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Name the gun and the man holding it


G-MAN

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Barry got it right off the bat in a PM to me.

The man is Jesse James. The gun is a Marlin 1881, the first mass produced lever action ever offered in 45-70. The "beautiful friendship" Barry is referring to in his hint is no doubt the relationship between Winchester and John Browning, because this Marlin rifle is what ultimately led Winchester to put Browning's big-bore lever gun into production as the Winchester 1886.

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Yep, when the Marlin 1881 came out, Winchester had to change their plans.

They had owned the lever action market since the Civil War and were fairly content with their big rifle, which was the 1876. But the Win 1876 was made in calibers that were for the most part Winchester proprietary calibers like the .45-75 Win and .45-60 Win. Chambering a lever for popular rounds like the .45-70 and .38-55 would have been ideal, but it just wasn't feasible for Winchester at the time. The 1876 had a toggle link action similar to to 1873, and toggle link actions are long. Compare a toggle link 1873 to the vertical locking bolt 1892 and see how much shorter the '92 is. Winchester could have made a toggle link action to handle .45-70 length cartridges but it would have been really long. So Winchester designed cartridges to fit the rifle. The .45-75 and .45-60 were bottlenecked, giving them fatter bidies and more powder capacity which let them be shorter than a .45-70 while being close ballistically. It wasn't the best solution but there was no competition to speak of so Winchester had little reason to do anything different.

Then Marlin came out with the 1881. The first two calibers it was chambered for were the .45-70 and .40-60 Marlin. The .45-70 had been the army cartridge for eight years and ammo was plentiful from the government giving it away to help the buffalo slaughter.

I don't know if panic broke out at Winchester, but I doubt things were relaxed.

In early 1883, a Winchester salesman bought a Browning single shot (aka 1885, High Wall, Low Wall) and showed it to T. G. Bennett who ran Winchester. Bennett himself took a train to UT to buy the design. While there, John Browning hinted around to him about a repeater he was working on. This was the rifle that would be the 1886 Winchester. Bennett was very interested, but Browning wouldn't say mich about a rifle that was not yet ready. Browning had already got a patent for what would be part of it as early as 1882, but was so busy making the single shot in their small gun shop and factory that he couldn't work on it much. It sounds like the Browning brothers were almost as happy to sell the single shot design to Winchester for the time it freed up than for the money. The cleared to-do list let them work on the repeater, they took it to Winchester in the fall of 1884, Bennett snapped it up for "more money than there is in Ogden" and the rest is history.

What I find interesting is that while John Browning waited for the final patent to come through (filed in May 1884, issued in Oct) he designed another .45-70-size lever action repeater that had nothing in common with the 1886. In this other rifle, the bolt and lever are one piece similar to the 1887 lever shotgun, and the hammer must be cocked manually for each shot. So while most people were struggling to make a .45-70 lever action, he made two, and the second type was essentially designed out of boredom!

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