American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms by Chris Kyle, William Doyle Page B

Coffeyville didn’t have to do much messing around with the sight.
    One by one, the Dalton boys were shot to pieces. Emmett made it to his horse, but Bob staggered and fell, finally perforated to the point where he couldn’t go on.
    “Good-bye,” Bob told his brother as Emmett tried to pull him to safety. “Don’t surrender, die game.”
    Emmett might have obliged, but he was hit several times and settled to the dust. There he was grabbed and dragged into the office of a local Dr. Welles. The doctor had taken an oath to preserve life, but as a good part of the town crowded in, he realized they were fixin’ to apply their own medicine to his patient with the short end of a rope.
    “No use, boys. He will die anyway,” he told the crowd.
    “Doc, Doc, are you certain?” someone asked.
    “Hell, yes, he’ll die,” said the doctor. “Did you ever hear of a patient of mine getting well?”
    The mob laughed, then ran off to gawk at the four robbers who hadn’t the luck to make it to Doc Wells’ office alive.
    The four were about as dead as men can get. One was said to have “as many holes in him as a colander,” and another report estimated twenty-three pieces of lead in one of the bodies. The town had saved its money and earned a place in history, though it had paid a steep price: Four civilians were dead.

The Dalton Gang pose with a Winchester.
    The deceased robbers were propped up for a picture, with a Winchester draped across them. Some dumb ass figured out that if you moved the dead Grat Dalton’s arm up and down, blood flowed out of a prominent hole in his throat; quite a number of people amused themselves trying it.
    Contrary to the doctor’s assessments of his skills, Emmett survived almost two dozen gunshot wounds and wound up in jail. Sentenced to life, he turned over a new leaf and was freed after serving some fourteen and a half years. Freed, he became an actor and a writer, somewhat less dangerous activities than robbing banks, though in some eyes nearly as dubious.
    The Coffeyville battle is a great action story, probably as exciting to hear and tell today as it was a hundred-some years ago. But it wasn’t just the bullet slinging that makes it stand out from a historical point of view. In deciding to stop the robbery, the citizens had drawn a big red line not in the sand, but across the West. The country was to be wild no more. Law and order would prevail. Not only were Americans taming the West, they were taming themselves.
    And if the people in the West had evolved, so had the guns they used to instill order on the chaos of nature and themselves. The Winchesters used in the Coffeyville battle represented a climactic moment in the century-long evolution of American frontier rifles.
    The Winchesters were never commonly used as combat weapons by American military forces. There were a bunch of reasons, from head-shed (aka top brass) prejudice against repeaters to the difficulty of cycling rounds while lying flat behind thin cover. Instead, the repeater became the all-purpose working rifle for countless thousands of cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, and homesteaders for the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Protecting the Herd , by Frederic Remington. Winchesters were standard issue for cowboys and ranchers.
Library of Congress
    I love lever-action rifles. I have since I was old enough to chase my little brother, Jeff, around the family house playing cowboys and lawmen. As a matter of fact, I lusted after his Marlin .30-30 when we were kids. I had a fine bolt-action .30-06, but his lever-action Marlin looked to me like a cowboy gun, and in my mind that made it the best.
    The whole idea of a lever-action rifle is to slip a cartridge into the breech quickly and easily, so it can then be put to good use by pulling the trigger. The trigger-guard mechanism on the outside of the gun works a lever that pushes the spent cartridge out of the breech when it’s pulled down. Sliding the lever back up snugs a