WWW: Where The Winchester Got its Name

Well,  I suppose that anybody who has ever watched a western with John Wayne, Tom Selleck or Clint Eastwood, grace the screen, has seen them with the “Guns That Won the West”, the 1873 Colt 45 or the Winchester. What most probably didn’t know:  the Winchester started as a hand gun and was called the “Volcanic” and the man who developed it into a rifle was a shirt maker.


It seems two entrepreneurs by the name of Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson (of Smith and Wesson fame) were running into financial troubles developing their volcanic gun, when an industrious shirt maker by the name of Oliver Fisher Winchester bought the patent rights to the gun and the cartridges.

Along with the patent rights Winchester inherited a brilliant engineer by the name of Benjamin Tyler Henry (of Henry rifle fame). It seems Mister Henry had a knack for solving problems with mechanical devices, by redesigning and enlarging the volcanic gun’s internal workings he was able to make the gun feed the ammunition properly, hence the renaming the gun the Henry Rifle.

As the gun continued to develop it became the 1866 Yellow Boy so named by the Indians because of its brass yellow receiver mechanism and then the subsequent models named for Oliver Winchester, the most famous of the time period, the Winchester model 1873.

Come on back again sometime and I will tell you some more Real West of the stories at WWW (Woody’s Wild West).

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Welcome to Woody's Wild West

My name is Woody... and I KNOW the Wild West.

I was born in July 1954 in the bloodiest battlefield in the south pacific Okinawa. My father being in the military was transfer to an old Calvary army post called Ft Huachuca, which had been established in 1877, when I was just two.


I had always thought I had been born there until my father told me different. My siblings didn’t care for the place much; you see it hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years, and they were accustomed to traveling the world living the officer’s life. I felt like the luckiest young kid in the world, you see everything on TV and the movies were about westerns.

Most Westerns of the time period of the 50's and 60's, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Travel, Tombstone Territory, Wyatt Earp, were either about the area I now found myself in or they mentioned it somewhere in the story.

So you can see why I felt the way I did, when I thought, “nothing existed” outside the continental Cochise County where the base was and the City of Tombstone.

As a young man I would hike in the desert exploring old houses and ghost towns of the area. The movies made everything so real to me because, I was actually living it and in the area where a lot of western history happened. I read a lot of history of the area as I explored it.

So, is it any wonder when the opportunity presented itself thru some friends I had met asked me to start performing the very thing all my life I had admired, in the time period I so loved, I jumped at the chance. I have spent the last six to seven years performing in Wild West reenactments all over the state, movies, and TV shows and have had the honor to work with a lot of Hollywood performers in recent years.

When I visit my wife, (Sierra Suites, General Manager - Glen Cobb) at work, many of the guests have found my stories and history of the Old West as interesting as I have.  They've asked me to share some of my knowledge in this new blog called WWW Woodys Wild West.

Back very soon, from WWW- Woody’s Wild West with more of the Real West of the story ....

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