I know a guy that has a Burgess Colt with serial # of 79 in great condition or pretty good condition. So if anyone knows someone that wants to make an offer give me a shout.

Gene: There rumors that Burgess was a spy/secret service agent, working for Lincoln. He went everywhere talking photos for his friend Brady. It could be that all those patents may have been part of a "cover-story". We'll never know, but I like your math.

I see mention of the 894 Burgess patents - I first saw this number in an old article - "Andrew Burgess, Gun Inventor" by Elmer Burgess and Lynn T. Wakeling ‘ Gun Collector's Digest, Volume II.’. I have in recent years began to doubt the accuracy of this number - in that old article there is a list of 87 patent numbers, I had independently compiled a list of 86 in searching patents and my list only had one patent not on the old list and was missing two = a combined total of 88. In the article it states that he got his first patent in 1871, he died 35 years later in 1906; for him to have 894 patents he would had to have filed, on average, for slightly more than one ever two weeks for the last 35 year of his life (more than 25 a year) – that is if all he filed for were granted. A patent application requires drawings and text (and there should probably be a prototype made) – he must have been quite a busy man for the last 35 years of his life…but I can’t prove he didn’t…I would just like to see the full list of 894.

RWH, you're absolutely correct about why the .45 Colt was never chambered in a rifle. People don't realize (or often even believe) that these days because all they have ever seen is modern, solid-head brass with its extraction groove cut around the head of the case, but original .45 Colt brass had a very, very small rim. Some cases that I've seen have rims that barely as wide as my thumb nail is thick, just enough to establish headspace in a single action revolver and no more. In fact when the military fielded the .45 Colt in the Model 1909 double action revolver--a Colt New Service Revolver that was fielded as a stop-gap until the 1911 could be finished and put into mass production--they had to produce a special version of .45 Colt ammo because the commercial version did not have enough of a rim for the extractor star to reliably catch and extract the empty brass. The fact that the thin walled, bottle necked cases of the Winchester Center Fire cartridges sealed the rifle's chamber and prevented the blowback of blackpowder fowling into the action considerably better than any straight-walled case like the .45 Colt (they still do by the way!) may also have played a small part. It's too bad the Burgess Rifle didn't last longer than it did. On the other hand we may not have gotten the Lightning slide-action rifle if it had.

Nice review of a nice rifle. My understanding as to why the early repeating rifles were not chambered in 45 Colt is that the rims on the original cartridge were so narrow and thin that extraction was a very iffy matter.