Posted on 08/24/2024 6:33:15 AM PDT by Twotone
.22? A girly gun.
Tongue-in-cheek, I'm sure.
I love my .22's. Can ring the 200 yard gongs at my range with my .22 CZ 452, with the rear sight appropriately set.
The article does a good job stating that the current company has resurrected the name only. Still, by all accounts the Imperatos make a quality product, and it's all American made.
I bought my Henry about a year before losing everything in an arson urban wildfire!
It was so sweet!
Still crying about it.
“. .22? A girly gun.”
My first rifle was a Winchester 9422. Started shooting it when I was 9 years old. I’ve shot thousands of rounds through it and can hit what I aim at.
Your comment of girly gun is laughable. You don’t want to be caught downrange of me with my .22, you would not live to regret it!!
“ The Henry was also used at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, only it was in the hands of the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes that obliterated Custer.”
I actually got to hold one of those rifles. It had upholstery tacks and other adornments. I knew it was a Henry, but I wasn’t quite sure of what I was looking at. And then the owner said it was at the Battle of Little Big Horn, on the winning side. Whoa!
I posted the entire article, so you don’t have to go to the website.
He did say he was a newbie & still learning. :-)
I sure found the right girl to marry. A couple years ago, she bought me a Henry .30-30 for my birthday. If you’d like to know what a lever-action is supposed to feel like, try one.
Yeah, I don’t remember any westerns where the .22 Henry had a starring role or ever being known or referred to as “ The Gun that Won the West”. Now a 73 Winchester in .44 .40 or a 66 Yellow Boy in .44/.40 is more like it
Cheap ammo to teach the granddaughters on. The love the Winchester 97 pump action .22 gallery gun the most. (Mfg date stamp says 1909)
My Winchester Model 94 was built in 1898 in .30-30. Takedown, octagonal barrel.
I’m kind of a crappy shot, usually. But I have my groups down to 4.5 inches at 100 yards seated off a bipod, the way I hunt the steep slopes of South Eastern Washigton state.
I intend to take one muley, then hang it up for future generations.
The first tubular magazine-fed, lever-action rifle (which he named the "Volitional Repeater") was invented by Walter Hunt in about 1848. Hunt was a prolific inventor, coming up with stuff like the modern safety pin, a lock-stitch sewing machine (before Elias Howe), and those suction cup thingies that window washers use on the sides of skyscrapers. But Hunt only seemed to be driven to invent in times of dire need, when he was under the gun to come up with some quick cash. And then he invariably sold the design for a fraction of what it eventually would come to be worth.
As great an inventor as he was, Hunt was an equally rotten businessman. Legend has it he invented the safety pin in 15 minutes when the artist who had drawn illustrations for a couple of his earlier patent applications threatened to sue him for non-payment. Then he sold the safety pin design, which came to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for its manufacturer, for $400, just enough to pay his illustrator. And the reason Elias Howe, not Walter Hunt, is credited for inventing the lock-stitch sewing machine, is that Hunt decided he couldn't in good conscience let it go to market because it would put too many seamstresses out of work.
Proof that Henry had exactly Sweet Fanny Adams to do with inventing and/or patenting the first lever-action rifle is here (pdf), a copy of Walter Hunt's 1849 patent for a "Combined Piston-Breech and Firing-Cock Repeating Rifle."
Ownership (and custodianship) of Hunt's continuously evolving repeating rifle design went from George Arrowsmith (where Lewis Jennings had worked it over) to the Robbins & Lawrence Company to Volcanic Repeating Arms (owned and operated by Daniel Wesson & Horace Smith) and finally to the New Haven Arms Company, which owner Oliver Winchester eventually rebranded as Winchester Repeating Arms. So there were more than a few sets of hands laid on the design before it finally became the Winchester's Model of 1866, and B.T. Henry's were just two of the many.
In fairness, Henry was responsible for two of the most commercially important changes. Where the tubular magazine once had to be loaded from the muzzle end, Henry created a loading gate on the side of the receiver. Loading down the end of the magazine tube was inconvenient and potentially impractical because it meant you had to point the muzzle upwards so the cartridges would slide down the tube and toward the receiver. The change to a loading port made it especially more practical for anyone not wanting to expose themselves while reloading, such as soldiers and other Indian fighters.
And Henry also invented the .44 Henry rimfire metallic cartridge, which was what really put the Henry rifle in the big leagues. However, Smith & Wesson working in collaboration earlier had invented a one-piece, self-contained, metallic .22-cal rimfire cartridge, so what Henry had actually done was little more than scaling up the example left to him by Daniel and Horace.
Henry deliberately waited until 1864, when he knew Oliver Winchester was in Europe, to file a petition with the Connecticut state legislature asking that he be awarded full ownership of the New Haven Arms Company. He claimed Winchester had not paid him in proportion to his contributions, so he asked to be given the whole company, lock, stock and barrels.
Somehow someone on Winchester's payroll managed to get word to him overseas, and he got back to America in time to stop the action.
By that time Henry had been gunsmithing for more than 20 years and a gunshop foreman for at least 15. And one of the basic principles of business is you never get paid what you're worth, you only ever get paid what you can negotiate. If he hadn't figured this out after in more than two decades in the business, it was nobody's fault but his own. Yet he blamed Oliver Winchester for his own ineptness at negotiating for royalties on the gun he helped improve.
What Benjamin Tyler Henry tried to pull wasn't the equivalent of a hostile takeover, it was attempted theft. And that fact should never be forgotten.
To make sure ownership would never again be in question, Winchester changed the name of the company to Winchester Repeating Arms.
At this point it bears mention that that was about the time that Henry left the company, but I don't find an authoritative source stating definitively whether he quit or was fired. So if Winchester fired him, he didn't make much show of it, else history would have recorded it. Regardless, Henry lived another 30+ years, all that time running a one-man gunsmithing service. And in all that time he never invented another stinking thing of note. Oliver Winchester, on the other hand, laid the foundation for a firearms empire the likes of which the world had never seen before.
It also bears mention that in the the mid-1860s, America had two wars in progress, the Indian Wars in the west and the War Between the States in the east. If you couldn't sell even a half-assed repeating rifle under those conditions, then you couldn't sell ice water in Hell. And a great many Henrys (and Spencers) were sold to soldiers spending their own money in the hope that the added firepower would save their skin. So a great deal of the success of the Henry rifle is owed, not to the brilliance of Benjamin Tyler Henry, but to the times they were being sold in.
If you think New Haven Arms would have fared as well under Henry's ownership, if you think America's westward expansion would have continued apace without the firearms that came to be made by Winchester, then you're just ignoring history. Contrary to misinformed popular opinion, B.T. Henry didn't make Winchester, we're just lucky Winchester survived him.
None of which means the modern incarnation of Henry Repeating Arms doesn't make good guns. But let's be honest about it being named after a rascal who believed thievery was just reward for having had his feelings hurt.
Very interesting history...what I love about FR.
If I was in the market for another gun, particularly a, it would be a Frontier Octagon from Henry
My buddy picked up a .22 Golden Boy for his not so young Son about 7 years back. I think they have used it twice. I was very impressed with the quality of of the look and feel.
I have a .22 bolt action.
At least Sight It In!
Good Stuff like this +++
Can’t beat the 10/22 for accuracy, ease of maintenance and cost. That Henry will set you back $425 while the Ruger is half that price.
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