Hollywood made a feature film about it. Buffalo Bill declared it to be "The Boss." Winchester called it, simply, the New Model of 1873. The rifle came from a dingy brick factory in New Haven, Connecticut, the product of men and women who worked in an inferno of noise for $600 a year, 11 hours a day on weekdays, 10 hours on Saturdays. It was a raging success from the beginning, and although it was rapidly outmoded, the 73 was so popular that it remained in production for 52 years. In all, 720,610 of the rifles were made. The 73 was more than a rifle model. It became an American symbol. As gun writer Ned Crossman stated in 1920, the 73 was "the rifle that put the name Winchester on the map of the West, trotting along with the equally formidable Colt gun at the belt of the frontiersman." Unstoppable Ironically, we wouldn't consider the 73 much of a rifle by today's standards. Historian Mike Venturino owns and shoots three original 73s. "It's a 150-yard rifle chambered for a dinky little handgun cartridge," Venturino says. "About the best I can do with my 73s is 3-inch groups at 100 yards, and beyond that, the sights are too coarse for any kind of accuracy. What the 73 did have was firepower. Aiming carefully, I can fire 15 shots in 60 seconds. That's what made the rifle so popular, even when there were more accurate, more powerful guns available." And in an era when many guns were fussy and unreliable, the 73 was just about unstoppable. It would not let you down, ever. In 1875, in a gun battle with Comanche Indians at a place called Enchanted Rock in central Texas, near what is now the town of Llano, a Texas Ranger named George Lloyd accidentally stuffed a .45 Long Colt cartridge into his .44/40 Model 73, jamming the rifle nicely. Pulling out his knife, Lloyd unscrewed the 73's side plate, pried out the .45, replaced the part, and got back in the fight. Evolution of a Gun For 400 years, men whose lives depended on firearms had only one pull of the trigger to save themselves. In the 15 to 30 seconds it took to reload a flintlock or a percussion arm, your time on earth could come to an end. Samuel Colt solved part of the problem. His revolvers were formidable weapons, but they were accurate only at very close range and thus arms of the last resort. It was not until the Civil War that practical repeating rifles appeared. Notable among them was a graceful, brass-framed .44-caliber lever gun called the Henry after its inventor, B. Tyler Henry. It was made by the New Haven Arms Co., formed by Oliver F. Winchester. The Henry was astounding. It held 16 .44 Henry Flat rimfire cartridges, and a good shooter could crank them off like a drumroll. The Henry awed the Confederates, and when it went West after the war, it terrified the Indians who came up against it. In 1866, New Haven Arms' name was changed to the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., and the Henry was succeeded by an improved version called the Model 66. The 66 was successful, but it was chambered for the same weak cartridge.
