The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. According to Lake, the dime novelist Ned Buntline commissioned the production of five Buntline Specials. 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. 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. After its publication, various Colt revolvers with long (10-inch or 16-inch) barrels were called Colt Buntlines or Buntline Specials. Colt manufactured the pistol among its second-generation revolvers produced after 1956. A number of other manufacturers, such as Uberti, Navy Arms, and Cimarron Arms, have made their own versions of this long-barreled revolver. Origin The revolver was first described by Stuart Lake in his highly fictionalized 1931 biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. The extremely popular book turned Wyatt Earp into a "Western superman". Lake's creative biography and later Hollywood portrayals exaggerated Wyatt's profile as a western lawman. 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. 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. But Buntline traveled west of the Mississippi only 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. Actually Earp was under indictment for murder in Dodge City at the time. 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