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Admin moved page Which Guns Won the American West? to Which Guns Won the American West
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[[File:Colt-arme-1860-p1030159_(1).jpg|thumbnail|320px|left|Colt 1860 Army]]
It rode on the hip of Buffalo Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, Judge Roy Bean and Pat Garrett, the sheriff who hunted down Billy the Kid. Its official name was the Single Action Army® Revolver. It was commonly known around saloons and lawmen's offices as The Peacemaker®. The gun was a Colt .45.
==Oliver Winchester - a Different Type of Firearm Entrepreneur==
[[File:Winchester_1873.jpg|thumbnail|320px|left|Winchester Model 1873]]
Born in Boston in 1810, Oliver Fisher Winchester was a New England contemporary of Samuel Colt but his route to weapons immortality was markedly different. When Winchester left the family farm it was to work in construction. He eventually migrated into the mercantile trade. He manufactured men's shirts and plowed the profits into the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut in 1855. As Winchester's talents were strictly on the business side, the work of building firearms was left to men like Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, who make names of their own in the gun world.
==“The Gun That Won The West” in Modern Culture==
The Model 1873 remained in production until 1919, the same year the phrase "the gun that won the West" appeared for the first time. <ref>Haar, Dan, ”Gun That Won The West: Two Claim Bragging Rights,” ‘’’’Hartford Courant’’’’''Hartford Courant'', 2016</ref> It was created by a copywriter for a Winchester magazine advertisement but it did not take long for moviemakers to adopt it. Randolph Scott starred in Colt .45 and the gun was at the center of every Western shootout, especially the fast-draw duel, a wholly Hollywood creation, as it staked a claim to being that victorious gun. By the 1960s, when Houston was awarded an expansion major league baseball team, the club adopted the nickname “Colt 45s.”
No gunfight ever erupted between the Colt and Winchester companies, still both in an altered existence in Connecticut, for bragging rights over the claim to be the one gun to have "won the West." America has created no myth larger than the "Old West" so there is plenty of shoulder room for the two to co-exist: the Colt revolver as the weapon of the lawman cleaning up a frontier town and the Winchester rifle taming the frontier.
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==References==
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[[Category:Wikis]]
[[Category:United States History]] [[Category:19th Century History]] [[Category:History of Science and Technology]][[Category:History of the American West]]
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