Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns that they are going to
be selling in their upcoming June of 2017 Regional Auction.
And today we're going to continue taking a look at the
development of the Winchester lever action rifle.
When we left off last we had taken a look at the Winchester 1873.
It was the first really just ... massively popular rifle from
Winchester, it would sell almost three quarters of a million rifles.
It fired the new Winchester .44 calibre centrefire cartridge.
The cartridge was great. The rifle was really good.
They'd finally overcome pretty much all of the original
problems or shortcomings of the Henry.
So where do they go now? Well, the one complaint that was still left with people was that,
well, the 1873 fired what was in every way a pistol cartridge.
There are a lot of guys out on the frontier who were looking at things like
buffalo hunting, or defence against bears, or long-range shooting. And they wanted something
that was more powerful, something more along the lines of the US army cartridge, the .45-70,
which was used in the single shot Trapdoor Springfield rifles by the military.
So Winchester looked into adapting their lever action system for the .45-70, and it didn't work.
And there were two reasons why. First off, the toggle link system that Winchester had been using
it was really borderline for a cartridge that powerful.
And the second problem, and maybe even the more significant problem, was that
.45-70 was available with a wide variety of bullet weights.
... The two really common ones were 405 grain, which was the cavalry loading,
and 500 grain, which was the infantry loading or the full rifle loading.
And the brass case was the same length for both, but the bullets would vary substantially in length.
And the way the Winchester system worked, it had a full length elevator
that lifted cartridges from the magazine tube up to the barrel.
And ... that was not compatible with a cartridge of an inconsistent length.
So if they had managed to make the gun strong enough for .45-70,
it only would have worked with one specific overall length of cartridge.
So it would have had to have been, "This rifle is for the .45-70 with
a 405 grain bullet, or with a 500 grain bullet, but it couldn't do both."
If the elevator was too short, obviously a cartridge wouldn't fit and it would jam.
If the elevator was too long, the back end of a second cartridge
would try to cram its way onto the elevator and the rifle would jam and not work.
So what Winchester did, they wanted to address this market for a more powerful cartridge in this style of repeating rifle,
so what they did was develop their own new cartridge, that they defined,
that only had one bullet weight to it. And that was the .45-75 cartridge.
It was actually a bottle-necked round, looked kind of vaguely like the .577/450 British Martini-Henry round,
and it fired a 350 grain bullet at a little over 1,300 feet per second (or close to 1,400 - in that range).
And they took that cartridge and they coupled it with a scaled up version of the Winchester 1873,
and the result was the Winchester 1876.
Now the 76 still uses that exact same toggle mechanism that dates all the way back to the Henry repeating rifle.
It's just bigger now. Bigger receiver, bigger toggles, bigger elevator, all allows them to use a bigger cartridge.
Although this is really getting to the limit of how much they can stretch that system,
because it is mechanically not that strong of a system, relatively speaking.
But .45-75 was good enough for what they needed.
Over the next 10 years or so they would bring out three other cartridges for the 1876 rifle.
They would bring out the .45-60, which was a straight walled case.
It was basically a shortened version of the government .45-70.
They would bring out the .40-60, where they necked it down to .40 calibre.
That was kind of wimpy relative to the other cartridges.
And they'd also try necking it up to the .50-95, which was probably the most powerful of the batch.
These were all firing [210] to 350 grain bullets at 1,300 to 1,500 feet per second. They're all black powder cartridges.
And they were good enough. This was a popular rifle with kind of a niche market.
They only sold about 64,000 or 65,000 of these guns,
and they were sold from 1876, when they were first introduced, through like 1898.
However, a lot of that was left over parts that were still being assembled and sold slowly.
Because the next rifle that Winchester would release would be the 1886, and when the 86 came out
(we'll talk about the 86 in a following video),
but when the 86 came out demand for the 76 pretty much evaporated overnight.
So they stopped manufacturing new components for the 76 in 1886,
and then for another 10 or 13 years they were able to assemble what they had
to supply guns to the market that people were still ordering.
Because of course at that point one of these would be cheaper than one of the brand new rifles,
and that ensured that there would still be people interested in buying them.
Now, before the 86 came out, when this was the option for a powerful Winchester repeating rifle,
it was popular with people who were looking for that type of rifle.
Theodore Roosevelt, for example, had a .45-75 calibre Winchester 76 that he was quite fond of.
He thought it was an excellent rifle for grizzly bear.
There was a batch of rifles, like ... 1,600 or 1,700 of them,
purchased and officially adopted by the Canadian North-West Mounted Police.
We actually have one of those right here.
They purchased carbines. They wanted the option of the kind of a military style of rear sight.
And they purchased guns in the .45-75 cartridge.
At any rate, as with the 1873, you could get a huge variety of options with these rifles.
So there were three standard lengths, as you may notice is becoming typical of Winchesters.
You could get the carbine. The carbine had a 22 inch barrel, which gave you a 9 round magazine capacity.
You could get a rifle which had a 28 inch standard barrel and a 12 round capacity.
Or you could get the really huge musket version with a 32 inch barrel and a 13 round magazine capacity.
Or if you wanted to be fancy you could pretty much order anything between 20 and 32 or 36 inches,
typically in two inch increments.
You could get the standard sporting model with a straight stock,
you could get the fancy model with a pistol grip stock on it.
You could get a variety of styles of butt plate.
You'd get all manner of sights, tang sights you could get on there. Single set triggers.
If you wanted it to be fancy you could get higher quality wood, you could get engraving, you could get nickel plating.
If you're really looking to blow some money you could get gold plating.
Everything was customisable on these rifles.
Alright, so just in case you haven't seen any of the previous videos (which you should go back and watch, by the way),
let's go ahead and pull the side plate off of one of these and we'll compare it to the 1873,
and you can see exactly what I mean by: same mechanism, just scaled up.
So here's our 1876 and here's our 1873,
and I think you can pretty clearly see the size difference between the two.
So I've already taken out the screws holding on the side plates.
Take those off, and you can see this is exactly the same system on both guns.
We just have a slightly longer toggle on the 76 than we do on the 73.
You can also see that very clearly by looking at the cartridge elevators on the two guns.
The 1876 is like 50% longer than the 1873 to accommodate those longer cartridges.
And the loading gate is slightly longer as well, again, for exactly the same reason.
Most of the rest of the details are going to stay the same though, so the markings on the top of the barrel
basically are identical, in fact literally identical to the 1873.
We also have the model marking just like the 73, except of course this is an 1876 pattern.
And we have the serial number on the bottom tang, right here.
Now this particular example has this additional stamp. That's APP 101, that is Alberta Provincial Police.
Now this is actually a rifle that was purchased by the Canadian North-West Mounted Police in the 1880s.
They specified a few things, they had the .45-75 calibre, they had a military style of sight,
and they used a carbine length with the full length stock.
And these rifles, they bought like 1,600 of them,
and in 1916 they were actually resold to the Alberta Provincial Police for the sum of
it was like $1,100 for the remaining 900 and some carbines that existed at that point.
So by that time the Mounted Police had replaced their guns with, I believe, either Ross or Lee-Enfield rifles.
And so they surplussed their old Winchesters to the Alberta Provincial Police, who subsequently marked them
down here right behind the serial number, and kept them for a while before they were
again sold off as surplus and eventually ended up on the collector market.
As with the 73s, you'll have calibre markings on the back of the barrel,
as well as on the cartridge elevator.
The dust cover from the 1873 was also retained of course.
So you manually slide it into position, and then when you
open the action, the dust cover opens.
So that does a pretty good job of keeping dirt and gunk out of the guns when you're not actually using them.
Interestingly, the first small batch of 1876 rifles that were made did not have the dust covers,
because it was discovered that the dust cover did a good enough job of sealing up the action
that if you had it closed and had a case burst it would actually do substantially more damage to the gun,
and maybe also potentially the shooter, than if you had the thing open.
If it was open and a case burst, ... the gas was able to vent out of the receiver much more easily.
Now, that wasn't all that common of an occurrence,
and so they ended up putting the dust covers back on after a short period of time.
But an interesting little note about the original production.
So with the 1876, Winchester filled one of the big holes in their collection of firearms that they could offer on the market.
They now had the 1873, pistol calibre, lots of capacity, very fast shooting,
light recoiling. Could be compatible with your pistol.
... At that point, a few years after the 73 came out, a lot of revolver manufacturers started offering their guns in
.44 Winchester Centre Fire. So you could have a rifle and a pistol in the same calibre,
pretty handy. That was kind of the gunfighter solution.
And then you also had guns that appealed to the hunters, or the guys who wanted a more powerful round.
And that was the 1876. So you get your full power cartridge, a much larger bullet,
you know, ... almost 100% more bullet weight than in the 1873 with the same nice high muzzle velocity.
You still have that rapid repeating action. Even the carbine had 9 rounds in the magazine,
a 10th round in the chamber if you wanted. And that was a lot of firepower for that time.
... Honestly, it's still quite a lot of firepower to this day, so.
If you would like to be like Winchester's customers in 1876 and pick up a large calibre
Winchester repeating rifle for yourself, I have links to these two in the description text below.
Those links will take you to Rock Island's catalogue pages for these two particular rifles.
And you can take a look at their description and estimated pricing and pictures and all the rest there.
There are a number of other 1876 Winchesters in this auction,
so if you do some browsing through the catalogue you can find those as well.
Thanks for watching.