Ah, a selection of 1873s.
It's a little short.
Ah, I can take a bayonet.
Pretty long and a little unwieldy there.
Ah-ha-ha, now this,
this is just right.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns they are going to be selling
in their upcoming June of 2017 Regional Auction.
And today we are going to continue our look at the development of the
Winchester lever action rifle with the Model of 1873.
Which, by the way, was the first Winchester to actually have a formal year designation.
So the first gun in this series was the Henry repeating rifle.
That was replaced by the Winchester repeating rifle or, as we know it today, the 1866.
And then when they improved the '66 it became the 1873 model.
And that one was actually formally identified by Winchester as the Model of 1873, in order to distinguish it from the earlier version.
Now, what's the big improvement to the '73? It is the cartridges.
So, all previous versions of the Winchester rifle had been rimfire, they'd fired the .44 Henry rimfire cartridge.
Which fired a 200 grain bullet at about 1,200 feet per second. It used 26 to 28 grains of black powder.
With this rifle they introduced a centrefire cartridge, the .44 Winchester Centre Fire.
It retained that same 200 grain bullet from the Henry cartridge,
but now it was backing it with 40 grains of black powder, instead of 26 or 28. So a pretty substantial increase in pressure.
This was able to bump the velocity up to like ... 1,325 feet per second for the .44 Winchester Centre Fire cartridge.
Now, this is also known as the .44-40, based on the .44 calibre bullet and the 40 grains of black powder.
And you'll see different designations used for it when different companies produce it.
So when Winchester was making guns in this calibre, they were marked .44 W.C.F.,
Winchester Centre Fire, to really highlight the fact that Winchester developed the cartridge.
When other companies were using it, for example, Colt introduced the Frontier model of their single action
Army revolver in 1878 chambered for this cartridge as a result of the huge demand for it
from people who wanted to be able to use the same ammunition in their Winchester rifle and their Colt revolver,
when Colt introduced the cartridge, they called it the .44-40
because they didn't want to refer to Winchester in the markings on their own gun.
You'll see the same thing, by the way, with the .30 Winchester centrefire and the .30-30.
Same cartridge, different marking depending on who's using it.
Anyway, what this cartridge did it was more powerful, which is a benefit unto itself.
Being centrefire it was a more reliable cartridge.
It was also reloadable. And this is not a trivial change, the rimfire cartridges couldn't be reloaded.
And if you're out on the frontier, as many people who purchased these rifles were,
being able to collect your brass meant that all you needed was powder, easily available,
lead and a mould, easily available, and primers, which
were the hardest part to get, but even the primers were at least were standardised and small.
If you could get those components you could make new ammunition for yourself.
Winchester actually sold a complete reloading kit to go along with these rifles, if you wanted it. They charged 5 bucks for the kit.
In comparison they charged 35 to 55 dollars for the rifles, or more if you really went crazy on special options.
Now, in addition to the cartridge there were a couple of other advantages to the 1873.
It no longer had that yellow receiver, they had gotten away from gunmetal and they were now using iron or steel for the receivers.
That was stronger and it allowed them to make the guns lighter, which was a nice improvement.
And they added a sliding dust cover to the top of the receiver.
It was an automatic dust cover, so you close it by hand but then when you cycled the action it would automatically open.
So you didn't have to manually open it before you could start shooting,
and that just did a good job of helping to keep dirt and debris out of the action.
So the 1873 would prove to be a fantastically popular and successful rifle.
It entered production in 1873 and it stayed in production all the way until 1923,
despite being basically mechanically made obsolete by the later Winchester 1892 model.
Over 720,000 of these rifles would be manufactured.
And with this model, Winchester really started introducing special options that you could get.
Some of these were available on the '66, but it's really on the '73 that they came into their own.
So you could get these rifles in three standard lengths, the carbine was a 20 inch barrel and a 12 round magazine capacity.
The rifle was a 24 inch barrel and a 15 round magazine capacity.
And the musket was a 27 inch barrel with a 17 round magazine capacity
You could also order custom barrel lengths, pretty much ... any multiple of 2 inches,
from 14 up to 36 inch Winchester could and did make.
This carbine that we have here is actually a 15 inch carbine. Those short ones are typically called Trapper carbines.
And it's interesting to point out that those would technically be liable to registration under
the National Firearms Act as short barrelled rifles, except that they
pretty much have all have been exempted because of their antique and collectible status.
The Mexican ... Rurales, the civil police department in rural Mexico, actually bought a substantial number of 15 inch carbines,
1873 carbines, that actually had shortened, like half length, magazine tubes so that they could also fit bayonets. That's an interesting variant.
And then you could get full length magazine tubes, you could get half length magazine tubes.
You could get a wide variety of front and rear sights.
You could get high quality wood, you could get normal wood, you could get a ... fancy pistol grip.
You could get several different variations of buttplate.
Everything from a flat shotgun style to a Swiss schuetzen style heavily curved buttplate with prongs top and bottom.
Pretty much whatever you wanted you could get as a custom option on the Winchester 1873.
And this is part of what led to their popularity. Now, the early guns tended to be more standard,
the late guns tended to have more options as more and more things were added to the catalogue over time.
The most common single variant of this gun would be this guy,
the 24 inch rifle with an octagonal barrel was the most popular single style.
And the most common calibre was the .44-40, Winchester Centre Fire.
Although in 1879 they would introduce the .38-40, which was basically the same cartridge necked down to .38 calibre.
In 1882 I believe they introduce a .32-20, which was again a yet smaller version if you wanted a .32 calibre rifle,
and they would even introduce some .22 rimfire versions of the 1873 as well.
Despite all this, .44 remained the most popular calibre.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at some of the mechanics on this,
and there are some more details to the cartridge that are relevant and interesting.
I've already loosened the screw here and so if we take this side plate off
we see our old friend, the Henry action.
There haven't been any mechanical changes to this system since the 1860 Henry.
We still have a pair of toggle locks inside there, ... the lever breaks this toggle down,
allows it to compress, cycle a cartridge, and then when it's in full extension like this
it creates a nice strong joint which prevents the bolt from blowing open when you fire the gun.
So nothing there has ... changed mechanically, the change to a steel receiver does help the strength.
But what really ... allowed the '73 to use a more powerful cartridge than the '66 and the Henry
was in the development of the .44-40 cartridge itself.
The original Henry cases had actually been made out of copper,
and that was a pretty weak material, it had a tendency to burst.
The new .44 Winchester cartridges were made with brass cases.
That was a much stronger material (that's why we continue to use brass to this day).
And that's what really allowed the extra powder charge to be put in to make the rifle more powerful.
And it wasn't just the fact that it was centrefire and stronger that made the .44-40 a good cartridge.
Winchester put a fair amount of thought and development into this.
So it's not a straight walled cartridge, it does actually have a slight neck
and that neck was in there in order to improve the obturation of the cartridge.
That is to say the expansion and gas seal of the cartridge against the wall of the barrel.
By having that little bit of a neck they were able to amplify the pressure and make a better gas seal
to prevent black powder fouling. Because remember these are still black powder cartridges, all of them.
Smokeless powder won't be invented for another 10 or 15 years.
And if you got a lot of black powder fouling into the action, you could jam up the works.
So having a good seal in the breech was an important element,
and the .44 Winchester centrefire cartridge did that pretty darn well.
The markings on these haven't really changed that much from the Henry and the 1866.
These are still marked Winchester Repeating Arms Company. And they specifically call out King's Patent,
which is the nice improved loading gate, as well as the original 1860 patent from the Henry rifle.
Once Winchester introduced the .38-40, or .38 Winchester Centre Fire cartridge,
they started marking the chambering on all of the guns.
Before that they were all in .44, so there wasn't a need to specifically mark the guns.
You'll find chamber markings either on the top or the side flat of the barrel here, as well as
on the elevator itself.
So you'll find .38, .32, .22 calibre because they did in fact make some ... .22 rimfire versions, as well as .44 calibre.
And by the way, they left these elevators made out of brass or gunmetal because they weren't susceptible to rusting.
So, if you had this steel here but gunmetal here, there was no chance of the elevator rusting
into the receiver of the gun if they were neglected out in the field, and that was an important point to consider.
Moving back to the markings, we will have the serial numbers on the lower tang, this is a pretty high example,
a pretty late production gun. And then we have the model name on the upper tang.
So this late production example does actually have Model 1873 and Winchester on it.
But the early versions of the gun just say Model 1873.
Of course, you know with nearly three quarters of a million of these made there are a lot of variations,
not just in markings, but also in small details to the manufacture and the shape of the various parts.
And I am not trying to make these videos any sort of comprehensive guide to those changes.
And of course it's not just minor manufacturing changes,
it's also the plethora of special custom options that you could get on the guns.
So even here we can see a couple of those, the carbine, this little trapper carbine, has a sling ring on it,
a saddle ring for attaching a sling.
It has a shotgun style of buttplate, which is not quite perfectly flat, but fairly flat.
The rifle up here has the style of stock that was more common on the rifles, which is more curved and pointed at the tip.
The wood is slightly different.
And then of course obviously the sights at the front end are different, the fore ends are different.
Because these were commercial guns and not a standardised military contract, variations abounded.
So the 1873 was not just an excellent frontiersman's rifle,
it could kind of do everything that you would need a rifle to do in that situation on the frontier.
It was an adequate hunting rifle, it was an adequate defensive rifle, in fact it was a fantastic defensive rifle.
It offered a tremendous volume of firepower,
people were starting to get used to that concept by 1873,
it wasn't quite the novelty that it had been in 1860 with the Henry.
But this was still absolutely the go to rifle if you needed firepower.
And of course they were heavily used in the Indian Wars by civilians.
The US military still wasn't interested, and in fact never would be interested in a lever action rifle like this.
But they were absolutely used by scouts, by civilians, and by Indian forces.
At the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where Custer got himself annihilated,
a substantial portion of the Indian forces were armed with Henrys and 1866s and even 1873s.
They would have been pretty new on the market at that point, but this technology absolutely got out
into the hands of many of the Indian warriors, and they also appreciated the firepower that a rifle like this would provide them.
There are a bunch of 1873s in this particular auction, in addition to these three in particular.
I've got links to the catalogue pages for these three specific ones in the description text below.
So take a look at that if you would be interested in adding any of these specifically to you own personal collection.
And if you want to browse through the others that Rock Island has, well,
check out the catalogue and do some exploring there, because you'll find some neat guns.
Thanks for watching, and next time we will continue with the big brother of the '73, the Winchester '76.