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.
Now today we are continuing our series on the development
of the Winchester lever-action rifle.
And we're taking a look at the rifle that was actually called
"The Winchester Rifle" upon its introduction.
Today we would refer to this as the 1866 Winchester rifle,
but when it came out it was the first of the batch.
It was in fact the first and only thing that the Winchester
Repeating Arms Company had ever produced,
and it was differentiated from its predecessor which was
the Henry repeating rifle. Although at first
these are actually ... marketed as improved Henry rifles,
because at that point ... the name that people were aware of
was Henry, and Winchester was this brand new thing.
Now the main improvement of the Winchester, the '66, was its magazine.
And this had been one of the main shortcomings of the Henry rifle.
The 1866 Winchester retained the exact same lever action, same mechanics, the same cartridge.
This was still a rimfire rifle, dual firing pins just like the Henry had used.
But this added the King's Patent Loading Gate. Now
in 1866 a guy named Nelson King took over the job of superintendent of this factory from Benjamin Tyler Henry,
and he did it under unfortunate circumstances.
In fact, why don't we discuss that briefly? Henry had been the guy, ... his name was the patent on this rifle.
Oliver Winchester didn't design this rifle. Oliver Winchester was a financier and a businessman
who made the rifle possible financially.
But Henry's the one who actually designed it, or designed the iteration of it that was the Henry.
Development of this goes way back through a lot of people and ideas.
Anyway, when the rifle actually went into production what would have been typical
would be ... you have an inventor and a financier, or an inventor who sold his patent to a company.
And typically, most commonly, an inventor would get a lump sum payment in exchange for his patent.
It was also possible, it was also done, to get a royalty payment.
So for every rifle made the guy who was running the company will pay the inventor a certain fixed amount.
Well, the New Haven Arms Company was running short of money when they got into the Henry,
and they ... were trying to find ways to reduce their expenses.
And so Oliver Winchester, being a pretty savvy businessman, came up with a different arrangement.
Henry ... attributed his patent to Winchester, gave him all the rights to it, in exchange for no financial compensation,
but instead was guaranteed a contract to make 5,000 Henry rifles,
and they would be sold at a fixed price to the New Haven Arms Company.
Basically the deal was Henry ... knew exactly what price he would sell all of his guns for,
which included a markup to give him some profit and some income.
And it meant that the company didn't have to pay for material or labour or anything.
They were able to guarantee their fixed price for the rifles, and didn't acquire any additional debt in the process.
Henry's job was to arrange for the actual manufacture of the guns.
And whatever the difference was between what his expenses were and the fixed price that he was going to get for the guns,
that was his profit. And this actually worked out reasonably well for Henry.
He made about twice as much money doing that as he would've if he had if he had taken the
normal expected salary as the superintendent of the factory.
Now we'll leave out his potential profit as inventor and owner of the patent, but
... the problem here is Henry was a gunsmith, and that's what he was good at.
Winchester was a businessman, and that's what he was good at.
And pretty soon this turned into a question of business instead of a question of making rifles.
And Henry at the end of the Civil War was
... annoyed that he wasn't making more money on this invention that was actually his idea.
Winchester was doing pretty well, the company was doing pretty well, Henry didn't do badly,
but he felt that he wasn't getting as much as he could have, as much as he deserved.
So he made a bid to actually take over the entire company.
He wanted to have the court system basically give him the company, take it away from Winchester's ownership,
And it didn't go his way. Ultimately what had happened was Winchester owned the patent,
... basically Winchester was able to say, "OK, the company's all yours. I'm founding this new company,
and by the way this new company is going to use the patent for all of this technology that we already have."
So what Henry ended up with was a worthless husk.
And about at this point a new superintendent takes over for Winchester, the new company is called the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.
And that's how Winchester's name became attached to these rifles.
Now Nelson King was the new superintendent, and he, along with several other people,
had been experimenting with ways to improve the magazine system on the Henry.
This under-barrel, open tube, exposed follower, pull the thing to the front and rotate the barrel, all that was not ideal.
And what King came up with was a very slick, simple and effective system.
It was the King's Patent Loading Gate, right here.
And we'll take one of these apart in just a moment and you'll see this thing is one flexible piece of sheet metal.
That's it on the inside. It looks more complicated from the outside than it really is.
What this allowed you to do was take what was essentially a Henry rifle
but instead of having to take it out of action to reload, you could reload this thing basically while you're shooting.
You could fire a round and then immediately top it off, load another round in.
If you fired it empty you could load the full magazine tube,
or you could only load a couple rounds, whatever was convenient for you.
You could fire a couple of rounds and then duck behind something and load a couple rounds back into the gun.
It got rid of the problem of the follower jamming on your hand.
It allowed the magazine tube to be completely enclosed, which meant it was stronger.
And it also meant it could be stronger while also being thinner. Because it was a complete circle
it had the strength of that geometric shape, which allowed the ... overall rifle to be made lighter.
It was a massive improvement in the practicality of the system, and it became massively popular.
Where the Henry, they'd manufactured 12,000 or maybe 13,000 of them. I think it was about 12,000.
The [Winchester] manufactured 170,000. This gun was in production from nominally 1866
(although it didn't really hit the market until a year or two later when they'd actually got production going),
they were producing them all the way until 1898.
So a full 30 years, despite being a rimfire case. By the time these were out of production they were thoroughly obsolete.
But they were still so well liked that they were still selling some of them into the 1890s.
This was also again tested militarily, if you recall from ... the previous video on the Henry,
that several of the ... US military objections to the Henry were also based on this magazine system.
The US military did not adopt these, but they did start to get a bunch of foreign military orders.
Turkey in particular bought more than 50,000 of these rifles.
To put that in context that's almost a third of the total production.
They sold a ton of guns to Turkey, they sold 6,000 of them to France ... for the Franco-Prussian war,
they were sold to Chile, they were sold to Peru. In small numbers they were sold all over the place.
While the US military may not have recognised the ... combat potential of this rifle, a lot of other people did.
And that's not even getting into of course the domestic American sales.
This and the Winchester 1873 that would follow it truly were, as far as any single gun,
the gun that won the west. This was the iconic western lever action rifle.
And for good reason. In this guise it was effective, reliable, and gave you a tremendous amount of firepower for the time.
Now breaking tradition a bit from the original Henrys, the 1866 rifles were offered in some different configurations.
As sales increased and production capacity increased to match, it became feasible to offer ... different options on the gun.
So first off there were three different lengths that you could get, you could get them as carbines, rifles or muskets.
The carbine was a 20 inch gun, the rifle (and this by the way is a carbine), the rifle
(this is a rifle), was a 24 inch, and the musket was a 27 inch.
The carbine gave you a 13 plus 1 round capacity, so 13 in the tube and one round in the chamber.
The rifles and muskets both gave you a 17 round capacity, that's tremendous.
The King's loading gate actually increased the capacity of the gun compared to the Henry.
And the muskets would allow you to attach a bayonet, you could get either a spike bayonet or a sabre bayonet.
The vast majority, like three quarters of the guns that were sold, were carbines.
It was the lightweight portable nature of the carbine that made it really popular.
Muskets were the least popular, kind of makes sense.
... Towards the very end of production, centrefire cartridges ... (which of course had been introduced long before),
they did start to offer these as centrefire conversions from the factory,
but those are relatively rare. These were generally sold as rimfire guns.
There were a number of other options that were made. You could get them with round or octagonal barrels, we have one of each here.
You could get a couple different sighting options,
this has a small leaf sight, this has a much larger flip-up ladder sight.
You could get fancy wood, you could get engraving.
Especially towards the later end of production, there were a lot of options that were possible.
None of them were all that popular, you know, these are special options and so most people don't get them.
Most people just ordered the stock, standard guns, either primarily carbines or rifles. But you did have options at this point.
There was one other military test, before I forget, which was quite significant,
not so much for Winchester, but it was for Nelson King. That was the Swiss military, they tested these rifles.
And they ultimately decided not to adopt them because they wanted a more powerful cartridge.
But they did adopt King's Patent Loading Gate as part of the Swiss Vetterli rifle system.
So that was a bolt action rifle but it had a tube magazine and it used King's loading gate.
And at the same time the Swiss were actually the first major military country
to adopt a ... magazine-fed repeating rifle in the 1860s, so.
With all of that under our belt, why don't we take a little bit of a closer look at this.
... We'll pull one of the side plates off and take a look at the inside of that loading gate.
The King's Patent Loading Gate is the most important part, so we'll start with that.
I've already removed the screw to allow me to take the side plate off.
You'll see that this is the exact same system as in the Henry. We still have, in fact actually it's a pair of toggles,
and they just lift right off. So this is the system that locks the action and then allows it to cycle.
Sits on a couple of pins,
(see if I can get it back on).
There we go. And then the important part here. The loading gate is just a flat piece of metal
like that. By the way if you take one of these apart, be careful because these corners and edges can be very sharp.
Anyway, what this does is it allows you to put rounds into the magazine tube from the back.
This spring-loaded gate pushes down to allow a round in and then it snaps back into place.
And it's edge right here prevents a round from popping back out the loading gate.
Holds it just in the right position to be lifted up by the elevator when you cycle the action.
Right there is our elevator, that would lift a round up,
bolt pushes it into the chamber, and then the elevator drops back down,
where it picks up a new round from the tube magazine.
In addition to the many reliability related improvements that this allowed the Henry,
it also meant they could put on a wooden handguard which made the gun much more comfortable to handle
in general, and especially when the barrel got hot from firing.
Remember that black powder actually heats up firearms faster than smokeless powder does.
So something like a Henry could get hot pretty darn quick if you actually had to unleash a lot of its firepower.
Markings are on the same place on the top of the barrel as on the Henry,
but they no longer say Henry, Henry is out of the picture now.
He would end up working as a private gunsmith until the 1890s when he died.
These rifles are now Winchester's Repeating Arms Company, New Haven, Connecticut.
And the patent that is specifically called out there is the King's Improvement, Nelson King's Loading Gate.
And then we have the patent date for the loading gate, 1866.
And we do still have the patent for, well, Henry's patent, October 16 1860.
Remember that that patent was assigned legally to Oliver Winchester,
and so he's not under any obligation to include Henry's name. And that's, technically, his patent now, so.
Serial numbers on the '66s can be in a number of different places.
This is a fairly early one, serial number 36,000 and change, and it's located on the wrist underneath the loading lever.
Just a note, this gun is missing its safety lever but they did still include that.
That was a standard feature, it just happens to have gone somewhere else on this particular rifle.
The carbine we were looking at does still have that. So that goes on there.
And it works the same way. When it's rotated parallel to the gun, it locks the lever in place and acts as a safety.
One of the other features that you could get, or could have added by a gunsmith later on, was a saddle ring.
This was added as a connection point for a single point sling
just so that if you were on horseback and managed to accidentally drop the rifle it didn't fall to the ground,
causing you to lose it. Instead it would dangle off your body.
This is something that was very common with cavalry and cavalry-style guns throughout this time period.
And it's with the '66 that we start to see a variety in rear sights. So two different types there.
Later on you start to get things like tang sights. With these rifles you will sometimes find buckhorn sights, which
are probably more likely gunsmith added than factory. But that was a style that people were accustomed to at the time.
With these two rifles we do also have two different styles of front sight.
The carbine has the front sight built into the front barrel band.
The rifle, because it's got a short handguard and doesn't have a full-size barrel band like that,
it has a front sight dovetailed into the top of the barrel.
And of course we have an octagonal barrel here and a round one here.
The octagonal barrel is rather heavier which was an option.
People liked heavier barrels ... at the time for more accurate shooting, or just for that specific balance to the gun.
By the standards of the period, post-Civil War, a guy with an 1866 Winchester could truly lay down a hailstorm of gunfire.
There were other repeating rifles on the market at the time, principally the Spencer,
but none of them ... really had the practical application, especially at close range and high speed that the 1866 did.
This mechanism functioned smoothly and quickly, loading was quick and easy, the capacity was quite high.
With this rifle you really did have the firepower of 10 men armed with almost anything else.
And that is what made it such a popular weapon, both with militaries around the world
(to a limited extent), and on the American western frontier.
If you were the, you know, the lone trapper, the lone settler, the lone explorer, out in the wilderness
and were beset upon by a group of hostile people, be they native Americans or just plain bandits,
you could actually effectively defend yourself against a large group of people with one of these rifles.
I call them the assault rifle of their day.
... I really can't ... overemphasise how effective these guns truly were.
They were short-range, you know, beyond a couple hundred yards the sights are tiny,
the cartridge has the ballistic trajectory of a brick.
You know, it's ... relatively low velocity, it is in all ways a pistol cartridge.
But within a couple hundred yards, especially with multiple opponents, this was the rifle to have.
And that's why it remains so iconic today.
Now we will move on and take a look at the next rifle in this series,
which ups the game one more time with another major improvement.
And that will be the Winchester 1873. So that's our next video.
If you would like either of these carbines for yourself,
they are both for sale here at Rock Island coming up at the end of June.
... There are a bunch of other 1866 Winchesters, they almost always have a wide variety of them.
So I have links to these two specifically in the description text below.
If you want to find others beyond those, you'll have to go to the catalogue and do some browsing and exploring on your own.
Anything you decide you'd like to place a bid on, you can do that right through Rock Island's website. Nice and easy.
Thanks for watching.