The Henry Big Boy Steel carbine in .357 Magnum/.38 Special may the handiest little rifle in the history of the world ever. Weighing in at a total of 6.5lbs and two inches shy of three feet in length, it’s a breeze to carry all day, and maneuvers easily in the tight Dewberry thickets and cedars, where […]
Regular readers know that I’ve shot a lot of lever guns, a fair few of them Henrys. The Henry Big Boy Steel in .41 Magnum was a first. I’d never seen a rifle of any kind in this Goldilocks caliber. An oddity or a chance to own something rare, practical and desirable? A little history […]
When Henry Repeating Arms revealed their box-fed lever-action Long Ranger series, I asked to test one in .308 Winchester. Without a round fired, I was impressed and intrigued. Why had Henry departed from its traditional tube-fed designs? “Because customers asked for it,” Henry GM Andy Wickstrom said, simply enough. The company figured they could make money selling a good product […]
For students of the history and romance of so-called cowboy rifles, Bayonne, New Jersey isn’t a particularly evocative locale. Ilion, New York (Remington). New Haven, Connecticut (Marlin). Those are the places where West-winning long guns were born. Even though the virtues of the long guns made in those storied factories have withstood the test of time, […]
