It can be said that nobody in the 19th century loved the firearm as well as Oscar Hicks.

Born in Maryland, by his own word, he shot and killed his first man at the age of 6, when the British tried to burn down the family farm during the War of 1812. The recoil of the musket, again by his word, is what gave him the dramatic scar over his left eye. It’s widely believed by scholars that Hicks was younger than he claimed to be for much of his life, and that he might not have even been born before the War of 1812 ended. Regardless, in the late 1820s, he left home to take up trade as a blacksmith. This would eventually bring him into contact with Samuel Colt in the middle of the 1830s.

While Hicks would leave Colt before he started production on his legendary revolver (reportedly fleeing a pregnant lover and her father), he worked for Colt for several years and learned much about the engineering and design behind a good gun. He would proceed to submit twelve patents for various experimental firearms, including an early rotary gun similar to the Gatling model. Attempts to sell his designs were less successful, as were attempts to find a new long-term employer. An argument over unpaid debts had him draw his favorite gun - a passion project that he’d been tinkering with for years - on an innkeeper, only for it to misfire, causing it to blow up in his hand. He would later say that he mourned the loss of the gun longer than he mourned the loss of his hand.

With his ruined hand limiting the work he could do in debtors’ prison, threatening to leave him there indefinitely, he reached out to his former employer for salvation, offering all of his patents in return for his freedom. Samuel Colt agreed, even offering him a position at his new manufacturing plant in Connecticut (far away from his unconfirmed bastard child), but Hicks would be operating under a very strict code of conduct. Hicks rose to the challenge, attempting to avoid the mistakes of the past with raw discipline and diligence. Not only would he become a key leader at the Connecticut plant, he would create four more patents for the company - one for the iron prosthetic that he created in his first year of freedom.

After his tour with the Union Army during the Civil War - during which he made the rank of sergeant and premiered a new machine gun model from Colt’s factories - he once again left to follow his own pursuits, supposedly weary of violence after the sheer brutality of the war and disinterested in staying with the company after Samuel’s death. He would become popular as a security consultant among the wealthy, which would lead to his recruitment by Tyce Francois for the Protean Expedition. Hicks would help with recruiting much of the muscle for the expedition, and would later run operations for the expedition in the States, transmitting information, warding off suspicious lawmakers, and eventually providing covering fire when everything went wrong. Dr. Theodore Birch, the leader of the expedition, was very fond of him, claiming that “his was a heart that understood sorrow” and that the expedition would never have succeeded without his organizational skills.

During his trial, when asked why he agreed to the position, he said, “I’ve caused so much trouble in my life. Thought it right to try and do some good”. While he would be acquitted of treason, he was convicted of several counts of aggravated assault and was sentenced to life in prison. He would be acquitted in 1893 by President Cleveland at the urging of her partner, and was taken in by Francois. His last eight years would be spent writing The Barrel of a Man, memoirs that spent as much time on Samuel Colt and the development of firearms in the 1800s as they did his own life.