Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i Guns of the Old West

There is this image of the American West we hold in our minds that is made flesh by men armed with Colt Model 1873 Single Action Army revolvers and Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifles. I think Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows first put that image there as he toured the country in the early 20th century, an image perpetuated by movies and television shows that these were the “guns that won the West.” No doubt they did for many souls who lived their lives on the post-Civil-War frontier, but most men, and many stalwart women, who ventured West in the 1870s and 1880s probably didn’t have the money to possess either. In this issue, the soul of the American West is revealed by authors who look at some very…

Legendary John Wayne used several Western gun belts and holsters before settling on what became known as “The Duke rig.” In his early Western movies, he wore a fancy hand-carved, silver-mounted buscadero rig, most likely from the shop of silversmith and saddle-maker Edward H. Bohlin. By the time he made Angel and the Badman in 1947, he was transitioning to The Duke rig, using a fancy hand-carved gun belt with a silver buckle, most likely by Bohlin, with a Mexican double-loop holster by H.H. Heiser of Denver. Rather than the buscadero drop-loop style, the Heiser holster went over the top of the gun belt. In 1953, The Duke starred in Hondo with what became his trademark rig. The Ranger-style gun belt had a standard 1½-inch chaps buckle as well as…

Imagine you were a Union soldier during the Civil War. Life was fraught with constant danger. The frequent battles were brutal and bloody, casualties many, and quality medical care was scarce. Many were forced to fight against family members and friends who had chosen to side with the South. From cannonballs and rifle bullets to bayonets and every sort of weapon in between, there was a good chance that over the next hill you’d come face to face with somebody set on seeing you dead and willing to make it happen. Even with all that on your plate, what you really didn’t want to do is get into a closeup tangle with one of the 1,500 to 2,500 Confederate troops who carried a special revolver that could blast you with…

If you’re a fan of weapons fashioned after the iconic Mare’s Leg used by Steve McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Henry Repeating Arms recently unveiled a new mini shotgun worth a closer look. The .410-gauge Lever Action Axe is sure to be quite a hoot on the range. The Axe’s magazine tube holds five 2½-inch shells, just like its larger Henry .410 siblings, but the addition of a loading gate means that you can keep the gun topped off at all times without having to deal with the magazine tube. Another practical advantage is its size. With a 15.14-inch barrel and an overall length of 26.4 inches, the Axe can be stored in far more places than your average long gun, yet it still bypasses NFA restrictions. The barrel…

Cliffs of Freedom isn’t the first film to use locations far from where the events shown on screen actually took place. In the early 1960s, a number of low-budget Westerns were filmed in Spain and southern Italy in order to cut costs. Originally, these films were released only in Europe, but in 1964, Italian director Sergio Leone filmed A Fistful of Dollars, which was in essence a remake of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo. It starred the up-and-coming Clint Eastwood as the “Man with No Name” and became a cult classic, spawning two sequels: For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.…

What do you do with an overwhelming surplus of percussion revolvers and parts that are rapidly becoming obsolete? That question, and the often discouraging answer, shuttered the doors of many arms-makers after the Civil War. And the Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company could have been one of them were it not for William Mason, one of two brilliant Colt arms designers who took the problem to task and engineered a means of repurposing the once-feted Colt 1860 Army and 1851 Navy models to fire self-contained metallic cartridges. This solution, however, did not come without a great deal of frustration to Mason, his colleague at Colt Charles B. Richards, and the new management of the company headed by the late Samuel Colt’s wife, Elizabeth, and her brother, Richard Jarvis. It was…

The fantastic collection of historic weapons available for viewing at the Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, Missouri, is one that gun lovers and history buffs won’t want to miss. Formally called the NRA National Sporting Arms Museum, it tells the story of sporting firearms of the Old West as well as any other museum anywhere, and it’s located right in the middle of “flyover country.” If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit the National Firearms Museum at NRA Headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, you know what a truly fantastic experience that is. Yet it is a long trip for those living anywhere but on the East Coast. Enter three guys who wanted to ensure that the history of guns, hunting and wildlife conservation was available to more Americans—Bass Pro Shops…

The story of the role women played on the frontier is one that has long been overlooked, especially in popular culture. In movies and TV shows, women have been largely relegated to supporting characters, and while that has changed in recent years, the role women actually played in taming the Old West is still largely misunderstood. New York Times best-selling author and screenwriter Chris Enss has sought to address the misconceptions and misinformation about this period, and has become the most prominent author on the subject of women in the Old West. She has written more than 20 books on the subject, including such colorful titles as Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier (2005), How the West Was Worn: Bustles and Buckskins on the Wild Frontier…

IN 1900, the Arizona Territory was a land of opportunity with vast horizons, plentiful wild game, mining riches and abundant open range. The territory’s population was only 123,000. Tucson was the largest city with 7,351 residents. Although the West may have largely been won, the Arizona Territory was anything but tamed. The sparsely populated territory was infested with outlaws: cattle rustlers, bank robbers, train robbers and killers. At the time, any outlaw with a fast horse stood a good chance of getting away and eluding arrest. In the territory, the town sheriff was only responsible for his town. If the bad guys escaped beyond town limits or committed a crime outside of town, the sheriff generally let it go. He didn’t want to risk getting shot. And county lawmen weren’t…

Even before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, much of Greece came under Ottoman rule, and for much of the next 400 years, the Greeks were forced to live under foreign oppression. There were several revolts over the centuries, but most were quickly put down. This changed when a secret rebel army, the Filiki Eteria , or Society of Friends, formed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and slowly built up its power base. In 1821, the first of these revolts turned into a full-blown war for independence, and while the Greeks had made real progress, infighting among the Greek forces almost ended the hopes for a Greek state. A combined naval force from Russia, Great Britain and France destroyed an Ottoman-Egyptian fleet, and a year later, the Egyptians—who…

Today, it’s easy to think of Greece as one of the cradles of civilization—an ancient republic and land of warriors who built one of the most impressive empires of the classical age. However, in the early 19th century, this rugged land was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, and its equally rugged people were truly subjugated second-class citizens at best. The great ancient city of Athens was little more than a provincial town. Yet with the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, there was a yearning for freedom and independence. For more than 400 years, the Greeks had lived under harsh Turkish oppression, but in 1821, the Greek War of Independence began. This is the subject of the 2019 film Cliffs of Freedom, which has a “Western” feel despite being…

Countless revolver variations found their way into the hands of soldiers, both North and South, during the Civil War. From the diminutive Smith & Wesson Model 1 to the heavy-handed LeMat and everything in between, they all looked very similar to one another. That’s what makes the revolvers designed by Charles S. Pettengill so unique. In an era dominated by single-action revolvers with external hammers, the New-Haven-based inventor created a double-action revolver with an internal hammer. Sure, there were other double-action models available (like those patented by Starr in 1860), but none were what we would today call “hammerless.” Pettengill designed a few different variants. First, in the late 1850s, was the Pocket Model, a .31-caliber design of which just 425 were made across all three variations. Shortly thereafter, the…