"Leverguns were never popular in the old west"
Ok, the silliness of that statement is illustrated by Winchester's sales records of lever actions in the United States, including lading bills for HUGE numbers of guns that were bundled onto railroad cars, shipped to distributors in Chicago and St. Louis, and disbursed all the freak over the American west.
Winchester made nearly 750,000 Model 1873s, with the VAST majority of them being shipped WEST.
I don't have production numbers at hand for Winchester, Ballard, Sharps, and Remington single shot rifles, but I have a funny feeling that there were more 1873s manufactured than there were single shot rifles during this time
The large-frame single shot rifles were primarily the domain of the market hunters. At any given time it's estimated that there were fewer than 5,000 of these individuals.
Not everyone in the west was employed as a buffalo hunter.
And, let's not forget that Winchester also had four other lever-actions that sold very well in the same time frame -- the 1876, the 1886, the 1894, and the 1895. Granted, the latter two are getting very close to the end of what we would consider to be the "classic" old west, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they were more than passingly popular west of the Mississippi.
All told, though, in the "old west" period, Winchester made well over 1 million rifles for sale in the United States, and by far the lion's share of them were sold in the west.
I'd really love to know where you came up with your assessment that the Winchester rifle wasn't popular in the west, and in fact was apparently something of a rare duck?
"The ones that were available were very expensive and not often used."
ALL quality firearms at that time were expensive in terms relative to personal income.
Just as they are today.
"By WW-I leveractions were all but dead."
Also incorrect.
It was World War I that introduced a significant number of Americans to bolt action rifles.
The 1920s saw the first commercial successful bolt action rifles that made any sort of traction with the shooting public.
Previous attempts to introduce bolt action rifles had largely been a failure because they didn't sell.
Why?
Because people weren't familiar with them.
What did they want?
Lever action rifles. Sales of lever action rifles by Winchester and Savage remained robust in the first two decades of the 20th century, FAR more robust than you apparently know.
So it was the rise of the bolt action that killed the lever action after 1920, right?
Guess again.
After the war, sales of Savage and Winchester lever actions remained very strong, and did until the Depression severely depressed gun sales across the board. Serial number records more than show that.
Do you really think that, if the "lever action was all but dead" before World War I Winchester and Savage would have a) continued to produce them and b) would have stayed in business? Especially savage, whose only true volume seller from 1900 to 1917 was.... the lever-action 1899?
