American Gun

4 THE WINCHESTER 1873 RIFLE

On the morning of October 5, 1892, two hardware stores in Coffeyville, Kansas, conducted the first and maybe only mass gun giveaway in the history of the United States.

Any adult was free to grab a firearm and a couple of boxes of ammo off the shelf, no paperwork or money required. Word spread in a lightning flash, drawing a crowd of people who reached behind the counters and helped themselves to rifles and shotguns. The big prizes were the lever-action Winchester rifles, elegant weapons that had proven themselves both dependable and deadly since their introduction some nineteen years before.

This wasn’t a sales promotion. In fact, the reason for the giveaway was clear to anyone brave enough to peek in the window next door: The bank was being robbed. Actually, two banks were being taken simultaneously. Five fully armed men were pointing their guns at terrified bank customers and employees inside the First National Bank and the Condon Bank, both right in the middle of town. The infamous Dalton Gang had come to town for an unauthorized withdrawal.

The Dalton Gang was on a bit of a roll. They’d just pulled off a string of successful train robberies in Indian Territory, robbin’, thievin’, and killin’ at a pace few had matched before. Not content to rest on their laurels, they had decided to top themselves with a brazen stunt in their old hometown—take two banks at the same time in broad daylight. As far as they knew, it had never been done. And that was the main point—cement their cred as the baddest crew of cutthroat thieves who’d ever ridden in the West.

Emmett, Bob, and Gratton “Grat” Dalton were related to members of the James-Younger Gang (led by Frank and Jesse James), which partly explained their competitiveness. A little harder to explain was the fact that both Bob and Grat were former lawmen. Their older brother Frank, a deputy U.S. marshal, was killed in the line of duty by a horse thief. But in the West allegiances shifted fast. Frustrated by irregular pay, the Dalton boys decided to apply their talents to crime.

The C.M. Condon Bank was located at the center of the town plaza, a wide, open space in the middle of Coffeyville. The First National Bank was across the way. The Daltons had fixed on a particular strategic point as the lynchpin of their plan—a hitching post next to the First National where they could park their horses for a convenient getaway.

What they hadn’t counted on was something that was becoming as American as, well, Winchesters and apple pie—road repairs. When the five desperados rode into town, they found the hitching post had been removed. This led them to leave their horses in a side alley several hundred feet away from their targets. More importantly, it complicated their escape route, hemming them into a spot where they could be easily ambushed.

They were a bit too full of themselves to think of that when they tied up their horses. Wearing fake beards and wigs, they strode across the town plaza, focused on their mission. The disguises were meant to keep anyone who saw them from realizing who they were and what they were up to. That didn’t work. A shopkeeper sweeping his sidewalk looked up as they passed, realized something was up, and discreetly trailed them as they split up and entered the banks.

I suspect the rifles they were packin’ gave them away.

“God damn you! Hold up your hands!” ordered Grat Dalton as he pointed his Winchester inside Condon Bank. With his confederates Bill Power and Dick Broadwell spreading out behind him, Grat told bank employees to fill up a grain sack with cash and silver dollars. Then he went over to the main vault and told one of the bankers to open the inner doors.

Which prompted bank cashier Charles Ball to utter the most famous lie in the Old West.

“It’s not time for that to open,” he told the outlaw, explaining that the burglarproof money chest was on a time lock that wouldn’t open for ten minutes. Another employee helpfully turned the handle, but did not pull it.

Time locks had been around in the West for a while, and Grat was familiar enough with them to recognize that the contraption on the door was indeed such a lock. What he didn’t know was that it had gone off earlier that morning; if he’d’ve simply pulled the handle himself, it would have swung open free and easy. But he fell for the bluff.

“We can wait ten minutes,” he announced.

But patience wasn’t his strong suit. Soon he began to fidget, then stalk back and forth. Finally he exploded. “God damn you! I believe you are lying to me. I’ve a mind to put a bullet through you! Open it up or I will shoot you!”

Ball stuck to his story.

“Where is your gold?” demanded Grat finally.

“We haven’t any,” said the banker. Ball then evaded Grat’s questioning with a stream of unintelligible banking lingo, explaining why this was the case.

Meanwhile, inside the First National Bank around the corner, Bob and Emmett Dalton were also being bluffed by bank employees, including one who insisted he didn’t know the combination to the safe. Finally deciding that time was wastin’, they filled up a bag with what they could find from the teller stations and patrons. This wasn’t chicken feed: a total of twenty thousand dollars went into the sacks. But the Daltons felt like they’d been gypped anyway. Swearing and shouting, they took three civilians hostage as human shields, and moved to the door.

The delay at both banks had been long enough for the good citizens of Coffeyville to arm themselves, courtesy of the gun dealers at the hardware stores. The decision to go to war against the Daltons seems to have been spontaneous, but sometimes spur of the moment is the best way to do things. Volunteers sprinted to the scene from all over town, many of them gathering at Isham Brothers hardware store, right next to the First National Bank. The staff at Isham’s, along with their rivals at A. P. Boswell’s hardware store a short distance away, gave guns and ammo away to all comers as fast as they could grab them from the display.

The civilian gunmen scrambled into positions around the two banks. Several men hauled wagons together to create cover. One store owner grabbed a Colt .44 from his basement and ducked behind a wooden sign. A wagon driver pulled a double-barreled shotgun off the shelf at Isham’s and hid behind a post that gave him a point-blank view of the First National Bank. The proprietor of Isham’s ducked behind a big iron stove in the front of the store, backed up by two of his clerks, one with a revolver and the other with a Winchester.

“Look out there at the left!” Emmett yelled to Bob as he cleared the doorway to the sidewalk. Two citizens blasted the robbers with a Winchester and Colt .44 from the doorway of the Rammel Brothers’ drugstore. They missed, but the Daltons were driven back into the bank, frantically searching for a back exit. One hostage broke free and scrambled across the street, where he grabbed a Winchester of his own to join the opposition. A firestorm of lead sailed into the First National.

Over at the Condon bank, Grat and his men gave up waiting for the lock to open, deciding to settle for the silver and cash they’d grabbed and head out. But before they could leave, townspeople began raining fire into the building. As some eighty rounds of rifle and shotgun slugs poured in, a witness spotted Grat and the others “running back and forth” inside. It reminded her of “rats in a trap.” She described the firing as “continuous like bunches of firecrackers exploding, both shotguns and rifles.” Anyone not firing at the Daltons was busy running for cover wherever it could be found.

You don’t have to be particularly bright to be a bank robber, but it’s probably helpful not to be so gullible you’ll believe anything you’re told. When Grat asked a Condon Bank employee if there was a back door, the banker lied and claimed there was only one exit.

“Let’s get out of here!” Grat shouted, heading to the front. Realizing he couldn’t drag a two-hundred-pound sack of silver in the middle of a firefight, he abandoned the bag and stuffed paper money into his clothes.

Grat and his two fellow bandits dashed out the southwest entrance of the bank into the street. Braving a blizzard of gunfire, they ran in the direction of the alley and their horses, periodically stopping to return fire. They ran, according to one account, “with heads down, like facing a strong wind.”

Grat hadn’t gotten too far before City Marshal Charles T. Connelly appeared in his way. They traded gunfire; while most sources believe that Connelly wounded Grat, the outlaw got the best of the marshal, killing him in the exchange. But the robbers were still a long way from their horses.

“The moment that Grat Dalton and his companions, Dick Broadwell and Bill Power, left the [C. M. Condon] bank that they had just looted, they came under the guns of the men in Isham’s store,” wrote newspaper editor David Elliott. “Grat Dalton and Bill Power each received mortal wounds before they had retreated twenty steps. The dust was seen to fly from their clothes, and Power in his desperation attempted to take refuge in the rear doorway of an adjoining store, but the door was locked and no one answered his request to be let in. He kept his feet and clung to his Winchester until he reached his horse, when another ball struck him in the back and he fell dead at the feet of the animal that had carried him on his errand of robbery.”

At First National, Bob and Emmett grabbed a hostage and escaped through a back door. They promptly shot and killed a man who happened to be passing by.

“You hold the bag, I’ll do the fighting,” Bob told his brother as they headed around the corner back toward the horses. “Go slow. I can whip the whole damn town!”

For a few dozen paces, it looked like he could. Bob walked along calmly, snapping his fingers and whistling. Gunfire began dropping civilians. The injured were pulled into Isham’s hardware shop, and soon the store resembled a blood-soaked hospital emergency room.

An unsuspecting boy wandered into the path of the robbers, one of whom shoved him aside with the warning, “Keep away from here, bud, or you’ll get hurt.”

Grat, Broadwell, and Power were now dead. The two other Daltons made it to the alley where their horses were, and if luck or maybe a convenient road detour were on their side, they might just have made it out. But luck wasn’t something they had much of that day, and the citizens’ superior numbers began to tell.

Depending on the model and caliber, the Winchesters the town was armed with fed as many as fifteen bullets through a round tube magazine into the breech. Pull down on the trigger guard, come back up with it, fire—even if most of these folks hadn’t grown up around guns all their lives, they still would have had no trouble learning how to fire the rifle in the heat of the battle. The front sight was fixed, and while the rear could be adjusted, my suspicion is that at close range the good citizens of Coffeyville didn’t have to do much messing around with the sight.

One by one, the Dalton boys were shot to pieces. Emmett made it to his horse, but Bob staggered and fell, finally perforated to the point where he couldn’t go on.

“Good-bye,” Bob told his brother as Emmett tried to pull him to safety. “Don’t surrender, die game.”

Emmett might have obliged, but he was hit several times and settled to the dust. There he was grabbed and dragged into the office of a local Dr. Welles. The doctor had taken an oath to preserve life, but as a good part of the town crowded in, he realized they were fixin’ to apply their own medicine to his patient with the short end of a rope.

“No use, boys. He will die anyway,” he told the crowd.

“Doc, Doc, are you certain?” someone asked.

“Hell, yes, he’ll die,” said the doctor. “Did you ever hear of a patient of mine getting well?”

The mob laughed, then ran off to gawk at the four robbers who hadn’t the luck to make it to Doc Wells’ office alive.

The four were about as dead as men can get. One was said to have “as many holes in him as a colander,” and another report estimated twenty-three pieces of lead in one of the bodies. The town had saved its money and earned a place in history, though it had paid a steep price: Four civilians were dead.

The deceased robbers were propped up for a picture, with a Winchester draped across them. Some dumb ass figured out that if you moved the dead Grat Dalton’s arm up and down, blood flowed out of a prominent hole in his throat; quite a number of people amused themselves trying it.

Contrary to the doctor’s assessments of his skills, Emmett survived almost two dozen gunshot wounds and wound up in jail. Sentenced to life, he turned over a new leaf and was freed after serving some fourteen and a half years. Freed, he became an actor and a writer, somewhat less dangerous activities than robbing banks, though in some eyes nearly as dubious.

The Coffeyville battle is a great action story, probably as exciting to hear and tell today as it was a hundred-some years ago. But it wasn’t just the bullet slinging that makes it stand out from a historical point of view. In deciding to stop the robbery, the citizens had drawn a big red line not in the sand, but across the West. The country was to be wild no more. Law and order would prevail. Not only were Americans taming the West, they were taming themselves.

And if the people in the West had evolved, so had the guns they used to instill order on the chaos of nature and themselves. The Winchesters used in the Coffeyville battle represented a climactic moment in the century-long evolution of American frontier rifles.

The Winchesters were never commonly used as combat weapons by American military forces. There were a bunch of reasons, from head-shed (aka top brass) prejudice against repeaters to the difficulty of cycling rounds while lying flat behind thin cover. Instead, the repeater became the all-purpose working rifle for countless thousands of cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, and homesteaders for the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

I love lever-action rifles. I have since I was old enough to chase my little brother, Jeff, around the family house playing cowboys and lawmen. As a matter of fact, I lusted after his Marlin .30-30 when we were kids. I had a fine bolt-action .30-06, but his lever-action Marlin looked to me like a cowboy gun, and in my mind that made it the best.

The whole idea of a lever-action rifle is to slip a cartridge into the breech quickly and easily, so it can then be put to good use by pulling the trigger. The trigger-guard mechanism on the outside of the gun works a lever that pushes the spent cartridge out of the breech when it’s pulled down. Sliding the lever back up snugs a fresh one into place. The inside cogs and springs of the action that get this done are tucked out of sight, of course; all the operator sees and feels is a very satisfying click-click that shouts WILD WEST in capital letters.

The Spencer had been the most successful repeater of the Civil War era, but even so, it did have limitations. The operation came to a full stop after the cartridge was chambered. Before the bullet could fly, the shooter had to pull back the hammer manually, usually with his thumb. Only then was the gun ready to fire.

Wouldn’t it be easier, someone thought, if you could use the same lever that was getting the bullet in place to ready the hammer as well?

Actually, you could. And while it may not seem like that big a deal to someone used to a Spencer, or other weapons of the day, that little touch of simplicity made for a much smoother and quicker shooting process.

As it happens, someone had thought of this setup well before the Spencer reached Gettysburg. The Henry Repeater, such as the model Lincoln tested in 1861, used just such an arrangement. The weapon had other shortcomings, but the ideas behind its action were solid.

In the late 1860s, Oliver Winchester purchased the remains of the company that created the Spencer Repeater. One of the reasons he had the cash to do so was the success of his firm, now known as Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester and company had stayed with the basic design of the Henry, but made so many improvements that the Winchester Model 1866 was really a very different animal. True, it had a bronze-alloy frame like the Henry, and it still used the same rim-fire cartridge. But where the Henry had been more than a tad on the temperamental side, the 1866 was a robust shooting iron. Its red brass or gunmetal receiver had a yellowish tint to it, earning it the nickname “Yellow Boy.” But there wasn’t anything yellow about it. The magazine was sealed. You could load the weapon at the side thanks to a loading gate. There were a bunch of other little improvements that helped the gun stand up to the strains of the frontier.

But it was the company’s next rifle, Model 1873, that earned Winchester its everlasting fame. Again, this was a sturdy weapon, even more so than the 1866. It also used a .44–40 cartridge. This gave the gun more stopping power, while not being so large that it made the rifle hard to handle. It also meant you could use the same ammo in your rifle and Colt Frontier revolver. The Winchester found a sweet spot where power, convenience, and versatility were in perfect balance.

The search for a perfect weapon had been a long, dusty trail, with a number of detours and missteps. It produced some mighty fine weapons, even if none were “perfect.” The ideal weapon depends on the circumstances you find yourself in. Sometimes you want a lot of bullets. Sometimes you want just one big one.

Size did matter on the Plains. American settlers surged westward from the eastern forests and quickly discovered that the original flintlock American long rifles with a .32-caliber ball weren’t powerful and fast-loading enough for the larger game out West. Buffalo, elk, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear, and mountain lion all required guns with bigger loads. And unless you were a skilled contortionist, the American long rifle was pretty awkward to carry and use from the saddle.

So new single-shot, muzzle-loading hunting rifles came on the scene. The most famous Plains rifle was a model made by the Hawken brothers, gunsmiths in St. Louis, Missouri. The Hawkens cut the barrel down to thirty inches, and boosted the projectile to at least .50 caliber. That gave their weapons the power to knock down big animals at long range. On the wide-open plains, accuracy at distance was essential, due to the fact that it was difficult to sneak up on anything. The weapon became a favorite among hunters, trappers, mountain men, traders, and explorers, first as a flintlock and then as a percussion cap gun after 1835. The Hawkens called them “Rocky Mountain Rifles.”

But the big daddy of all Plains rifles was the post–Civil War “Sharps Big 50,” the quintessential powerhouse buffalo gun. This piece contributed directly to the shaping of America by powering the final expansion of European settlers across the continent. Its bullets slaughtered millions of buffalo. The consequences were complex and, for Indians as well as the animals, not very pleasant, but the weapon itself was a fine piece of work.

The large-caliber Sharps built on the design and reputation of the single-shot, breech-loading, falling-block Sharps rifle, which had done so well on the field of battle during the Civil War. The new model had center-fire metallic cartridges and a half-inch-diameter projectile. It retained its vertical dropping-block action, which was operated by the trigger guard. The action was not only strong but limited the release of gases when the gun was discharged. The thirty-inch barrel had eight sides, which was not uncommon at the time. I don’t know if that made it stronger or just easier to build, but it did give the weapon a special feel.

The big Sharps had the power to drop a distant buffalo or stop a charging grizzly. It was also highly accurate. The kick was strong, or as the National Firearms Museum in Virginia puts it, the rifle had “knockdown power at both ends.” Elmer Keith, writing about the gun in 1940 after conducting a number of experiments with it, pronounced its recoil “darn heavy” and its report “something to remember,” which I suppose you’d expect from a cartridge two and a half inches long.

The .50 Sharps’ main target was the American bison. Before 1800, much of middle American grassland was a paradise for vast herds of grazing buffalo. Twelve feet long and weighing up to two thousand pounds each, the buffalo were self-service supermarkets for the several hundred thousand Native Americans. Their carcasses provided not only food, but also clothing and shelter. They even served up raw materials for war shields, boats, fuel, and glue. As many as 50 million buffalo remained on the Plains in 1830, split into northern and southern groups. A single herd of roughly 4 million was spotted as late as 1871.

For the arriving white settlers, the buffalo were a cash machine: hides fetched a hundred dollars each. Among other things, the leather from the animals was being used to make belts for commercial sewing machines and other equipment as the Industrial Revolution expanded. The animals were just one more raw material. But as they vanished, so would the people who depended on them.

The big Sharps was capable of bringing down bison at distances approaching half a mile. It “shoots today and kills tomorrow,” Native Americans said of the Sharps. “The Sharps was a different kind of gun,” wrote Keith McCafferty in Field & Stream in 1997. “Originally a target rifle of great accuracy and crushing power, Sharps rifles became the tools of choice for those who came to slaughter the great buffalo herds. There was no nobility in what the hide hunters did. It was wretched, fast-money work that they themselves despised, and it represents a dark page in our history.”

The orgy of wholesale buffalo slaughter surged after the Civil War and peaked in the 1870s and 1880s, powered by the Sharps and other accurate, high-powered long-range hunting rifles firing big metallic cartridges. A single “Big Fifty” Sharps .50–90 rifle owned by legendary buffalo hunter J. Wright Mooar was believed to have dispatched more than 22,000 buffalo.

Bison weren’t the only things you could take with a Big Fifty. A legendary sniper named Billy Dixon made what came to be known as “the Shot of the Century” with a Sharps. He was at a trading outpost in Texas named Adobe Walls, on June 27, 1874, when the settlement came under fierce attack by as many as a thousand Indian warriors. One woman and twenty-eight white men—including a young Bat Masterson—huddled inside the fort walls and five buildings, fending off the attack. Indians pounded on doors and windows with their clubs and rifle butts as defenders held them off with Winchesters and pistols.

Finally repulsed, the Indians were gathering for a fresh round of attacks on the second day of the siege when Dixon borrowed a Sharps buffalo gun from the post’s well-stocked arsenal. He squeezed off a shot that killed a mounted Indian warrior from a distance measured two weeks later by a team of U.S. Army surveyors at 1,538 yards. The shot apparently broke the morale of the Native American strike force. They abandoned the siege two days later in a major psychological defeat. Worse, the failed attack convinced the military to step up their campaign against the natives. The Red River War followed in 1874–75; at the end of the conflict, the survivors of the defeated tribes were relocated to Oklahoma reservations.

The other big buffalo gun in the West was the classic Remington Rolling Block rifle, a single-shot breechloader with a simple but extremely strong mechanism. On a gun with a rolling block, the breach is sealed by a lock or breechblock that rotates backwards for loading. To load, the hammer is pulled back to full cock. The breechblock is then pulled back, opening the chamber so the cartridge can be put in. Push the breechblock back into place, and you’re ready to fire.

The extremely durable weapon could handle the large charges and calibers needed to knock down buffalo and other large game. The range and accuracy of both the Remington and the Sharps were an important asset, since they allowed hunters to shoot from a good distance. The idea was to get precision kills without alerting the rest of the herd to what was going on. It was an idea that applies with some modifications to all long-range shooting, not just buffalo hunting.

By 1875, the southern buffalo herd had been all but exterminated—and in that year, partly as a consequence, the mighty Comanche surrendered at last. America’s surviving buffalo now roamed only over the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, where they helped the northern Plains Indians resist the onrush of whites and their ways. These last great buffalo-hunting grounds would host the final acts of the Indian Wars. Ironically, it was the native tribes who reaped the advantage of American firearm innovation in the most famous confrontation in that end game: Custer’s Last Stand.

When the Battle of Little Bighorn began on June 25, 1876, at 4:15 p.m. near a riverside Indian settlement in eastern Montana, George Armstrong Custer had 210 mounted troops and scouts of the U.S. Army Seventh Cavalry under his command. They were largely armed with single-shot 1873 “Trapdoor” Springfield carbines.

Less than sixty minutes later, Custer and all of his men were gone. Their deaths were serenaded by the staccato crackle of gunfire from Winchester repeating rifles—in the hands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.

Guided by poor intel and his own bad judgment, Custer’s plan was to attack the Indian settlement quickly. A separate force under his command would engage from another direction while a third detachment blocked the escape route through a nearby valley. Custer apparently aimed to induce the Indian warriors to sue for peace by taking their women and children as hostages and human shields. He figured, according to author Evan S. Connell, that the Indians “would be obliged to surrender, because if they started to fight, they would be shooting their own families.”

But Custer never got his hostages. Instead, he was cut off by a multi-tribal strike force of perhaps 1,500 combat-seasoned Indian fighters. He was hugely outnumbered, and, just as importantly, outgunned.

The “Trapdoor” Springfield carbines in the hands and saddles of Custer’s men were recycled weapons from the Civil War. Faced with tons of surplus muzzle-loading rifle-muskets when the Civil War ended, the Army decided to modify the guns by cutting into the rear of the barrel and installing a breechblock, chamber, and “trapdoor” bolt, a system into which metal cartridges could be loaded fairly quickly. Under perfect conditions, a trooper might get twelve to fifteen shots off in a minute.

Under perfect conditions.

The U.S. Army continued to use the single-shot Trapdoor Springfield well into the Spanish American War, despite all evidence of their shortcomings. Army planners were not only cheap, but stuck in the past.

To be fair, the Springfields did have some upsides. The carbines were fairly rugged, fired a good-sized bullet, and were accurate at long range. They could throw a .45-caliber, 405-grain bullet as far as 600 yards or more with fine results. But as it happened, the battle climax at Little Bighorn was fought at relatively close range. Like most U.S. Army troops in those days, Custer’s men were not intensively drilled in marksmanship, and were prone to shoot high, especially when aiming downhill. They had trouble reloading quickly under pressure. The guns themselves suffered a kind of combat fatigue: the Springfields were known to jam, overheat, and get fouled with residue during fighting.

Custer’s problems were magnified by his tactics and the terrain. The brushy landscape hid the size of the Indian force. His impulsive race to attack the huge Indian village took him out of range of reinforcements. He split up his command repeatedly on the battlefield, and launched his attack without much in the way of reconnaissance.

According to Indians who fought in the battle, Custer’s “last stand” was actually a series of five individual stands made by groups of cavalrymen, as Custer’s lines repeatedly collapsed up the hill in ten-minute stages. At one point the dismounted Army troops held a fairly continuous line along a half-mile backbone in the hill. But everything changed when the Lakota’s warrior chief, Crazy Horse, led a sudden, surprise mounted charge through their ranks.

“Right among them we rode,” said a Little Bighorn vet named Thunder Bear, “shooting them down as in a buffalo drive.” Daniel White Thunder remembered, “As soon as the soldiers on foot had marched over the ridge,” he and his fellow warriors stampeded Custer’s horses “by waving their blankets and making a terrible noise.” The horses carried away most of the cavalry’s reserve ammunition. Red Hawk described a scene of mass confusion: “The dust was thick and we could hardly see. We got right among the soldiers and killed a lot with our bows and arrows and tomahawks. Crazy Horse was ahead of all, and he killed a lot of them with his war club.” Cheyenne Two Moons recalled the chaos as “all mixed up, Sioux, then soldiers, then more Sioux, and all shooting.”

As the Indians’ momentum increased, they used “battlefield pickups” and corpse-stripping of U.S. Army weapons and ammo to boost their firepower. “By this time,” said Red Hawk, “the Indians were taking the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers and putting these to use.”

The Indians had begun the day armed with a plethora of weapons, including a favorite Native American rifle, the Winchester. The repeater gave them a powerful edge when the fighting got closer. “The Indians at the Little Bighorn used at least 47 different types of firearms against the 7th Cavalry,” reports Doug Scott, a prominent historian of the battle who has studied its archaeology. “The Henry, Winchester Model 1866, and [Winchester] Model 1873 were used in abundance.” Archeological analyses performed by Scott and others in recent decades has estimated that roughly 25 percent of the Indian warriors were armed with repeating Henrys or Winchester 1866 or 1873 models; another 25 percent were armed with single-shot rifles and muzzleloaders of various types, and the remaining half used traditional war implements like clubs, lances, and bows and arrows. The Indians had obtained the repeaters through trade, U.S. government clearance sales, raids, and battlefield pickups.

The complete annihilation of Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn was the biggest victory ever achieved by Native Americans against the U.S. Army. It also marked a milestone in the long climax of the Indian Wars, which finally ended at Wounded Knee in 1890. There, troops of the same Seventh Cavalry massacred one hundred and fifty or more Indian men, women, and children.

Debates have raged among historians and firearms buffs for decades around Custer’s mistakes, over alternative histories of the Bighorn battle, and about what difference various guns might have made. It’s possible Custer wouldn’t have stood much of a chance no matter what weapons he had, given the overwhelming number of Indian warriors he faced.

At the risk of armchair quarterbacking, let’s suggest one gun that Custer should have taken along, a revolutionary weapon that might have saved him and his troops.

It was the Gatling gun, a two-man, hand-cranked, rapid-fire “machine gun” that could fire hundreds of bullet rounds a minute. First used during the Civil War, the weapon could spit bullets out at a furious pace. Custer had access to a battery of six Gatlings. Though heavy, the guns could be broken down, packed onto mules or horses, and hauled, with some difficulty, over the rough terrain. The downside was they had a tendency to jam and otherwise malfunction, and they could roll over and shatter to pieces while being handled on hilly inclines.

But it wasn’t the Gatling’s awesome firepower that would have saved Custer. It was the fact that the bulky Gatlings, even when disassembled for portability, would have slowed his march to Little Bighorn long enough for his forces to consolidate. Reinforcements would have arrived in time. Custer would have hours to spare to formulate a coherent plan of action.

But time was the reason Custer left them behind in the first place. He figured they’d slow him down.

On second thought, maybe there was no hope for Custer at all. He was in too much of a hurry to meet his fate.

Dubbed “the gun that won the West,” the Winchester Model 1873 was an instant hit, destined to be a long-running best-seller for the company. The first cartridge it fired was a .44–40 Winchester center fire round, which proved particularly popular with people who owned revolvers in the same caliber. Winchester soon produced rifles in other calibers, making it possible for more gun owners to use the same bullets for their long gun and their pistol.

Other models followed. Winchester developed the 1876 with an enlarged and strengthened receiver, which allowed for larger and more powerful cartridges. Eventually available in a series of calibers ranging from .40–60 on up to .50–95 Express, the gun packed enough wallop to make it suitable for buffalo hunting. The 1876 and the 1886 that followed were versatile and powerful rifles, and straddled the transition from black powder to smokeless.

Winchester lever-action rifles became the prized possession of ranchers, movie stars, and presidents alike. The Winchester Model 1892 Lever-Action Repeater was the favorite of sharpshooter Annie Oakley and tagged along in Admiral Robert Peary’s baggage on a trek to the North Pole. Winchester sold a million of those guns. The Model 1894 was an even hotter seller, with more than 7 million produced in its different forms, making it the number one sporting rifle in history. Though it was first built to fire black powder rounds, it switched easily to new smokeless cartridges. In the United States, the Winchester 94 .30–30 combo became synonymous with “deer rifle.” You can still buy one new, fresh from the factory.

But my all-time favorite Winchester repeater has to be the Model 1892. If you’ve watched only John Wayne movies, you’ve probably seen the gun. It has an oversized loop trigger guard that looks like a miniature metal lasso under the stock. Unlike the 1876 and 1886 models, the 1892 was made to handle shorter rounds, again allowing a frontiersman to carry the same bullets for pistol and rifle.

For years, a friend of mine had a fine example of an 1892 sitting in his weapons vault. This particular version was a specially made Winchester John Wayne Commemorative edition. It had special engraving on the metal and a silver indicia on the stock showing the Duke’s profile. Any time I’d go over to the vault, just about my favorite thing would be to take that rifle and rack it. I’d work the action like I was riding with the Duke himself.

One day, we were in there talking, and I went over to the gun. My friend looked at me a little funny, so I stopped and backed away.

“Take it,” he told me. “It’s yours.”

“Huh?”

“You like that gun so much,” he insisted. “Take it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I did. And I’ve enjoyed it ever since.

In the early morning hours of Valentine’s Day, 1884, a young politician sat at the bedside of his dying wife, trying to make sense of the way joy had suddenly turned to tragedy over the past twenty-four hours. He had returned home to New York City through a terrible fog and storm after receiving a wire that his wife had given birth to their first child. Now he was shocked to find his wife dying of kidney failure, then known as Bright’s Disease. Downstairs, his mother was in the final stages of typhoid fever.

His daughter was healthy, but both his mother and wife would die that same day.

Devastated and utterly alone, the young man left politics and New York. Wandering the American West in search of a new life, he settled into the life of a rancher and outdoorsman in the badlands of Dakota Territory.

The man was Theodore Roosevelt. TR went on to become America’s youngest president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner—as well as a lifetime National Rifle Association member, world-famous big-game hunter, gun collector, and the biggest celebrity endorser that the Winchester firearms brand ever had. “The Winchester,” he wrote, “is by all odds the best weapon I ever had, and I now use it almost exclusively.”

As a hunter out West, Roosevelt liked not only the punch but the utility of the 1876 Model. “It is as handy to carry, whether on foot or on horseback, and comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun,” he declared. “It is absolutely sure, and there is no recoil to jar and disturb the aim, while it carries accurately quite as far as a man can aim with any degree of certainty.” The .40–60 Winchester, he noted, “carries far and straight and hits hard, and is a first-rate weapon for deer and antelope, and can also be used with effect against sheep, elk, and even bear.”

In the West, Roosevelt found his reason to go on living. Hunting inspired him. He was a cowboy poet when it came to guns. “No one but he who has partaken thereof can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands,” Roosevelt wrote. “For him is the joy of the horse well ridden and the rifle well held; for him the long days of toil and hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph. In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun; of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.”

In a few short years living in the West, Roosevelt became an authentic cowboy-rancher. He tamed bucking broncos, drove a thousand head of cattle on a six-day trail ride, punched out a cowboy in a saloon fight, and faced down Indian warriors. In 1886, with an 1876 Winchester in hand, he tracked and captured three desperadoes in the wilderness and marched them forty miles to face justice.

TR was witnessing the end of the American frontier. By 1890, fewer than a thousand American bison remained. Most of the available land claims had been staked. Countless lives had been claimed by nature, and by man. Yet for many settlers, and for millions more who would follow, the opening of the West offered opportunity and freedom. That frontier spirit is still branded into our national character.

As for Teddy Roosevelt, the West eventually repaired his spirit. He found his bearings again, returned to politics, and started a new family. He worked to clean up the New York City police department, then became an assistant secretary of the Navy. Wanting to see more action, he quit that job when war came, rounding up a group of volunteers to form one of the most famous cavalry units of all time.

And it was in a single hour in 1898, in the thick of combat, when Teddy Roosevelt would discover the key to the White House—while ducking bullets from a gun design that would help shape America into a world power.