The Tucker

Another revolver resembling the .36 Dance in points of manufacture but with a complete rounded frame boss, a la Colt, is known with the Tucker marking: l. e. tucker & sons etched on top of the barrel. It has no. 72 on the cylinder. The thoughtful reader will now be way ahead.
We surmise that Crockett, upon paying off the debts of the factory in inflated currency, was left with unfinished parts on hand. These parts were of all pieces except the frames. Initially, he expected to cast the frames and admittedly did not forge them. Casting proved unsuccessful. Clark may have gone to Galveston to buy out the town of files to use in the finishing; or Crockett may have taken the desperate step of buying up files to melt down into frames.

Not many frames were made that way, you can be sure! A file, melted down, would be reduced by uncontrollable oxidation in the furnace, with the huge area of its rippled surface, to probably half or less in metal; and that would be contaminated and need blowing off of the impurities with an air draught. That Clark might have stopped to see Dance as a source of metal seems almost a certainty. Also a certainty is that Crockett was working up both sizes of pistols, for at the conclusion of the contract 1,500 of each size were due. That no one has ever recognized a Navy-size Tucker, Sherrard & Company pistol is hardly strange; but the existence of the L. E. Tucker & Sons revolvers serves to confirm the surmise: Crockett sold out the frameless sets of parts to Dance, maybe liquidating his investment and making a profit.
The parts were good parts, well machined, made with the excellence his fulltime attention to detail Warranted. The basic machines were also easily sold. The inference is that Crockett and the Tuckers did not get along too well as co-equal administrators, and the Tuckers were content to let Crockett run it and pay them wages, since they had got their money out long before the demise. Hence, with the contract annulled by the board and the debts paid off, Tucker took over what frames had been made, and fitted up the L. E. Tucker revolvers.
In East Columbia, Dance commenced making frames for the pistols. Without forging dies to stamp a lump of iron with the round frame, the Dances did the next best thing, they cut the frames from plates of rolled iron. If the Dance revolver was made from “whole cloth” and the tools advanced in each part of the work from time to time, no benefit would be gained by making the frames flat. But with a pile of parts finished ready for frames, there was some point to making the frames as quickly and as cheaply as possible. The frames were not “milled flat”; the frame raw material was that thickness to begin with. Adding 317, for the Dance number, to 72, for L. E. Tucker and his boys, we reach 389 units production, agreeing with Crockett’s candid statements of the progress of the Tucker, Sherrard & Company and Sherrard, Taylor & Company pistols.

Perhaps Clark and Sherrard, who started the whole business, may have returned to making the dragoon size guns. In spite of the Perkins name on Dragoon No. 2120, the identification with a Perkins of 1861 is not necessarily complete. The finish and execution of this pistol is superior and reflects considerable experience in their manufacture. As Mr. Rawlins, the Lancaster old-timer, said to Fuller, “When the War ended, of course the pistol factory ended, and who fell heir to it I am unaWare. I can still see in mind’s eye that old factory with its old melting furnace, filled with charcoal and scraps of all kinds of iron and pouring its liquid metal through a spout into a ladle to be carried by laborers to moulds ... As to who fell heir to this machinery, I have no knowledge, but naturally suppose it fell into the hands of Mr. Clark.”