Theodore Roosevelt sailed for Mombasa in March 1909 with a battery of four rifles and a shotgun. Two of them were Winchester Model 1895s in .405 Winchester: a cartridge developed just five years earlier, hurling a 300-grain bullet at roughly 2,200 feet per second. Roosevelt called the .405 his “medicine gun for lions.” His personal…
Category: Rifle/Long Guns
Winchester Model 1894: The American Deer Rifle & .30-30 Lever-Action
The Winchester Model 1894 is the bestselling centerfire sporting rifle ever made. Over 7 million produced. Winchester marked the 7,000,000th rifle in a ceremony in 2005, at which point the 1894 stood as the highest-volume centerfire rifle ever built by a single manufacturer. The number alone tells most of the story. The 1894 is, by…
Winchester Model 1892: John Wayne’s Lever-Action and The Rifleman
Watch a John Wayne film and the rifle in his hand is almost always the same one: a saddle-ring carbine with a custom oversized lever loop, cycled with a one-handed spin that became Wayne’s signature on-screen move. That rifle, across Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), True Grit (1969), and on through Rooster…
Winchester Model 1886: Browning’s Big-Bore Lever-Action
The Winchester 1886 — John Browning’s first Winchester lever-action, the .45-70 repeater Theodore Roosevelt killed grizzlies with, and modern reproductions in 2026.
The Taylor’s & Company TC86 Takedown: A Browning-Designed .45-70 That Splits in Half
The Taylor’s & Company TC86 Takedown is a modernized reproduction of John Browning’s Winchester Model 1886, chambered in .45-70 Government with a 16.5-inch threaded barrel and takedown capability. Color case-hardened, hand-oiled walnut, Skinner peep sights, and suppressor-ready from the factory.
Winchester Model 1876: Theodore Roosevelt’s Bison Rifle
The complete guide to the Winchester 1876 – Theodore Roosevelt’s bison rifle, NW Mounted Police carbine, and the Cimarron reproductions you can still buy in 2026.
Winchester Model 1866 “Yellow Boy”: History, .44 Henry & Modern Reproductions
On a December morning in 1877, outside a fortified Bulgarian town called Plevna, Russian and Romanian infantry advanced on Ottoman trenches in the kind of close-order assault that European armies had been winning with single-shot rifles for a generation. The Turks waited. At roughly two hundred yards they set their long-range Peabody-Martini rifles aside, picked…
The Henry Model 1860 Rifle: Civil War Repeater and Modern Reproductions
The Henry Model 1860 was, in raw numbers, a marginal Civil War weapon: roughly 14,000 produced against the 1.5 million Springfield rifle-muskets that armed the Union. The U.S. Ordnance Department bought only about 1,731 of them. To the ordnance officer of the day, the Henry was a private-purchase curiosity that never reached scale. And yet…
Winchester Model 1873: The Gun That Won the West
The Winchester Model 1873 is known as “The Gun That Won the West.” It’s a wonderful slogan, it appears in both museum signage and marketing copy. The problem is it’s not a 19th-century historical consensus. Fortunately, the rifle’s real story is more interesting than the slogan.The Cavalry never carried it as a standard arm —…
History of the Remington 700: America’s Bolt-Action Icon
The Remington 700 is the best-selling bolt-action rifle in history. From its 1962 debut to military sniper duty, explore how five million were made.