American Rifle - Alexander Rose [95]
For understandable reasons, Winchester wished to erase the memory of his nettlesome former mechanic’s name and asked his loyal superintendent Nelson King to make improvements to the product. First to go was the Henry’s somewhat annoying design that required the shooter to load cartridges into the underbarrel magazine from the muzzle end; King kept the magazine where it was but made an opening in its rear so that the operator simply pushed cartridges in and they were driven forward. Winchester claimed that his weapon, dubbed the Model 1866, could fire thirty rounds a minute.
The newly renamed “Winchester” Model 1866 went into production in August. Initially its standard round was a .40-28-200—far too light for the big-gamers—but King managed to cram in seventeen of them, as opposed to the Henry’s sixteen. By the spring of 1867 the first Winchesters were being seen in the West, though they seem to have been limited-edition trial specimens. After Winchester authorized a full-scale advertising campaign in the newspapers out there, demand began to take off, then rocketed.85 Indeed, most of the Indian warriors who used repeaters at the Little Bighorn used Winchesters—ironic testament to their popularity.86
The Model 1866 and its successor, the legendary Model 1873 (or “Winchester ’73,” Billy the Kid’s weapon of choice), was popular with settlers and travelers—the company sold 100,000 of the Model 1866 alone. But it did not make inroads into the professional or military market, mostly owing to its reputation for being underpowered. Comparisons between a Winchester and a Springfield Model 1873 showed that at one hundred yards, the Springfield drilled its bullet ten inches into a block of white pine, double that of the Winchester.87
Hence, according to P. C. Bicknell, who accompanied a team of buffalo hunters in 1876,“the Winchester is the laughing stock among these men—they would not take one as a gift if they had to use it.”88 As late as the end of the 1880s, according to Dr. William Allen, one grizzled frontiersman named Hiram Steward “looked at my Winchester with contempt, calling it an old popgun.” And with that he “slid down from his jackass, pulled his old Sharps from the sling and inserted a .44-75.”89
Yet Steward, by that time, was in the minority, a tetchy holdout clinging to the old ways. During the mid-1870s some experienced warhorses and hunters had come around to recognizing the virtues of repeaters. In 1874 the Indiana-born and Civil War–blooded Lew Wallace (six years later he would write Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ) was already using a Winchester for up-close buffalo hunting in northern Mexico: “The time came to use my Winchester. I selected the place to shoot at—just below the shoulder . . . Goodness!”90 Ten years later, writing in Harper’s magazine, the accomplished huntsman G. O. Shields described his pursuit of antelopes in Montana and proudly said the once-unsayable: that he used a repeater, a Winchester.91
A catalyst for the hunters’ change of heart had been the increasing availability of centerfire ammunition, which helped repeaters erode the single-shot’s superiority in terms of power. Moreover, as the buffalo vanished from the Plains, need diminished for the single-shot’s Big Fifty and its like, since the prey that remained lacked their toughness, size, and vitality. Downing medium game like elk, deer, and antelope simply did not require the heavy loads once thought necessary.
However, the military market remained stoutly impenetrable to Winchester’s salesmen. Had the Indian wars—which were characterized by police actions and small-scale skirmishing, ideal conditions for repeater fire—not already begun to wind down, Winchester and his ilk might have enjoyed more success, but already officers were looking ahead to the army-on-army battles that they believed would typify the defense of American interests against European imperialism. Would short-range