Around 1867 in Reconstruction Texas, the story goes, a black man rode down the Camino Real in the Lee County town of Evergreen, cursing every white man he met. When he cursed Campbell Longley, the farmer's teenage son took exception. The rider raised his rifle, but before he could fire, Willian P. ("Wild Bill") Longley shot him dead with a .44 caliber percussion cap-and-ball revolver. A product of hate-filled post-Civil War Texas, Longley would go on to kill perhaps 30 more men, many of them black. So it stands to reason that he would kill his first man with a Dance revolver--a weapon that had been made in Texas for the Confederacy. Whether or not the gun he used was in fact a Dance--Ed Bartholomew, author of Texas Outlaw Bill Longley: A Texas Hard-Case, said it was, but Longley biographer Rick Miller has not come across any such information--Dance revolvers and the men who made them certainly have their place in the history of firearms. James Henry Dance had not planned on becoming a gunsmith when he and his family, along with their slaves, settled in Brazoria County, Texas. Originally from North Carolina, the Dances had migrated to Greene County Ala., in 1835. But J.H. Dance traveled to Texas in 1848 and liked what he saw. In 1853 the Dances moved there. Five years later they built a house in East Columbia, on the Brazos River, and opened a factory where they made gristmills and cotton gins. James and two brothers George Perry and David Etheldred, named the business J.H. Dance and Company. They prospered. When the Civil War broke out the brothers enlisted in the Condederacy but soon were assigned to thier own factory. At first Dance & Company mounted cannons, repaired wagons and ground cornmeal. But Texas and the Confederacy needed firearms, and the Company opted to try making revolvers. Basically, the Dance was a combination of the 1848 Colt Dragoon .44 and the 1851 Colt Navy .36, popular revolvers in Texas at the outbreak of the Civil War. The Dance revolver has been described as a Colt Dragoon on a Colt Navy frame. Flat-framed, the revolver was constructed of iron, with a brass trigger guard and back strap and walnut grips. Unlike the Colts, however, most Dance models had no recoil shields. Produced in .44 and .36 caliber, the weapons were single-action, six shot. The .44 Dance usually had an 8-inch barrel and weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces. Some .44 models had iron back straps, due to the shortage of brass and other raw materials in Texas during the war. The .36-caliber model had a 7 1/2-inch barrel and weighed 2 pounds, 8 ounces. Prototypes were produced by June 1862. The Dances originally thought they could turn out 50 revolvers a week, but they soon realized that figure was not realistic. Eleven revolvers were sent to the San Antonio Arsenal in October 1862. The Houston Tri Weekly Telegraph lauded the Dance revolver as "superior to Colt's best" in it's September 5, 1862 edition. Even after it was antiquated, the Dance still got around.

 Apache warrior Geronimo was photographed (probably in 1894) with a Dance .44, although the revolver was most likely a photographer's prop. 

The Dance brothers returned to East Columbia after the Civil War and continued manufacturing gristmills and cotton gins. The factory remained in operation until the buildings were destroyed in the September 1900 hurricane that hit the Texas coast at Galveston.