variations, and I will tell you up front that the list is shorter than you would expect out of a gun that stayed in production for over a decade. Three chamberings, two barrel lengths, a couple of finishes, some running changes to the small parts, the contract guns that went to Egypt and Mexico and the reservations, and whatever Remington was willing to engrave or bolt on for extra money. We will put the 1888 and the 1890 to bed while we are there too. Hope to see you then.
This installment is part of the Curious Relics series – an ongoing archive of historical firearms documentation. Browse the full series here.
In closing, I hope our Curious Relics segment informed as well as entertained. This all was written in hopes of continued firearm appreciation and preservation. We did not just realize how guns were supposed to look and function. It was a long and tedious process that has shaped the world we live in. If you have a question or you are sitting on information that could sharpen up an article like this one, you can find me through my Linktree. Until next time!
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