The night is dark. The moon is mostly concealed by dark clouds and the little light that persists is smeared by the whirling fog around you. The cool metal of your gun sweeps across the palm of your hand as you remove it from its from its holster. You load two bullets into the chamber just before a mad-eyed werewolf comes 
crashing through the brush, panting and hurling long strands of saliva in all directions. The first bullet is lead. It lurches from the barrel of the gun and hits the wolf square in the chest. You stagger back as the bullet rebounds and the beast continues charging. As if your fingers were moving on their own, you fire the second bullet without even noticing. The second bullet is a silver bullet. The silver bullet dives towards its target and pierces the wolf’s matted forehead. You exhale as it shrieks and falls. You then realize that the beast was one of your dearly loved relatives, but not the one that seemed outwardly evil as you were expecting.
Silver is a substance that maintains a great deal of power in legends and stories. During the time that witches were thought to be a great threat to humanity, silver was thought to be immune to enchantment which made it very valuable. Possibly because of this, silver developed a kind of religious, holy aura in the minds of medieval westerners. It is not surprising then that the invention of firearms brought about the importance of silver bullets when battling witches, werewolves, and vampires. But what truth is there to this application of silver?
It is thought that the use of silver bullets when battling evil, especially werewolves, came from a supposedly true story called the Beast of Gévaudan. The story tells of a horrible wolf-like creature that attacked a small town in France in the 1700s. The creature, perhaps due to exaggerations on individual accounts, was prone to attacking humans over animals and killed by ripping through the throat. Historians now think that the attacks were caused by a pack of wolves instead of just one, but the townspeople believed that it was a magical being. Supposedly many of the townspeople tried to slay the creature with close-range weapons as well as firearms loaded with lead bullets and failed. After many deaths and wounded civilians, a local hunter named Jean Chastel managed to kill the wolf with a silver bullet. However, this part of the story has many different variations, most likely because there was more than one wolf.
Many thought that the wolf was killed by a man hired by the king and that Chastel was imprisoned for falsely claiming that he had killed it. Even more suspect is that the silver bullet portion of the story did not arise until Abel Chevalley’s novel La Bete Du Gévaudan based on the legend. Because of this, historians believe that Chevalley invented the silver bullet to add heroism and righteousness to the character version of Chastel in his book. The bullet is believed to have been completely fabricated by someone who was not involved with the attacks. But could it have actually happened? What is the practicality of using silver in bullets?
Another well known application of the silver bullet is in the story of The Lone Ranger. This character is completely fictional, but the show inspired the Mythbusters to do a segment on the practicality of the silver bullet. They found that, when compared to a lead bullet, a silver bullet does not penetrate as far as a lead bullet when it hits its target. Lead has a greater density which means that a lead bullet at the same volume as a silver bullet will have a greater mass, and therefore greater momentum. Penetration being the method in which bullets damage their targets, it is unlikely that a silver bullet succeeded in killing a creature that a lead bullet did not. Furthermore, silver is much more difficult to make precise bullets with because it shrinks.
Silver, in legends and religion, is generally used for protection as opposed to offensive purposes. The likeliness of Chastel finding a bullet made from this material is not very high. Some say that he invented the silver bullet, but this is equally unlikely. In both locales, the Old West and medieval France, silver was too precious to have been made into a bullet that isn’t as effective. Silver in the Old West was used as currency and would not have been a reasonable thing to purchase or use. In the late 1700s, the franc, the French equivalent of a dollar, was backed completely by silver, meaning that its use in bullets before that was not very likely either.
Silver was likely not used in bullets for practical purposes anytime in history because of the metal’s consistent worth. Today, if you were to sell just the lead required for a 7mm magnum bullet, you would receive about one cent, whereas silver of the same mass would sell for around $8.60. A clip of lead 7mm bullets sells for anywhere between $25.00 and $50.00, which would be horrendously higher if they were made of silver. So next time you’re thinking about making some silver bullets to fight that undead horde, consider what you learned here. Sell your silver and use it to buy the lead bullets, instead of shooting your precious silver from your gun.
Image Courtesy of Marlon Malabanan/Some Rights Reserved
Andy is a lover of all things silver and gold currently living in Atlanta, GA. Aside from making silver bullets, he enjoys writing for the Selling Jewelry blog.