FIREARMS OF THE AMERICAN WEST: 1866-1894, by Louis A. Garavaglia and Charles G. Worman, The University Press of Colorado, 413 pages, $59.95.
This second volume of a two-part study of weapons from the nineteenth-century American West traces their development from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the modern era of firearms, including the evolution of a high-velocity, bolt-action rifle designed for smokeless powder cartridges that was adopted by the army and the introduction of the Winchester Rifle, Model 1894. In this comprehensive, large-format book, the authors examine the period when “swords and pikes had long since been laid aside; now it was the firearm that either broke or enforced the law.” Included are more than 500 photographs of the weapons of the period, and the men and women who used them as they settled the West.
