At $40 to $50 per rifle — roughly $1,250 to $1,500 in 2020 dollars — the Henry was not cheap. The government balked. Military traditionalists raised concerns about ammunition expenditure, and the logistics office noted that a .44 rimfire cartridge cost four times what a single-shot rifled musket round cost. The U.S. government ultimately purchased just 1,731 standard rifles during the war.

The brass-over-beans argument is as old as repeating firearms, apparently. Every conversation about upgrading a duty weapon or issuing a higher-capacity platform eventually runs into the same objection — ammo consumption. Bureaucracies move slow, and soldiers with skin in the game don't wait.

That damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week. — Confederate Colonel John Mosby

When your enemy's soldiers are buying the rifle out of their own pockets and your raiders are talking about it like that, you've got something. That quote has lived for 160 years because it captures what a 15-round repeater meant to guys who'd spent their whole lives loading one round at a time.

Loading was the rifle's most distinctive and most frustrating procedure. To charge the 15-round tubular magazine, the shooter had to move the cartridge follower along a slot to the top of the magazine tube, pivot it to the right to open the front end, pivot the top portion of the tube back, and then release the spring-loaded follower. It worked, but it was not fast under pressure and required both hands completely off the rifle.

Anyone who's fumbled a reload under even mild range pressure knows that a slow loading system erases a capacity advantage fast. The Henry's 15 rounds was genuinely revolutionary — until you ran them dry in a defensive position and had to stand there with both hands occupied doing origami on your magazine tube. Nelson King's loading gate on the '66 fixed this, and that single change is probably worth more than all the commemorative plaques Winchester ever put on their receiver.

Firearms historian Herbert G. Houze put a number on what that rate of fire meant in practice: one man with a Henry was the equivalent of 14 or 15 men with single-shot guns.

That math hits different when you're thinking about it from a defensive standpoint — the Allatoona Pass account of 16 men holding a position is basically a real-world proof of concept. Volume of fire in close terrain matters. Still matters. Anyone who's worked through a home defense scenario with a lever gun versus a magazine-fed rifle has thought about a version of this same equation.

What's the oldest or most historically significant firearm you've actually put rounds through — and did shooting it change how you thought about the platform?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team