Wild West Historians, what’s the most modern firearm used by outlaws or against them before the era came to an end?

13 comments

1. Yes it’s possible. Bolt actions and semi auto pistols started to see limited commercial use in the US. The c96 comes to mind for a semi auto pistol. And bolt actions were around since the mid to late 1820s

2. Like the colt peacemaker and the Winchester 1866 repeater?

   The bolt action Springfield (1903) and the colt 1911 (1911) and the M1917 (1917) Browning, so your WWI staples, all came from after the wild west times.

   More interesting is the WWI era weapons that were common in WWII. The Marines on Guadalcanal successfully defended themselves from waves of Japanese soldiers using WWI era Springfields and liquid cooled M1917s.

3. I’d say the lever action rifle.

4. standard in the great war? probably not

   but weapons that saw action in the war, that’s a different story

5. Lever action rifles of (almost) any caliber for sure. The fire rate and versatility put everything else to shame. However, bolt action rifles were more common in the military due to ease of maintenance and the general reluctance of the military to adopt new tactics.

   [Here’s a very good video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOtW76itFtU&pp=ygUUaW4gcmFuZ2UgdHYgbGV2ZSBndW4%3D)

   Nonetheless, some WWI rifles saw action in the trenches, mostly on the eastern front as many were exported to Russia.

   More advanced weapons including early semi-automatics were beginning to be produced during the “wild west era” but these were in fairly limited supply to really embody that time period.

6. Depends on what you mean by “Wild West”. There were actual shootouts in 1917 and 1918.

7. My uncle was in a cattle rustling gang in Deadwood. When he a bit long in the tooth he was still being an asshole. In 1908 he shot a sheriff at a brothel in Sturgis. He also beat a girl with the gun he used and but the article only states it was a revolver.

8. It depends on what you consider to be the end of the wild west. If you consider it to be when the last of the far southwestern territories were converted into states (Arizona and New Mexico only became states in 1912) then the technology was pretty much already at WW1 levels. General Patton of WW2 fame had his first field experience hunting down Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa around that time, and he did so with jeep-mounted Gatlin guns.

9. The weapons that are considered the iconic weapons of the “Wild West” were various single action revolvers, lever action rifles, single action rifles, and double barrel shotguns. Most of these weapons were obsolescent by the beginning of the Great War.

   Single Action revolvers had been replaced by double action revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. Most Single action revolvers are very slow and tedious to reload, particularly in combat, which is why cowboy movie gunslingers carried several.

   Lever Action rifles were not as popular in Europe, although some were purchased and given to rear echelons troops such as depot guards or messengers. The Lever Action rifles of the “Wild West” era were very handy, but used significantly less powerful cartridges than Great War bolt action rifles. A cowboy lever action
   was only useful to about 300m, whereas a Great War bolt action was lethal at distances over a kilometer. As an aside, Winchester did develop a lever action rifle, their model 1895, that could shoot full power cartridges and sold almost 300,000 of the Model 1895s to Russia in Russia’s standard 7.62x54r caliber, where they served in frontline roles. However the 1895, was not the kind of lever action we typically see in Cowboy movies.

   Single shot rifles had been completely outmoded by bolt actions by the time of the Great War, although many came out of reverses during the desperate years of the Great War. Most of those were European designs, like the Gras or Martini-Henry, that American cowboys would not have had. There were some Remington rolling blocks rifles purchased by the French and British as training and auxiliary rifle, and Cowboys would have had access to those Remington rifles.

   Shotguns were not really used by European militaries. The US used a few pump action shotguns.

   As another aside, in 1916, while the Great War waged in Europe, a Mexican revolutionary named Pancho Villa tried to cross the border and raid the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. The Mexican revolutionaries had a hodgepodge of whatever weapons they could find, but they would have been similarly equipped to Cowboy movie characters. The US Army had stationed a small Calvary unit there due to the unrest in neighboring parts of Mexico. The US army units had Springfield bolt actions and a handful of Hotchkiss M1909 Benét–Mercié machine guns. The citizens of Columbus were also well armed. The attack went very poorly for the Mexican revolutionaries, and although the Hotchkiss M1909 is not considered a particularly good machine, they were very effective against the revolutionary attackers.

10. Possible, especially some of the revolvers available at the time. For rifles, the Winchester Model 1873 was the “rifle that won the west” and I think it saw service with the military up through the Spanish-American war but lever action rifles fell out of favor before WWI for bolt action rifles as the are easier to cock while in a prone position and considered more reliable.

11. The Winchester Model 1897 shotgun, Aka M1897 Trench gun, aka the Trench Sweeper, aka “a war crime” if you listen to the Germans of WWI.

12. My favorite rifle -the Winchester 1895- was the last lever-action firearm to see large-scale military service, being used by the imperial Russian military in WW1. Modern reproductions are even still made today by Miroku, In Japan.

13. I’ve seen various pictures from turn-of-the-century cowboys and lawmen with [Lugers](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fywwtnid8318a1.jpg) and at least one with a [C96 Mauser attached to its stock](https://imgur.com/a/lX68zda) in a pile of guns being used by a sheriff and his deputies. Also considering Browning was developing semi-auto pistols in the late 1800s, it’s possible something like the FN M1900 could have shown up.