Henry Repeating Arms president Anthony Imperato confirmed to me this morning that the New Jersey-based arms maker will be offering their steel-framed, round-barrel lever action rifle in the thundering .45-70 cartridge in March of 2012. We loved Henry’s Big Boy .44 Magnum earlier this year, and we’ve come to expect great things from them. What’s not to love about lever-action goodness in a huge .45-70 package, other than football ballistics and the price of ammo?
How should you feel when one of your favorite guns, an American classic that had served cowboys, lawmen, deer hunters and recreational shooters for over a century, simply vanishes from store shelves? It happened before: we lost a classic .22 pistol when High Standard vanished, and a little piece of us died when Winchester imploded and the Model 1894 moved to Japan to be ‘resurrected’ as high-priced custom gun. Now, sadly, it has happened again…
Our beloved jefe Farago has been waiting a long time for his over-the-top Cowboy Assault Rifle project (not pictured) to come to fruition. What a long, strange trip it’s been, starting with an unintentional ‘Paratrooper’ version of the Model 1894C complete with a folding walnut stock. After months of radio silence (during which my own 1894C was customized, modernized, and shot like I stole it) Marlin sent Farago an impeccably perfect replacement.
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, … Read more
[HTML1] As you may recall, Marlin sent us a pair of .357 Magnum lever-action carbines, and to describe the aftermath as a PR failure would be a polite understatement. Wild West Guns worked their magic on one of them, and did their best to fix most of what Marlin got wrong. Do I like the … Read more
RF:
Sorry to hear about your Marlin 1894C breaking in half at the range last week. I’ve been looking forward to comparing my retro classic lever hunting rifle to your Urban Cowboy Assault Rifle, something John Wayne might have carried in the classic movie “Tom Clancy’s: The Searchers.” Looks like my project is coming along a little better than yours, so far . . .
I’ve become addicted to playing been playing an iPhone game called High Noon. It’s Western dueling game, that’s surprisingly fun. Recently, they upgraded the weaponry, and now, instead of choosing between a U.S. Navy Revolver, a lever-action rifle and a side-by-side shotgun, they’ve added some new toys to the arsenal. You can buy a Banker’s Revolver (3x more deadly than the default U.S. Navy Revolver), a Stagemaster Shotgun (50% more deadly than the regular shotgun), and a Tatanka Rifle (also 3x more deadly as compared to the standard lever-action “buffalo rifle” that is but 2x better than the default revolver. I’d never heard of the Tatanka, so I did what I usually do when I don’t know something. I Googled it. Turns out, there is such a thing. And it’s a thing of beauty.
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