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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