22 revolver with his patent attorneys, and they agreed that Colt no longer had patent rights on their classic single action. Ruger broached the subject of a Colt look-alike. Bill Ruger, president and CEO of the fledgling Sturm, Ruger & Company, saw this as an opportunity to step in and provide folks with the ability to purchase a Single Action Army look-alike revolver at a great price, and it could be chambered for the economical. The machinery to make it had been dismantled and scrapped as Colt's attended to the manufacture of other guns during WWII. But strangely, in 1947, Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company announced that it would not be resuming manufacture of its classic Single Action Army revolver. The public loved those cowboy sagas, and they loved those old cowboy guns. In nearly all of these movies, and in similar portrayals on TV, the heroes wielded Colt single action revolvers.
Back in the late 1940s the United States, freshly recovered from World War Two, had a renewed and apparently insatiable love affair with the 'old West.' The movies featured 'westerns' with John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers, William Boyd, Gene Autry and many others in roles that glorified the days of the western frontier.
