Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2021 i Guns of the Old West

THE OLD WEST was populated with as varied an assortment of folks as we have today, but due to the “wide open spaces” and a lesser amount of civilization in the more remote locales, some interesting characters developed. One such individual, who has been described as a mountain man, was long-haired Orrin Porter Rockwell. A native of Massachusetts, Porter’s neighbor was Joseph Smith, the man who wrote The Book of Mormon, which Rockwell helped to publish. Porter was baptized into Smith’s church at age 16 and followed him on his journeys. After being forced out of Missouri, the Mormons settled for a time in Nauvoo, Illinois, and founded a temple. In 1842 Rockwell was accused of the attempted assassination of Lilburn Boggs, the Missouri governor who’d evicted the Mormons. Following…

The original Winchester Model 71 was designed for hunters who wanted to deliver a big-bore punch to big game. A few generations ago, hunters in Alaska and Canada thought highly of the Model 71, appreciating the rifle’s caliber on big game like moose and bear. The Taylor’s & Company Model 1886/71 follows the same tradition of big-bore power and fast follow-up shots. You might need to study the Taylor’s 71 some because it is as close to a new Winchester Model 71 as you can get. In .45-70 caliber, however, it is a dead giveaway this is a newly manufactured gun since most Model 71 rifles were chambered in .348 Winchester—a bone-crushing, shoulder-punching round that could easily put down any North American big game, from elk and moose to bear.…

THE 1851 NAVY was Colt's second best-selling revolver. Outsold only by Colt's 1849 Pocket Pistol, it is arguably the most recognized cap-and-ball sixgun in the world. If ever a gun were to be considered a classic, certainly the 1851 Navy Colt would rate near the top of anyone’s famous firearms list. It could be debated that this caplock six-shooter was the first truly practical revolver, since those Colts that preceded it were either lacking in ergonomics and design refinements, or were simply too big and cumbersome, or too small and underpowered. The ’51 Navy model represented the peak of firearms technology of its day. It married lightweight, excellent balance, natural pointing and handling characteristics, practical accuracy and man-stopping power, all in a one-hand gun. During its 23 years of production,…

IN the late 1850s, Smith & Wesson become successful making high-quality, small-bore, tip-up barrel loading, single-action handguns with bored-through cylinders designed for metallic, rimfire cartridges. The factory used numbers to designate the frame sizes of their various guns. The No. 1 was .22 caliber, the No. 1-1/2 was .32 Short, and the No. 2 was .32 Long. The No. 3 was their largest frame and served as the basis for several popular models, of which the American was the first. When Smith & Wesson’s large-frame No. 3 American revolver hit the market in 1870, it was a watershed moment in firearms history. Chambered in .44 Henry Rimfire or, more often, their newly contrived centerfire .44/100 (.44 American) cartridge, it was the first successful American big-bore revolver designed from the start…

Americans, both the North and South variety, have had an affinity for lever-action long guns since they were perfected some 160 years ago. The lever gun is uniquely American and initially gained popularity during the era of the Old West. Cowboys, settlers, lawmen and outlaws took to the lever-action rifle for its firepower, fast handling and ease of use. Its popularity extended up to Canada and down through Mexico, into Central and South America. Whether you were a cowboy, vaquero or gaucho, you probably had a lever gun in a scabbard attached to your saddle. While most lever-action rifles and carbines were manufactured in the United States, there were some outfits “south of the border” that also began producing them. Amadeo Rossi entered into the firearms production field in 1889.…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I worked a summer at Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado. If a tour bus pulled up and the reflective-vest-wearing line leader barked Italian into his megaphone, I could bet my minimum-wage job a posse of dress-up cowboys was about to mosey through the gift shop. We Americano cash register jockeys—divorced mainly from our own national history—always chuckled at these man purse-toting cowboys. Beneath our joshing of these tourists was an honest question none of us could answer: “What’s up with Italians and their love for the American West?” To us, the Italian fascination with the West seemed like a goofy culture quirk. This question surfaced again for me last summer while standing on the line at my local NRA Metallic Silhouette league. Pistol-caliber lever…

STARING DOWN THE BARRELS OF A LARGE CALIBER HOWDAH PISTOL can be just as intimidating as being on the wrong end of a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, and at a glance it is an easy mistake to make. The double-barreled pistol is a very old design dating back to smoothbore double-barreled wheellock pistols from the 1600s. Flintlock designs, like those on which Pedersoli based its new Howdah model, may well have been the “inspiration” for sawed-off doubles seen in the mid to late 19th and early 20th centuries, the latter famously manufactured in the United States by Ithaca Gun Co. from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s as sawed-off shotguns (outlawed by the National Firearms Act of 1934) but reproduced today as a rifled-barrel pistol by Pedersoli and chambered in .45…

JOHN WAYNE is one of America’s most iconic actors. Although he played many different parts in his 142 films—from Genghis Khan to an oil rig firefighter and even a Green Beret in “Nam”—most of the folks in my generation see Duke as synonymous with characters of the Old West. Wayne’s movie career started with a Western, The Big Trail, in 1930. Sadly, it flopped, and he ended up playing numerous leading roles in B-movies, most of them Westerns. His break came in 1939 when he starred in John Ford’s Stagecoach, which made Wayne a mainstream star. As Duke’s popularity increased, his Westerns took on a “formula” with a regular troupe of actors and the screenplays recognizable as a John Wayne Western. However, some of his early Old West protagonists could…

After briefly tending the St. Louis shop, William traveled west. Years later, a .56-caliber muzzle-loader bearing his name was found under a pile of rocks in Querino Canyon, Arizona. Sam Hawken had run the business alone since his brother Jacob’s death from cholera in 1849. His son’s disappearance at the onset of the Civil War pushed Sam to hire a helper. J.P. Gemmer had arrived in 1838 from Germany. In 1862 he bought the Hawken enterprise. As breechloaders bled the last of the great buffalo herds, Gemmer built rifles of smaller bore. Samuel Hawken outlived Bridger, Carson and other famous customers. He died May 9, 1884, at 92. The Hawken shop had changed St. Louis locations in 1870, 1876 and 1880. Three years after a final move in 1912, it…