The era of the gunfighter soon died off, but their weapons, most especially the Colt Single-Action Army, endures to this day. Prized by historians and collectors for its simplicity, power, and beautiful design, it is truly an American classic.
Colt revolvers had been instrumental in opening up the American West. Still, the region remained dangerous, largely unconquered land through much of the late nineteenth century.
To finally “win” the West, the United States needed an even bigger gun. As it happened, that weapon made its debut the same year the Colt Single-Action Army did.
4
THE WINCHESTER 1873 RIFLE
“The Winchester stocked and sighted to suit myself is by all odds the best weapon I ever had, and I now use it almost exclusively.”
—Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
On the morning of October 5, 1892, two hardware stores in Coffeyville, Kansas, conducted the first and maybe only mass gun giveaway in the history of the United States.
Any adult was free to grab a firearm and a couple of boxes of ammo off the shelf, no paperwork or money required. Word spread in a lightning flash, drawing a crowd of people who reached behind the counters and helped themselves to rifles and shotguns. The big prizes were the lever-action Winchester rifles, elegant weapons that had proven themselves both dependable and deadly since their introduction some nineteen years before.
This wasn’t a sales promotion. In fact, the reason for the giveaway was clear to anyone brave enough to peek in the window next door: The bank was being robbed. Actually, two banks were being taken simultaneously. Five fully armed men were pointing their guns at terrified bank customers and employees inside the First National Bank and the Condon Bank, both right in the middle of town. The infamous Dalton Gang had come to town for an unauthorized withdrawal.
Jesse James’s Winchester.
Library of Congress
The Dalton Gang was on a bit of a roll. They’d just pulled off a string of successful train robberies in Indian Territory, robbin’, thievin’, and killin’ at a pace few had matched before. Not content to rest on their laurels, they had decided to top themselves with a brazen stunt in their old hometown—take two banks at the same time in broad daylight. As far as they knew, it had never been done. And that was the main point—cement their cred as the baddest crew of cutthroat thieves who’d ever ridden in the West.
Emmett, Bob, and Gratton “Grat” Dalton were related to members of the James-Younger Gang (led by Frank and Jesse James), which partly explained their competitiveness. A little harder to explain was the fact that both Bob and Grat were former lawmen. Their older brother Frank, a deputy U.S. marshal, was killed in the line of duty by a horse thief. But in the West allegiances shifted fast. Frustrated by irregular pay, the Dalton boys decided to apply their talents to crime.
The C.M. Condon Bank was located at the center of the town plaza, a wide, open space in the middle of Coffeyville. The First National Bank was across the way. The Daltons had fixed on a particular strategic point as the lynchpin of their plan—a hitching post next to the First National where they could park their horses for a convenient getaway.
What they hadn’t counted on was something that was becoming as American as, well, Winchesters and apple pie—road repairs. When the five desperados rode into town, they found the hitching post had been removed. This led them to leave their horses in a side alley several hundred feet away from their targets. More importantly, it complicated their escape route, hemming them into a spot where they could be easily ambushed.
They were a bit too full of themselves to think of that when they tied up their horses. Wearing fake beards and wigs, they strode across the town plaza, focused on their mission. The disguises were meant to keep anyone who saw them from realizing who they were and what they were up to. That didn’t work. A shopkeeper sweeping his sidewalk looked up as they passed, realized something was up, and discreetly trailed them as they split up and entered the banks.
I suspect the rifles they were packin’ gave them away.
“God damn you! Hold up your hands!” ordered Grat Dalton as he pointed his Winchester inside Condon Bank. With his confederates Bill Power and Dick Broadwell spreading out behind him, Grat told bank employees to fill up a grain sack with cash and silver dollars. Then he went over to the main vault and told one of the bankers to open the inner doors.
Which prompted bank cashier Charles Ball to utter the most famous lie in the Old West.
“It’s not time for that to open,” he told the outlaw, explaining that the burglarproof money chest was on a time lock that wouldn’t open for ten minutes. Another employee helpfully turned the handle, but did not pull it.
Time locks had been around in the West for a while, and Grat was familiar enough with them to recognize that the contraption on the door was indeed such a lock. What he didn’t know was that it had gone off earlier that morning; if he’d’ve simply pulled the handle himself, it would have swung open free and easy. But he fell for the bluff.
“We can wait ten minutes,” he announced.
But patience wasn’t his strong suit. Soon he began to fidget, then stalk back and forth. Finally he exploded. “God damn you! I believe you are lying to me. I’ve a mind to put a bullet through you! Open it up or I will shoot you!”
Ball stuck to his story.
“Where is your gold?” demanded Grat finally.
“We haven’t any,” said the banker. Ball then evaded Grat’s questioning with a stream of unintelligible banking lingo, explaining why this was the case.
Meanwhile, inside the First National Bank around the corner, Bob and Emmett Dalton were also being bluffed by bank employees, including one who insisted he didn’t know the combination to the safe. Finally deciding that time was wastin’, they filled up a bag with what they could find from the teller stations and patrons. This wasn’t chicken feed: a total of twenty thousand dollars went into the sacks. But the Daltons felt like they’d been gypped anyway. Swearing and shouting, they took three civilians hostage as human shields, and moved to the door.
The delay at both banks had been long enough for the good citizens of Coffeyville to arm themselves, courtesy of the gun dealers at the hardware stores. The decision to go to war against the Daltons seems to have been spontaneous, but sometimes spur of the moment is the best way to do things. Volunteers sprinted to the scene from all over town, many of them gathering at Isham Brothers hardware store, right next to the First National Bank. The staff at Isham’s, along with their rivals at A. P. Boswell’s hardware store a short distance away, gave guns and ammo away to all comers as fast as they could grab them from the display.
The civilian gunmen scrambled into positions around the two banks. Several men hauled wagons together to create cover. One store owner grabbed a Colt .44 from his basement and ducked behind a wooden sign. A wagon driver pulled a double-barreled shotgun off the shelf at Isham’s and hid behind a post that gave him a point-blank view of the First National Bank. The proprietor of Isham’s ducked behind a big iron stove in the front of the store, backed up by two of his clerks, one with a revolver and the other with a Winchester.
“Look out there at the left!” Emmett yelled to Bob as he cleared the doorway to the sidewalk. Two citizens blasted the robbers with a Winchester and Colt .44 from the doorway of the Rammel Brothers’ drugstore. They missed, but the Daltons were driven back into the bank, frantically searching for a back exit. One hostage broke free and scrambled across the street, where he grabbed a Winchester of his own to join the opposition. A firestorm of lead sailed into the First National.
Over at the Condon bank, Grat and his men gave up waiting for the lock to open, deciding to settle for the silver and cash they’d grabbed and head out. But before they could leave, townspeople began raining fire into the building. As some eighty rounds of rifle and shotgun slugs poured in, a witness spotted Grat and the others “running back and forth” inside. It reminded her of “rats in a trap.” S
he described the firing as “continuous like bunches of firecrackers exploding, both shotguns and rifles.” Anyone not firing at the Daltons was busy running for cover wherever it could be found.
You don’t have to be particularly bright to be a bank robber, but it’s probably helpful not to be so gullible you’ll believe anything you’re told. When Grat asked a Condon Bank employee if there was a back door, the banker lied and claimed there was only one exit.
“Let’s get out of here!” Grat shouted, heading to the front. Realizing he couldn’t drag a two-hundred-pound sack of silver in the middle of a firefight, he abandoned the bag and stuffed paper money into his clothes.
Grat and his two fellow bandits dashed out the southwest entrance of the bank into the street. Braving a blizzard of gunfire, they ran in the direction of the alley and their horses, periodically stopping to return fire. They ran, according to one account, “with heads down, like facing a strong wind.”
Grat hadn’t gotten too far before City Marshal Charles T. Connelly appeared in his way. They traded gunfire; while most sources believe that Connelly wounded Grat, the outlaw got the best of the marshal, killing him in the exchange. But the robbers were still a long way from their horses.
“The moment that Grat Dalton and his companions, Dick Broadwell and Bill Power, left the [C. M. Condon] bank that they had just looted, they came under the guns of the men in Isham’s store,” wrote newspaper editor David Elliott. “Grat Dalton and Bill Power each received mortal wounds before they had retreated twenty steps. The dust was seen to fly from their clothes, and Power in his desperation attempted to take refuge in the rear doorway of an adjoining store, but the door was locked and no one answered his request to be let in. He kept his feet and clung to his Winchester until he reached his horse, when another ball struck him in the back and he fell dead at the feet of the animal that had carried him on his errand of robbery.”
At First National, Bob and Emmett grabbed a hostage and escaped through a back door. They promptly shot and killed a man who happened to be passing by.
“You hold the bag, I’ll do the fighting,” Bob told his brother as they headed around the corner back toward the horses. “Go slow. I can whip the whole damn town!”
For a few dozen paces, it looked like he could. Bob walked along calmly, snapping his fingers and whistling. Gunfire began dropping civilians. The injured were pulled into Isham’s hardware shop, and soon the store resembled a blood-soaked hospital emergency room.
An unsuspecting boy wandered into the path of the robbers, one of whom shoved him aside with the warning, “Keep away from here, bud, or you’ll get hurt.”
Grat, Broadwell, and Power were now dead. The two other Daltons made it to the alley where their horses were, and if luck or maybe a convenient road detour were on their side, they might just have made it out. But luck wasn’t something they had much of that day, and the citizens’ superior numbers began to tell.
Depending on the model and caliber, the Winchesters the town was armed with fed as many as fifteen bullets through a round tube magazine into the breech. Pull down on the trigger guard, come back up with it, fire—even if most of these folks hadn’t grown up around guns all their lives, they still would have had no trouble learning how to fire the rifle in the heat of the battle. The front sight was fixed, and while the rear could be adjusted, my suspicion is that at close range the good citizens of Coffeyville didn’t have to do much messing around with the sight.
One by one, the Dalton boys were shot to pieces. Emmett made it to his horse, but Bob staggered and fell, finally perforated to the point where he couldn’t go on.
“Good-bye,” Bob told his brother as Emmett tried to pull him to safety. “Don’t surrender, die game.”
Emmett might have obliged, but he was hit several times and settled to the dust. There he was grabbed and dragged into the office of a local Dr. Welles. The doctor had taken an oath to preserve life, but as a good part of the town crowded in, he realized they were fixin’ to apply their own medicine to his patient with the short end of a rope.
“No use, boys. He will die anyway,” he told the crowd.
“Doc, Doc, are you certain?” someone asked.
“Hell, yes, he’ll die,” said the doctor. “Did you ever hear of a patient of mine getting well?”
The mob laughed, then ran off to gawk at the four robbers who hadn’t the luck to make it to Doc Wells’ office alive.
The four were about as dead as men can get. One was said to have “as many holes in him as a colander,” and another report estimated twenty-three pieces of lead in one of the bodies. The town had saved its money and earned a place in history, though it had paid a steep price: Four civilians were dead.
The Dalton Gang pose with a Winchester.
The deceased robbers were propped up for a picture, with a Winchester draped across them. Some dumb ass figured out that if you moved the dead Grat Dalton’s arm up and down, blood flowed out of a prominent hole in his throat; quite a number of people amused themselves trying it.
Contrary to the doctor’s assessments of his skills, Emmett survived almost two dozen gunshot wounds and wound up in jail. Sentenced to life, he turned over a new leaf and was freed after serving some fourteen and a half years. Freed, he became an actor and a writer, somewhat less dangerous activities than robbing banks, though in some eyes nearly as dubious.
The Coffeyville battle is a great action story, probably as exciting to hear and tell today as it was a hundred-some years ago. But it wasn’t just the bullet slinging that makes it stand out from a historical point of view. In deciding to stop the robbery, the citizens had drawn a big red line not in the sand, but across the West. The country was to be wild no more. Law and order would prevail. Not only were Americans taming the West, they were taming themselves.
And if the people in the West had evolved, so had the guns they used to instill order on the chaos of nature and themselves. The Winchesters used in the Coffeyville battle represented a climactic moment in the century-long evolution of American frontier rifles.
The Winchesters were never commonly used as combat weapons by American military forces. There were a bunch of reasons, from head-shed (aka top brass) prejudice against repeaters to the difficulty of cycling rounds while lying flat behind thin cover. Instead, the repeater became the all-purpose working rifle for countless thousands of cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, and homesteaders for the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Protecting the Herd, by Frederic Remington. Winchesters were standard issue for cowboys and ranchers.
Library of Congress
I love lever-action rifles. I have since I was old enough to chase my little brother, Jeff, around the family house playing cowboys and lawmen. As a matter of fact, I lusted after his Marlin .30-30 when we were kids. I had a fine bolt-action .30-06, but his lever-action Marlin looked to me like a cowboy gun, and in my mind that made it the best.
The whole idea of a lever-action rifle is to slip a cartridge into the breech quickly and easily, so it can then be put to good use by pulling the trigger. The trigger-guard mechanism on the outside of the gun works a lever that pushes the spent cartridge out of the breech when it’s pulled down. Sliding the lever back up snugs a fresh one into place. The inside cogs and springs of the action that get this done are tucked out of sight, of course; all the operator sees and feels is a very satisfying click-click that shouts WILD WEST in capital letters.
The Spencer had been the most successful repeater of the Civil War era, but even so, it did have limitations. The operation came to a full stop after the cartridge was chambered. Before the bullet could fly, the shooter had to pull back the hammer manually, usually with his thumb. Only then was the gun ready to fire.
Wouldn’t it be easier, someone thought, if you could use the same lever that was getting the bullet in place to ready the hammer as well?
Actually, you could. And while it may not seem like that big a deal to someone used to a Spencer, or other
weapons of the day, that little touch of simplicity made for a much smoother and quicker shooting process.
As it happens, someone had thought of this setup well before the Spencer reached Gettysburg. The Henry Repeater, such as the model Lincoln tested in 1861, used just such an arrangement. The weapon had other shortcomings, but the ideas behind its action were solid.
In the late 1860s, Oliver Winchester purchased the remains of the company that created the Spencer Repeater. One of the reasons he had the cash to do so was the success of his firm, now known as Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester and company had stayed with the basic design of the Henry, but made so many improvements that the Winchester Model 1866 was really a very different animal. True, it had a bronze-alloy frame like the Henry, and it still used the same rim-fire cartridge. But where the Henry had been more than a tad on the temperamental side, the 1866 was a robust shooting iron. Its red brass or gunmetal receiver had a yellowish tint to it, earning it the nickname “Yellow Boy.” But there wasn’t anything yellow about it. The magazine was sealed. You could load the weapon at the side thanks to a loading gate. There were a bunch of other little improvements that helped the gun stand up to the strains of the frontier.
But it was the company’s next rifle, Model 1873, that earned Winchester its everlasting fame. Again, this was a sturdy weapon, even more so than the 1866. It also used a .44–40 cartridge. This gave the gun more stopping power, while not being so large that it made the rifle hard to handle. It also meant you could use the same ammo in your rifle and Colt Frontier revolver. The Winchester found a sweet spot where power, convenience, and versatility were in perfect balance.
The search for a perfect weapon had been a long, dusty trail, with a number of detours and missteps. It produced some mighty fine weapons, even if none were “perfect.” The ideal weapon depends on the circumstances you find yourself in. Sometimes you want a lot of bullets. Sometimes you want just one big one.