I love watching the old westerns and seeing the love for the Henry.
.22?
To be accurate, most of the lever guns in westerns are model 1892, winchesters or copies there of.
The writer is way off. The original Henry was indeed a rim fire but it was .44 caliber.
I bought two, about a year and a half ago. One for myself and one for my ten-year-old grandson, because I always wanted one when I was a kid, but my parents couldn’t afford it. Neat little rifle, still haven’t shot 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.”
That is a famous question in several Westerns: “Where did those indians get those new repreating rifles.”
There was thread here on FR about why Custer’s men had only single shot rifles. I believe the reason was that there was a concern about the waste of ammunition.
I have two Henry .22’s. One has an octagon barrel. Looks great. I’ve not shot it yet.
My son had a Henry 30-30 in his collection.
One cool thing they’ll do once in a while is engrave custom serial numbers.
My .22 is a special run with Trail Life USA logo and my member number as the serial number. (TLUSA is a Christian boys adventure organization)
The member number as serial was my idea when we (TLUSA) began to offer the rifles for sale. I wasn’t gonna buy one but my wife insisted.
***The original Henry 1860 has been used in a ton of Westerns***
Most just used a Winchester 1892 rifle with the frame brass colored and the forestock removed. Most people never noticed.
Love my Henrys. I have a 22 for fun and a 45/70 for getting dinner. The only thing I’ve changed on both is the addition of a peep site. It makes it so nice shooting out to 100yds. https://rangerpointstore.com/
I’ll stick w/my scoped 10/22, for a squirrel getter, but really would like one of those Model 94’s, chambered in .357!
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I have a Marlin Model 1936 lever action that was my grandfather’s
Also have a Model 94 Winchester .30-30, two totally different critters.
.22? A girly gun.
I bought my Henry about a year before losing everything in an arson urban wildfire!
It was so sweet!
Still crying about it.
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.
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.
You’ll shoot your eye out!