The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty by Laura Trevelyan (review)

The prologue to Winchester '73, a classic 1950 western starring Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters, reads: "This is a story of the Winchester Rifle Model 1873 . . . 'The gun that won the West.' . . . To cowman, outlaw, peace officer or soldier, the Winchester '73 was a treasured possession. . . . An Indian would sell his soul to own one." In addition to Stewart, the likes of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, and Yul Brynner all carried the Model 1873 on film. Not surprisingly, given its vanguard position in American pop culture, thousands of pages have been written concerning the schematics, exploits, and history of the rifle. From the very beginning, however, BBC anchor and author Laura Trevelyan disclaims that The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty is anything but another chronicle of this iconic gun. Nor is it even a straightforward history of the family—a family to which Trevelyan belongs—that created it; rather, this book is the biography of that family's business, which began just as the sectional crisis started to boil over into civil war.

In the late 1850s, Oliver Winchester (Trevelyan's great-great-great-grandfather) incorporated the New Haven Arms Company and worked with Benjamin T. Henry to produce a highly successful line of lever-action repeating rifles. As Trevelyan notes, Winchester tried in vain to market the rifle to the U.S. Army when the Civil War began, but stubborn military officials (and Lincoln) preferred the lighter weight and the slower rate of fire of the Spencer carbine. Winchester's rifles largely missed out on the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy—but they would take center stage in the new territories that the Union's victory threw open for settlement. After the Civil War, the name of the business changed to the more recognizable Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and models such as the 1866, 1873, 1886, 1892, and 1894 became immensely popular on the western frontier. Cow punchers, rustlers, homesteaders, gold prospectors, lawmen, and bounty hunters all valued the Winchester for its superior rate of fire. The company's rifles were even in the hands of Sioux, Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne warriors in 1876 as they slaughtered George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Despite these decades of achievement, World War I would prove the company's downfall; Winchester overexpanded to meet government contracts but hemorrhaged money as the prices of raw materials and production skyrocketed. The Great War threw the company into a financial tailspin, and by the 1930s, following multiple failed recovery schemes, it had fallen out of the Winchester family's hands.

While not explicitly stated, the book's narrative touches on several important developments in Civil War–era history: the growth of American weapons manufacturing in the lead-up to and during the Civil War; the process of integrating (or failing to integrate) new weapons technologies into the largest armies America had ever known; how those technologies borne of the war were transported west and used to carry white civilization to the frontier; and, perhaps most interesting of all, how businessmen of the Civil War generation, like Oliver Winchester, coped with the onset of not just industrial capitalism but industrialized warfare. That said, because these dots are generally left for the reader to connect, the main issue surrounding The Winchester is one of readership. More specifically, it's somewhat unclear what constitutes this book's target audience. On one hand, gun enthusiasts and western history buffs will likely be disappointed with the lack of technical details and gory shootouts. On the other hand, professional historians of capitalism or the military will not find much new to mine from Trevelyan's narrative or her sources.

Trevelyan is a more than capable storyteller but has a tendency to repetition. Regardless, the story brims with engaging and eccentric characters, ranging from Oliver Winchester to Benito Juarez to...