More Pistols Questions

While there weren't too many companies manufacturing cap and ball pistols post 1873 there were still quite a few in use by people that either couldn't afford anything better, couldn't afford to have a gunsmith convert it to metallic cartridges (or didn't have access to metallic cartridges anyway, so why bother?) or had relied on them for so long that that's what they trusted with their lives and didn't see the sense in changing anything.

I can only assume Marston's goons fell into one of those first two categories, they didn't seem all that well to do. Not only that, assuming they converted them how easy would it be to get ammunition? A lot of those early conversion calibers were rimfire and non reloadable. Caps and powder were always available for purchase and with a mold any lead you had was a projectile, so maybe the choice of weapons was more pragmatic than we give them credit.

As for Marston himself, eh who knows? Maybe he fell into the third category. He was clearly skilled with them and they had done the job thus far. A firearm is a surprisingly personal thing, especially when it's how you make or protect your living so many weren't too quick to discard what worked even when 'new and improved' was available.

Or maybe they just wanted to make the Sharps appear to be more of a novelty so they pitted it against obsolete tech.

Or maybe the idea is that Australia is so remote that a lot of the newfangled stuff hadn't filtered down there yet.

OR maybe it's really pre 1874 and the Sharps is simply an anachronism in this movie...

Simply because they were half a world away from the US, where they were being made, across a continent from Australia's main city, and because back then they were tools that were replaced only when necessary.

Also, ammunition wasn't readily available, either. Easy to carry powder and ball, and they made the balls themselves.

Same reason they don't have Winchesters, and the first Repeater made by them was the 1866 model, and before that, the Henry repeater was available during the Civil War.

..Joe

Wild Bill Hickok (referenced in the movie, BTW) was killed two years after the introduction of the Colt Single Action Army in 1873, and he was still using a pair of muzzle-loading 1851 Colt navy revolvers when he died. Apparently this was by preference. As others have noted, people were still using black powder revolvers well into the 1880s. (They were still being used to a more limited extent even later, and I read somewhere that you could get nitrated paper cartridges for them into the early 20th century.).

But cap and ball persisted for a long time in frontier areas, because if you had a cartridge gun (or your old cap and ball revolver had been converted), and you're local vendor didn't have any cartridges to sell you once you'd run out, you were screwed. Loose powder and ball -- or just lead to mold your own bullets -- was nearly always available. So for a long time, certainly in the 1870s, a lot of people stayed with cap and ball because they knew they'd always be able to load and fire their pistols, and feared they might not if they switched over to metallic cartridges.