The Gun That Won the West? The Truth Behind Winchester's Slogan

A rifle, a revolver and one cartridge

In 1873, Winchester introduced a rifle chambered for a new cartridge it called the .44 Winchester Center Fire, now known as the .44-40. It was the first centerfire cartridge the company manufactured. Within a few years, Colt offered a version of its new Single Action Army revolver in the same round, eventually marketed as the Frontier Six Shooter.

That pairing is the seed of a legend. A traveler, a rancher or a lawman could carry one box of ammunition that fed both a repeating rifle and a revolver. It is easy to see why the 1873 became, in the popular imagination, the rifle of the frontier. Winchester leaned into that idea with a phrase it still uses today. The page for the modern Model 1873 on Winchester's own website calls it the "Gun That Won the West."

The question worth asking 150 years later: is it true?

What the 1873 actually was

Start with the numbers. Winchester produced more than 720,000 Model 1873s between 1873 and 1923, which is a staggering figure for its day. After the .44-40, it was also chambered in .38-40 and .32-20, both popular handgun cartridges of the era.

It was a refinement of a family. The Henry rifle of 1860, built by the New Haven Arms Company, gave rise to the Winchester Model 1866 "Yellow Boy," which added a loading gate invented by employee Nelson King and a wooden forearm. The 1873 continued that lineage, and its big leap was the centerfire cartridge. It was, in fact, the first lever-action rifle to use one.

Winchester also sold it as a status object. In 1875 the company created a premium "One of One Thousand" grade with set triggers and special finishing. Only about 136 were sold. A second, less exclusive "One of One Hundred" grade sold just eight. Those rare rifles are now some of the most valuable American long guns, and they later became the basis for one of Hollywood's most famous Westerns.

The rifle the Army actually carried

Here is the first problem with the slogan: the United States Army did not adopt the Winchester 1873.

The same year, a board led by General Alfred H. Terry tested 99 rifles, Winchester's among them, and the Army adopted a single-shot breechloader instead: the Springfield Model 1873, the "Trapdoor," in .45-70 Government. Springfield Armory built 567,882 of them between 1873 and 1884, and it remained the main service rifle until replacement began in 1892 with a bolt-action design derived from the Krag-Jørgensen.

The .45-70 itself tells you why. Its name describes a .45-caliber bullet and 70 grains of black powder, behind a 405-grain lead bullet. It was a long-range military round. The .44-40 was a pistol-length cartridge. Military planners of the 1870s valued range, a robust single-shot action and ammunition economy over the 1873's rapid fire.

And the Army's standard revolver was the Colt Single Action Army, adopted in 1873 and issued until 1892, in .45 Colt.

The repeaters on the other side

The second problem with the slogan is less comfortable.

At the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, Custer's battalion carried the single-shot Springfield carbine. On the other side, Lakota, Dakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho fighters used Henry repeating rifles extensively, along with other firearms. Archaeological work on the battlefield in 1983 found that a small share of recovered Army casings, about 3.4 percent, showed signs of having been pried from jammed weapons.

That is a long way from the poster version of history. The lever-action repeater did shape the West, but not only, or even mainly, in the hands of the settlers and soldiers the slogan imagines. The phrase "won the West" also glosses over the people who already lived there. For a modern reader, that is worth holding in mind when the nickname appears on a box.

So who won? Nobody, and many guns

Historians and collectors tend to agree that no single firearm "won" anything. The frontier was a long, varied era of homesteading, ranching, railroads, mining, military campaigns and treaties. Many guns played a part:

The 1873 can fairly claim to be the most popular civilian repeating rifle of the period. It cannot fairly claim to have won the West by itself.

How Hollywood finished the job

If marketing launched the slogan, the movies cemented it. Winchester '73, released in 1950 and starring James Stewart, built its plot around the rifle: a prized, nearly perfect "One of One Thousand" Model 1873 that passes from hand to hand across the frontier. Generations of moviegoers met the rifle through Westerns long before most of them saw an original.

This site's piece on lever guns in American film covers what the screen got right and wrong about guns of the period.

The Henry's shadow

It is worth pausing on the rifle that made the 1873 possible, because it complicates the slogan from another direction. Benjamin Tyler Henry received his patent on October 16, 1860, for a .44-caliber rimfire repeater with a 15-round tubular magazine, built by the New Haven Arms Company, where Oliver Winchester was the money and the driving force. The first Henrys reached Union soldiers in mid-1862.

The U.S. government bought 1,731 standard Henry rifles during the Civil War, but many more were bought privately by soldiers who wanted the firepower, and over 10,000 are believed to have seen service in the war. Confederate cavalry leader John Mosby is credited with calling it "that damned Yankee rifle" that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.

When Henry tried to wrest control of the company from Winchester in 1864, Winchester blocked him and reorganized the business under his own name. The improved rifle that came out of that fight was the Model 1866, and seven years later, the 1873. In other words, the Gun That Won the West was the grandchild of a Civil War rifle whose inventor left the company that made his name famous. The site's collectors' glossary decodes the terms you will see on Henrys and early Winchesters.

Why the myth still matters

It is tempting to dismiss the slogan, but there is something true underneath it. The 1873 was the gun ordinary people bought: ranchers, hunters, stage drivers and travelers who wanted a fast-handling repeater that shared a cartridge with a revolver. That civilian popularity, not military adoption, is the real legacy.

The rifle never really disappeared, either. After original production ended in 1923, the design lived on through reproductions, and Italy's Uberti is now one of the best-known makers of high-quality '73 rifles and carbines. Winchester's own licensed version, built by Miroku in Japan, was reintroduced in 2013. Modern versions are made in .357 Magnum and .45 Colt as well as .44-40, a chambering the original never offered in .45 Colt, and they remain a favorite in cowboy action shooting.

If you would rather shoot the cartridge most modern shooters own, a Cimarron 1873 Short Rifle in .357/.38 gives the same silhouette in a more common chambering.

Shooting a piece of the legend

Modern 1873 reproductions are built for modern smokeless loads in their marked chambering, but they are still nineteenth-century designs. Use standard-pressure factory ammunition for the caliber stamped on the barrel, and lead flat-nose or round-nose bullets in the tube magazine. The .44-40 Winchester ammo selection includes loads suited to these rifles.

The verdict on the slogan

Was the Winchester 1873 the Gun That Won the West? Not in the way the phrase suggests. The Army carried a single-shot Springfield and a Colt revolver. Native American fighters carried repeaters at the Little Bighorn. Dozens of guns, and far more than guns, shaped the era.

But as the most popular civilian repeater of its time, a rifle that shared ammunition with the revolver on the hip of nearly every Western archetype, the 1873 earned a place in the story that no other long gun quite matches. The slogan is marketing. The rifle is real.

Editorial note: This is an independent editorial overview built from manufacturer specifications, retailer listings and published sources. We have not performed hands-on testing of the products discussed, and nothing here is a performance guarantee. Verify specifications, compatibility and the law where you live.

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