That Time Colt Made a Rifle and Winchester Made a Revolver
Who doesn't love a good Western? One of our shelves in our expansive video library is filled completely with Westerns, many of which feature John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and many other traditional Western heroes, generally wielding Winchester lever-action rifles and Colt revolvers. There are exceptions, like Tom Selleck in the wonderful film "Quigley Down Under" in which he co-stars with a Sharps breechloader, but the usual pattern is Winchester/Colt.
Thus the story of the history of guns in the American West is, in the gun world, the story of those two primary arms: Winchester lever-action rifles and Colt revolvers. It all started before the Civil War, with the 1860 Henry and the Colt dragoon revolvers and the famous 1851 Navy and 1860 Army revolvers, and continued after the war with the 1866, 1873, and 1876 Winchesters and the famous 1873 Colt Single Action Army and 1877 and 1878 Colt double-actions.
Great pieces, all, and the 1873 Winchester and the Colt Single Action Army legitimately compete for the title of the “Gun that Won the West.”
But there was a time, believe it or not, when Colt manufactured a lever-action rifle – and Winchester mulled over the idea of building revolvers, although that effort never went past the prototype stage. Why and how did this happen? Read on:
The Colt-Burgess Rifle
In 1883, Colt, in partnership with American gun designer Andrew Burgess, introduced a lever-action rifle Colt called the 1883 Burgess Rifle but which came to be called the Colt-Burgess. It wasn’t anything innovative or unusual. Andrew Burgess designed for Colt a pretty traditional gun, with a tube magazine under the barrel, a finger lever that included the trigger guard and a loop, an external hammer, and a loading gate on the right-hand side of the receiver. It was only chambered in the .44WCF (.44-40) and was broadly similar to the Winchester 1873 lever gun, which was still being made. There were two versions: the rifle, which had a 25 ½” barrel, and the carbine, with a 20” barrel. If only they had made one in .45 Colt!
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During the short production run, Colt made 6,403 Burgess rifles. Compare that to Winchester’s 1873, of which Winchester built 720,610 in the years from 1873 to 1923. Colt ceased manufacture of the Colt-Burgess lever gun after only 21 months. The Colt-Burgess was a more expensive piece than the Winchesters, selling originally at $43 as opposed to $17.50 for a new 1873 Winchester. But even so, Colt was horning in on Winchester’s territory.
While the Colt-Burgess rifle was on the market, there was little doubt in the American gun manufacturing community that Colt was trying to grab a chunk of what had traditionally been Winchester’s market. So Winchester responded.
The Winchester Revolvers
Miffed at Colt’s lever-action rifle project, Winchester decided to turn the tables. They brought in a guy named William Mason, who had worked for Remington and Colt, and who was therefore familiar with revolver designs. The resulting Mason revolver was a pretty standard item; a single-action piece, with a loading gate on the right-hand side, and an ejection rod under the barrel. It was, in fact, remarkably similar to the Colt Single Action Army. Revolver design was pretty well defined by the Colt in those days, although that wasn’t always the case.
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One prototype was built, and rumor has it that some Winchester engineers actually took it along on a visit to Colt, presumably to show it to Colt’s management and say, “Hey, look what we’ve got here.” There's no record of that meeting, but we do know that the meeting happened and that the Winchester people fetched along that prototype. It would have been fun to have been a 19th-century fly on that wall.
There were at least two other Winchester revolver prototypes. One was the result of Winchester’s recruiting of two former Smith & Wesson engineers, William Wetmore and Charles Wells. The Wetmore-Wells revolver was likewise a single-action piece with a loading gate, and while it was a solid-frame piece rather than the break-top design generally used by Smith & Wesson at that time, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the Smith & Wesson No. 3 revolver. It retained the Colt-style loading gate, but the ejector was operated by an odd little lever on the right side of the receiver just aft of the loading gate. Again, only one prototype was made.
Finally, there was the 1883 double-action revolver, designed by the aforementioned William Mason and Winchester’s Stephen Wood. Amazingly, the gun strongly resembled the 1878 Colt double-action and functioned in pretty much the same fashion, with the loading gate and a rod ejector. And, of course, there was only the prototype.
Winchester didn’t waste a lot of time being imaginative. The conventional design of all three revolvers seems to indicate that they were mostly bargaining chips. In the end, no Winchester revolver was ever put into production – but they did manage to see an end to the Colt-Burgess lever guns.
What Happened?
While the history is uncertain, rumor has it that a gentleman's agreement was struck between Colt and Winchester, the result of which was Colt discontinuing their Colt-Burgess lever-action rifle, and Winchester giving up on the revolver market. Winchester was reportedly disgruntled at the idea of Colt horning in on the lever gun market, and the building of the Winchester revolver prototypes was a response to this - and it worked. Colt, worried about the shoe being on the other foot, evidently decided to make a move to ensure Winchester would be once more gruntled.
Winchester did well with the deal. Colt was out of the lever gun business, and while there was still competition, from Savage and Marlin, to name two, they still controlled the lion's share of the lever gun market.
But Colt didn’t get out of the rifle business altogether. They did have one loophole in the deal, and they took advantage of it.
The Colt Lightning Rifle
Then, perhaps as a way around the gentlemen’s agreement, starting in 1884, Colt built the Lightning rifle – not to be confused with the 1877 Colt Lightning double-action revolver. The Lightning was a slide-action rifle available in three frame sizes for a variety of calibers. I had one for a while, a medium-framed version in .38 WCF (.38-40) with a badly shot-out barrel. It functioned fine, but you couldn’t hit much with that bad barrel. It wasn’t original – the magazine tube had been replaced – and in time, I traded it away in one of those Complicated Gun Deals to a cowboy-action shooter who intended to have the barrel sleeved to shoot the .45 Colt as a counterpart to his Colt Single Action Army revolvers. It was a slick little piece, though, light, handy, and fast.
So, Colt was still represented in the rifle market. And the agreement was, technically, adhered to. Colt continued to build the Lightning rifle until 1904.
As It Stands Today
Interestingly, you can buy new replicas of the Colt Lightning rifle and the Colt-Burgess lever guns, thanks to Italian replica manufacturer Uberti. But the Winchester revolver prototypes were all that ever was, the only attempt the famous lever-gun company made in revolvers, all museum pieces now. And that gentlemen’s agreement is still in place today; Colt still makes no lever-action rifles, and Winchester, or the company that calls itself Winchester now, still makes no revolvers.
It’s an unusual interlude in the annals of American firearms history, made so by its conclusion in an unwritten agreement by two companies that remained in place for over a hundred years. The rest of American industry could learn a thing or two from Colt and Winchester.