My new Henry: Shooting the gun that won the West

After seeing the Henry lever-action .22 rifle in countless Westerns, firing one of my own brings a smile to my face.

I just bought my first Henry rifle, a .22 lever action. When one of my AR-loving friends saw it, he said, “Look out, squirrels!”

Most everyone else, however, responded with stories about their favorite .22 lever action. One of them, a novelist friend, said that he’s fended off thousands of prairie dogs with his .22 rifle.

Unless life in America gets real bad, real fast (definitely possible), I won’t be killing any critters with my Henry. But I am going to learn every part of this wonderful machine and, hopefully, get good at using it.

It’s not an AR-15 or an AK-47 or an M16. It’s their grandpa, the gun that won the West.

Technically, the Henry rifle was only made for six years, through all of the Civil War. During that brief period, the New Haven Arms Company produced 14,000 Henrys. The company even crafted a gold-adorned Henry for President Abraham Lincoln.

The Henry that I own is a modern reimagining of the original, made by Henry Repeating Arms, founded in 1996 by New Yorkers Louis Imperato and his son Anthony Imperato, who has since become the CEO. The company is headquartered in Wisconsin, with a factory there and another in Bayonne, New Jersey.

This article is not a promotion for Henry Repeating Arms. But the company sells a great product and espouses commendable values. It is an unabashedly pro-America company whose motto is “made in America, or not made at all.”

A good friend of mine loves Henry repeating rifles, so I’ve shot a variety of them. He also collects various lever-action rifles, including Marlins, Rugers, Spencers, and Brownings.

I love these Wild West rifles, especially the ones made by Henry. Brand loyalty, maybe. But it’s also a relationship based on feeling. How does the gun sit in your hands? Does it rest nicely on your shoulder? Is there an intuitive flow to its movements and anatomy? Cheesy as it sounds, you have to sync with the rifle.

I bought it for $370 at Whitey’s Pawn and Tools, just outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. The owner was enthusiastic about my purchase, as my daughter tore through the stacked aisles past banjos and swivel hooks.

I went with the cheapest lever-action sold by Henry Repeating Arms, the Classic. It has none of the ornamentation that makes the company’s rifles so elegant, like the Big Boy .45 caliber designed to honor John Wayne. I’ll work my way up to the Golden Boy, then the Big Boy.

My rifle weighs about five pounds, heavier than it appears. It’s got a hooded front sight — a tiny metal canopy at the end of the barrel. So when you look down the pointy rear sight, your field of vision contains a frame for the target.

The magazine is a tube with a loading port near the front end of the outer tube that is kept in place by a notch pin, a simple locking mechanism. There’s a bullet-shaped hole where you slot your .22 rounds. A skinny rod serves as the inner magazine tube. When you use it to shove the rounds into place, it feels like you’re a chimney sweep.

Cradle the stock into your shoulder. Squint at the target — we often use a metal spinner.

Then there’s the familiar motion of pushing the lever down then pulling it back up, in one decisive and swift movement. A snail-sized round flies into the rifle chamber, and the bolt has shoved the hammer into full-cock position. Time to shoot.

Then you get to do the John Wayne lever motion all over again. And again and again.

It’s a wonderful gun to take to the range. It’s accurate. But it’s not immediately easy. I like that. There’s zero recoil, and .22 caliber ammo is cheap.

It’s a great varmint rifle. It’s good for home protection, too, in case you would prefer not to liquify an intruder with a 12-gauge shotgun.

The loading process is difficult enough that kids couldn’t fire it by accident — especially for responsible gun owners who follow the rules of firearm safety.

I’m by no means a gun expert. Not at all, actually. I’m a student at best. I’m sure I even botched parts of the above descriptions. I couldn’t tell you why .22 cartridges are rimfire or how rimfire is different from centerfire.

But I am lucky enough to spend time with some actual experts. And it’s like one of them often says after I lower my rifle, “Doesn’t it just bring a smile to your face?” My Rifle, My Pony, and Me

The original Henry 1860 has been used in a ton of Westerns, including “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and “How the West Was Won” (1962).

In ”Silverado” (1985), Danny Glover’s character asks, “You ever seen what a Henry rifle can do in the hands of somebody who knows how to use it?”

You can find it in many of the Westerns slated to appear in this series: “Lonesome Dove” (1989), “The Man from Laramie” (1955), “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (2018), “Heaven’s Gate” (1980), “Dances with Wolves” (1990), “Ride with the Devil” (1999), and “Django Unchained” (2012).

It also appears in the animated Western “Rango” (2011), which I excluded from the family-friendly list at the last minute — it’ll reappear.

Versions of the Henry rifle appear in a number of video games, including The Last of Us Part II, Fallout 3, Red Dead Redemption, and Red Dead Redemption 2. There are even some newer games that feature Henry Repeating Arms, including the great Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

Those are only a few examples. Henry and Henry-derived lever-action rifles are nearly as ubiquitous in Westerns as six-shooters. When you hold one, you can feel the spirit of the West. Winchester, a brutal man

In the mid-1800s, a young man named Benjamin Tyler Henry set out to be a gunsmith. During his apprenticeship, he worked alongside Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson (Smith & Wesson). From there, they founded their own firearms company. One of the investors was Oliver Winchester, who also has a famous last name and who quickly wrested control of the company, rebranded it, moved headquarters to New Haven, Connecticut, then renamed it New Haven Arms Company.

Benjamin Henry landed a supervisor role at the factory. Then, with America on the cusp of civil war, he designed the first lever-action repeating rifle. At a time of muskets, which had to be muzzle-loaded, Henry’s .44 caliber 16-shot rifle was formidable. The patent was registered on October 16, 1860.

Henry rifles played an interesting role in the Civil War. They were used primarily by the Union Army, most of whose soldiers bought them with their own money. Henry rifles allowed soldiers to rapid-fire 16 shots, giving them an incredible advantage over their wartime adversaries.

Confederate soldiers weren’t able to consistently get the ammunition. One Confederate officer described the Henry as “that damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.”

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.

In 1864, Benjamin Henry soured on his boss, Oliver Winchester. Irked by his salary, Henry sought to wrest the New Haven Arms Company from Winchester. Before he could, in 1866, Winchester dissolved the New Haven Arms Company into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Benjamin Henry died before the dawn of a new century. Winchester, meanwhile, modified the Henry rifle until it became the Winchester Model 1866.

From there, the Winchester took all the credit. The Winchester company pushed the promotional slogan for its newfangled rifle: “The gun that won the West.”

John Wayne used the Winchester Model 1892 in roughly a dozen films, beginning with “Stagecoach” (1939). It also appears throughout “True Grit” (1969). In 2021, the rifle sold for a whopping $88,500.

Of course the Winchester appears in “Winchester ‘73” (1950). One of my favorite scenes is early on, right as the shooting competition is about to begin and Wyatt Earp is presenting the coveted rifle, one of 1,000. He struggles to speak over a pair of fighting boys.

Earp: “Young men, dry up!” (Everyone laughs.) “Without being unkind to either the Henry or the Spencer, do you suppose we could agree that this is the finest gun in the world?”

Benjamin Tyler Henry was a scoundrel who deserves to be remembered as much for his treachery and underhandedness as for his contribution to repeating rifles. And in its previous advertisements, the Henry Repeating Arms (the modern company) was claiming B.T. Henry's either invented or was the first to patent the lever-operated repeating rifle. Neither claim was true and they since have dialed back their puffery to "...the first reliable lever action rifle as we know it...."

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.

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