Which rifle and handgun "won the west"?

I think it was more the spirit and men behind the westward movement than any individual tool. It was the opportunists and entrepreneurs like the fur trappers, the Bent brothers, William Sublette and Robert Campbell, and the multitude of miners, farmers, lumbermen, ranchers, and shopkeepers who poured into the west as soon as any source of livelihood was discovered. Without the constant improvement in weaponry the "winning" of the west would have taken much longer but the sheer force of numbers of the westward migration all but guaranteed that it would be "won". Conquest is the historical nature of the human race no matter what pigmentation of the skin or ancestry of the clashing cultures. Before the lighter cast Europeans settled the America's the natives were too busy conquering each other than to worry about some strange men men wearing shiny outerwear entering their future. Last fall I picked up a couple of books about the use of steamboats to move people and freight up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the early days of the migration. The numbers of people who migrated to the Dakota's, Oregon, California, and the southwest is astounding considering the hardships and uncertainty of the west, but they continued west either picking up where others had failed or finding new settled territories. I just finished reading a historical report about Ft Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. The fort was staffed with horse cavalry into the 20th Century so I would consider the entire time span from Lewis and Clark until the early 20th Century to be the time encompassed by the "winning."

it was the air rifle carried with Lewis and Clark. intimidated the "natives", hence by reputation kept a lot of immigrants alive.

All good responses. I'd have to throw in another vote for shotguns.

Wagon trains were still running in the 1880s. If you were from Baltimore, Philadelphia Boston or any large eastern city you had to lay out a lot of cash to buy a wagon, horses or oxen, food for the trip, etc.

You needed some kind of gun too. Many of these people from the cities never fired a gun. A shotgun, especially after the invention of shotgun shells in the 1860s, was an economical alternative. It also increased one's chances of hitting something. Taking small game was essential to survival until you got your first crop in. There was a lot more of that than gunfights and fighting Indians.

I would guess if you found a settler with one gun it probably was a shotgun.

When I was kid, I just assumed that westward expansion took maybe a hundred years. In reality, I think the bulk of it was a 30-35 year span

The advancements in firearms technologies was pretty substantial. Went from flintlocks to cap & ball to metallic cartridges in just a few years. Maybe more firearms advancement in those 35 years than in the last 135 years

Smallpox, measles, fever, and a few other diseases won the west. And the east. By the end of the 17th century disease had killed off 90% to 95% of the Indian population. As the settlers went west, the disease cleared the way for them. Don't forget all the African diseases brought by the slaves. The Indians returned the favor in the form of syphilis. The original version was much nastier when what we have today. In a way the survivors were defeated by guns. More accurately the desire for guns. The Indians were constantly fighting each other. The goal was to sell each other into slavery to get guns. Vast numbers of Indians ended being sold into the Caribbean.

The Indians really liked guns and would trade just about anything they could for them. Crops, furs, slaves, land, etc. They were pretty anxious to fight each other to get it. The idea of well armed white guys fighting Indians that just had bow and arrows is a myth. In many cases the Indians were better armed than the whites. The westward expansion was done by farmers, not military. The military activity made it into the history books, but their actual numbers were insignificant. The people that went west did not go out of a sense of adventure. They went because they were poor. Life was tough in the west. But there was a lot of land and it was cheap. The settlers often had no gun at all. The frontier was mostly isolated families that did not stand a chance against an attack.

The west was not won by guns at all. But if you were to pick an iconic gun of the west, it would likely be the Pennsylvania flintlock rifles or fusil-de-chasse for the early expansion, which lasted about 200 years. Then came any number of percussion guns after that. Colt, Winchester, Sharps, etc were the most famous guns of the time that the movies are based on, but they were expensive. Not many people had them. The most common guns on the frontier would have been an obsolete military surplus gun. The people that could afford the fancy modern guns tended to live a bit east of the frontier and were more established.

Guns didn’t win the west, but...

Many people say it’s the Winchester 1873 and Colt Frontier Six-Shooter in 44-40.

I think it would be impossible to name one gun, but probably common shotguns or Civil War surplus long guns.

Guns won the west? I think that it could be argued that an axe and a trappers tools had as much a hand in that as guns did. Axes cleared the land and built houses which were much more fortified structures than the portable homes that the migratory tribes had in the west as they followed the herds of game. When it came to Indian fights, a house was a great place to be because it stopped both arrows and bullets not to mention wolves, bears, and likely the most dangerous of all, the cold weather.

Realistically I would think that the guns that won the west would have been the small defensive arms of the period. Coach guns were real, and were really useful. Cap and ball revolvers came when the west was already explored and settled, but the battles were still raging in the far west... but they would have been cost prohibitive (like most any handgun would have been). Civil war surplus guns were cheap, available, and the smooth bore muskets could shoot shot or ball loads. Many of them went home with the soldiers when the war was over, and those soldiers were subsequently the ones moving west or selling that arm to those who were.

So what won the west? Same as what’s winning the streets of Chicago today. What was available, that was affordable, and reliable.

The “white face” took the West from the Native-Americans with many different kinds of guns; the West was won with bows, arrows, knives and spears.
When the Indians won, it was a massacre - when the white face won, it was a victory - history is written by the victors!

As to the OP’s original question.
There was no one gun that won the west. There were many. This article does a very nice job of outlining the many guns that were used over a period of the last 40+ years of the 1800’s.

https://truewestmagazine.com/old-west-guns-22-guns-that-won-the-west/

It wasn't guns, but ladies who won the West. Start building towns and filling them with families with children had a way of settling things down right quick.

I'm with Pat Riot.... The guns of the frontier expansion were many and varied over that span of 40 something years. Most folks using guns utilized whatever they could get or afford. In my younger days I think my ideas on that were influenced by Hollywood. Then I began studying history.

I recommend reading Empire of the Summer Moon. The Comanche Nation dominated its territory against all for quite some time, even halting America’s manifest destiny for decades.

Sorry I can’t give specifics on the guns but the book mentions the use of superior repeating firearms contributing to the decline of the Comanche Empire. The book also mentions diseases and the extermination of the bison, but it also makes clear that there was a lot of hard fighting required to topple the Comanche.

The Indians were constantly fighting each other. The goal was to sell each other into slavery to get guns.

Click to expand...

Sounds like shotgun and turn bolt rifle shooters not caring about FA, semiauto, pistols, bumpstocks, etc. Sell out your only friends to your foe.

Irony is to get guns vs keep them...

I have to wonder how some data was collected though.

With a population in excess of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was down to 541 animals by 1889.

Click to expand...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison

Now we can’t even seem to get accurate census data with all the resources we have today.

How does one come up with the number of 541 for living animals in the wild?

Or is that a case of 89.75% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

LRDGCO said:

"
While popular mythology has the buffalo herds wiped out by hunting, that is a mathematical impossibility. There were in fact millions of buffalo. The massive slaughter, certainly in the tens of thousands and possibly the hundreds of thousands was a key contributing factor to the demise of the buffalo, but several million buffalo were not shot. The loss of large sections of herd through commercial hunting, disruption to migration patterns, and disease combined to destroy the buffalo, also denying good resources to some Plains Indians.

In the buffalo slaughter, large bore single shot rifles, including but by no means largely made up 45-70 rifles, won the plains.

So, the military small arms of the 1860s and 1870s would appear to have the greatest claim to the dubious title.

Click to expand...

Millions of bison were killed.

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-buffaloplight/ shows minimum of 13 million killed
http://www.davidmeyercreations.com/strange-science/who-killed-off-all-the-buffalo/ The Comanche alone were killing 280,000 a year.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/
http://www.nativeamerican.co.uk/1872-3buffalo.html In just two years over 3 million were killed
https://www.encyclopedia.com/histor...cs-transcripts-and-maps/buffalo-extermination
https://fee.org/articles/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america/ Bones filled 5,000 box cars a year, Union Pacific shipped 1.3 million hides between 1872-1874

From Wiki:

"Trappers and traders made their living selling buffalo fur; in the winter of 1872–1873, more than 1.5 million buffalo were put onto trains and moved eastward."

That's just one year!

GunnyUSMC said:

The West was not won over night. It was an on going process that didn't end until the late 1800's or early 1900's depending on who you talk to. Men specking adventure, fortune, solitude and sometimes fame headed west. These men armed themselves with the best guns they could afford. Now depending on the time frame of the western expansion different guns were more popular. You also have to know what was going on in the US during the time frame. After the Civil War the American public was well armed and the guns that were used on the battle fields of the east started making their way west. By 1871 Colt was converting 1860 and 1851 revolvers to fire cartridges. They remained popular even after the Colt 1873 (Peace Maker) came out. this is due to conversion models costing $5.00 to $6.00, while the Peacemaker cost $15.00. In most western movies you will see Winchester 1892 carbines, but you must remember that the Winchester 1892 did not come out until close to the end of the wild west days. The 1892 was a scaled down version of the Winchester 1886 lever action. Winchester offered Browning $15000 if he could have a completed rifle in two months. Browning said the price would be $20000 and would have it done in a month. But lets not forget the Henry rifle or the Winchester 1866. Both fine rifles in their day. You have right around 30 years of history where the West was wild. Pick a time in that history and research the guns of that time frame. Or pick a famous person, Lawman, or Outlaw, and see what guns they favored. We live in a great time where there are many replicas of old guns from the west that we can buy.

Click to expand...

I grew up in Colorado and we learned in my public school in this basic progression: Western History (we're talking bronze age up through the Renaissance) then American History (Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution up through WW2) and then State history including the forming of the Western states (so Colorado history along with things like manifest destiny, the gold rush, Native American history, etc.,).

After Lewis and Clarke and the Louisiana Purchase (thank you France) I'll just say the "winning" of the West took a long time and the first white people west were fur trappers aka mountain men and these guys were all basically crazy. Even the Native Americans thought they were wild, untamed, raw, uncouth, etc. One thing these men were great at was hunting and yes, their rifles were their life. That said, we are talking muzzle loading rifles, probably .50cal or so.

People went west, mainly because they were seeking gold or silver or some such thing to make them rich. Colorado and towns like Denver were unclean and lousy places to live, all the worst parts of human nature were found in towns like this. Colorado had some big mining operations like Victor, CO that had a large silver mine, and other places like Cripple Creek and Leadville that were basic mining operations. The gold rush of 1849 was in CA and that's where the term "49ers" comes from and that type of mass rush out west is what brought larger numbers of people and settlers and all the businesses that go with supporting the miners looking for gold. Again, this is all from like 1800-1850 and we all know that there were no lever action rifles or single action revolvers during this time.

Then the Civil War happened and of course, that pushed fire arm technology ahead rapidly. After the Civil War, you had the big migration out west for a lot of different reasons. Many seeking a new life and with the government giving free land away (think Oklahoma Sooners) and well, this is the wild west that we all think about when you see a John Wayne western. We are talking 1870 to 1910 or so. Really, less than about 40 years a real, true, wild west with things like the train system (trains were the life blood of the west) and impending conflicts with Native Americans and settlers and the US Army posts stationed around the western states.

So really, whatever firearms where prevalent and accessible to settlers, miners, farmers, and sold/traded to Native Americans during this time are what circulated around the west during this time. As others have said, the Civil War provided a lot of surplus arms that found their way west, but you also had the invention of the inclosed metal/brass cartridge during this time that really changed dynamics of guns and it was probably the movement west that provided a market for this new invention.

This is all off the top of my head so I'm sure I'm not 100% accurate in what I've written above, but it's just what I can remember about how "the west was won".

Speedo66 said:

From Wiki:

"Trappers and traders made their living selling buffalo fur; in the winter of 1872–1873, more than 1.5 million buffalo were put onto trains and moved eastward."

That's just one year!

Click to expand...

The first fur trappers were hunting beavers and spent lots of time in the mountains where the beavers were. I believe that in places like NYC, hats made from beaver pelts were very desirable. As for the buffalo, yes, they were slaughtered by the thousands but I don't recall why they were slaughtered, I don't think there was a big market for buffalo fur.

They were killed because they were in the way, sometimes buffalo were killed for food.

I saw a period photo of a pile of buffalo bones awaiting shipment back east to be made into fertilizer. The pile looked taller than the depot.

Steel Horse Rider said:

I think it was more the spirit and men behind the westward movement than any individual tool. It was the opportunists and entrepreneurs like the fur trappers, the Bent brothers, William Sublette and Robert Campbell, and the multitude of miners, farmers, lumbermen, ranchers, and shopkeepers who poured into the west as soon as any source of livelihood was discovered. Without the constant improvement in weaponry the "winning" of the west would have taken much longer but the sheer force of numbers of the westward migration all but guaranteed that it would be "won". Conquest is the historical nature of the human race no matter what pigmentation of the skin or ancestry of the clashing cultures. Before the lighter cast Europeans settled the America's the natives were too busy conquering each other than to worry about some strange men men wearing shiny outerwear entering their future. Last fall I picked up a couple of books about the use of steamboats to move people and freight up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the early days of the migration. The numbers of people who migrated to the Dakota's, Oregon, California, and the southwest is astounding considering the hardships and uncertainty of the west, but they continued west either picking up where others had failed or finding new settled territories. I just finished reading a historical report about Ft Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. The fort was staffed with horse cavalry into the 20th Century so I would consider the entire time span from Lewis and Clark until the early 20th Century to be the time encompassed by the "winning."

Click to expand...

Yep, there's a reason that there were many, many different Native American tribes, and that is because Natives are just like everyone else, they are sinners and they fought violently against each other. The Native Tribes did not like each other, or were in competition with each other in many areas of the US. That said, they simply could not compete with the white settlers and the numbers of white settlers moving west. Yes, the US Government reneged on many of its promises and treaties with Native American tribes, that said, many Native American tribes were flat out aggressive and violent toward people when the settlers did nothing to provoke hostility.

The reality is, that the history of the US and the movement west is not pretty, it's brutal and unforgiving. There were no prolonged or extended peaceful movement of settlers going from East to West, just a lot of conflict and then really depressing episodes like what the book "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" recount, where women and children (Sioux I believe) were slaughtered because of tensions and poor leadership decisions by men of questionable character put in no win situations. The west was a mess...

For a fun West gun I would like to buy a Win 73 in 44-40. Low recoil fun and iconic.

Not sure how much it “won the west” but there is no doubt there certainly were a lot of individuals using this cartridge and rifle combo.

jmr40 said:

Lever actions and the Colt Peacemaker were invented after the west was won.....

Click to expand...

Not by a long shot.
The last conflicts of the "Indian Wars" were fought well into the 1900's.
The last Medal of Honor winner from that era was in 1898.

Remember many Civil War soldiers were allowed to keep their muskets after the hostilities.
Not a few Civil War soldiers also supplied their own side arms.
These no doubt contributed to the outcome of the 1876 Northfield Minnesota Raid.

Lycidas Janwor said:

The first fur trappers were hunting beavers and spent lots of time in the mountains where the beavers were. I believe that in places like NYC, hats made from beaver pelts were very desirable. As for the buffalo, yes, they were slaughtered by the thousands but I don't recall why they were slaughtered, I don't think there was a big market for buffalo fur.

They were killed because they were in the way, sometimes buffalo were killed for food.

Click to expand...

From what I’ve read, the leather was used to make belts for machinery, army contract boots, and buffalo robes were very popular for winter use in horse drawn wagons for warmth. The tongues were taken for food.

LRDGCO said:

Try to do the math and think critically. Try.

A number of dubious sources citing the same implausible tripe does not evidence make. The fact is that hunters were unable to kill more annually than the actual replacement birth level in the herds. The myth of buffalo hunting wiping out the buffalo herds is right up there with the 1873 Winchester being the gun that won the West.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190052818300087

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/16/science/historians-revisit-slaughter-on-the-plains.html

Pursue primary sources, not regurgitated anecdotal blather.

Edit: because you won't do the math yourself.

Estimates of the buffalo herds prior to the railroads allowing large scale hunting range from 50 million to 75 million. Let's start there, at the low end. Keep in mind, they reproduce annually. Even at rapidly declining birth rates, you seem to think dudes with single shot rifles shot, at an absolute minimum 80 MILLION buffalo, in 15 years or so? Really. Where did all the lead come from? Assuming 1 oz for every shot (438 grs per shot, a little high, but indulge me for once) with no misses. That's 80 million ounces of lead, or 5 million pounds of lead, just for buffalo hunting.

Let's assume the low low end. 50 million. Let's assume an efficient guy kills 20 a day. That is higher than the historical record indicates, but let's indulge you. Let's assume he kills 20 every other day. Again, absurdly implausible, but let's. That's 3,550 a year. How many people do you imagine are engaged in buffalo hunting? Let's go high again and assume 1,000 shooters killing 20 every other day. Great, that's an improbable high of 3.5 million a year, more than the dubious sources that you cite claim. If we assume only 20 million reproducing buffalo issuing only one calf a year, and a loss to predation and disease of 50%, your uber efficient workaholic hunters are killing 6 million fewer buffalo per year than are produced.

Inevitably, you will nitpick and seek to inflate the numbers by all forms of absurdity. It doesn't matter. White hunters using single shot rifles did not wipe out the buffalo herds. Because math.

Click to expand...

Talk about going off the reservation. I don't think, how the Buffalo were decimated is what the OP is looking for.
I think a lot of attention is focused on the Indian problems and not so much given to the Outlaws and Lawmen.
To me the Wild West has more to do with the wild and lawless men that raised hell, robbing trains, banks and stagecoaches, or anything else, and the Lawmen that hunted them.
So when looking for the guns that tamed the West, one should also look at the guns used by the Outlaws and Lawmen during those wild times.