Is it sunset for the gun that won the west?

The factory that created the rifle immortalised by films stars like John Wayne and James Stewart is threatened with closure after 130 years. Andrew Gumbel reports on an American icon

A ginger-bearded hunter, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, with a wide-brimmed hat shielding him from the punishing desert sun, stands before a craggy flat-topped mountain with both his booted foot and his trusty Winchester resting on the shaggy corpse of a giant buffalo. "Winchester big game rifles and ammunition," runs the slogan, "the kind that gets 'em."

This was a pivotal time in the history of the American West. The federal government was withdrawing its troops from the Southern states that had been on the losing side of the Civil War a decade earlier, and redeploying them instead to Indian country. General Custer's humiliating defeat at Little Big Horn (1876) at the hands of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse was just around the corner.

The region was attracting the kind of hired gun later immortalised by Hollywood - Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James and Billy the Kid - and exploding into violence between rival groups of ranchers all the way from the Black Hills of Dakota Territory to Dodge City, Kansas and Lincoln County, New Mexico.

No frontiersman would enter such a world without first ensuring he had the proper weaponry to defend himself, his property and family. And the Winchester, particularly the best-selling 1873 model, was the weapon of choice.

Repeating rifles - that is, rifles that could fire several bullets one after the other without the need to reload - had made their first significant appearance on the Union side in the Civil War.

The '73 model, though, combined several desirable features: a simple lever mechanism that allowed an adept marksman to fire a bullet every three seconds, a steel frame that could handle the latest in ammunition technology, a powerful, centre-fire .44 calibre cartridge, and a wooden forearm that greatly enhanced the comfort of aiming and shooting.

Not for nothing was the Winchester '73 nicknamed "the gun that won the West". Buffalo Bill had one. Annie Oakley, nicknamed Little Miss Sure Shot and later commemorated in the musical Annie Get Your Gun, had one. Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general who went on to serve two terms as president, had one. Outlaws, sheriffs, soldiers and ordinary cowboys either had one or hankered after one. In all, more than a half a million Winchester '73s were sold from the time of their entry on the market right up to the 1920s.

And the lore of the Winchester has persisted - largely thanks to the public-relations savvy of the Winchester company itself and the myth-making powers of Hollywood. After the Wild West was tamed, Winchesters became popular as hunting rifles - in no small measure thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, who took one with him on his hunting safari in Africa in 1909, the year he relinquished the presidency. The best-selling Winchester, in fact, was an 1894 model that clocked up six million sales by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Well into the era of the Kalashnikov, the pump-action shotgun and the semi-automatic pistol, the Winchester brand continued to do business from its original New Haven headquarters.

John Wayne was not an official pitchman for the company, but he might as well have been: the sight of him pulling the lever of a Winchester and firing slug after slug into the guts of screen villains is as familiar and comforting to cinema lovers around the world as a favourite pair of slippers. Two years after Wayne's death in 1979, a commemorative Winchester was issued in his name and engraved with the name "Duke", the sobriquet he carried with him throughout his 50-year career playing tough guys in the Old West.

Now, though, it seems the end has finally come. Earlier this week, Winchester's parent company, the US Repeating Arms Co, announced that it would close the New Haven plant for good at the end of March if a buyer could not be found. City officials and union leaders have vowed to hunt high and low for a saviour to avert the closure, but it is a daunting prospect.

A factory that once boasted 19,000 employees now has fewer than 200. The company has long since given up any pretence of being at the cutting edge of firearms technology and, for several decades, has traded largely in memorabilia. The past 30 years or so - particularly since a crippling strike by the company's unionised machinists in the mid-1970s - have largely been a litany of humiliations; none more so than the sale of the US Repeating Arms Co to a Belgian holding company, the Herstal Group. As one aficionado remarked at the time of the sale, if gun enthusiasts wanted to do business with the Belgians, they'd buy chocolates, not rifles.

The Belgians, in turn, did their best to push the Winchester in its last thriving markets - the gun collection trade in certain parts of western Europe - but the New Haven plant has been losing money for years. The plan, it seems, is to continue to use the Winchester name, but not in any way that will identify it with its traditional product line or the city of its origin. The Winchester, a mournful New Haven mayor, John DeStefano, said a few days ago, "is part of who we are as a nation just like it's part of who we are as a city". An era, in other words, is drawing to a close.

The Winchester's significance in American, and global, culture can really be divided into two phases. The first is the place it holds in the history of the technology of firearms. It was Oliver Winchester's good fortune to get into the firearms business at a time when industrial innovation was just beginning to take off in the United States, and the secession movement in the American South opened up hitherto undreamed-of commercial possibilities for anyone involved in armaments.

Winchester, a wealthy Connecticut businessman previously best known for manufacturing shirts, bought the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company in 1857. It had pioneered the first lever-action rifle with a design by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, who later made their fortune making Smith & Wesson handguns. Winchester brought in his own gun mechanic, Benjamin Tyler Henry, who perfected a form of rimfire cartridge first dreamed up by Wesson and came up with an initial model capable of storing and firing 15 cartridges at a time.

The Henry, as it was known, became commonplace on the battlefields of the Civil War - on the Union side only. Further breakthroughs, though, were to come after the war was over. In 1866, a company engineer called Nelson King developed a tubular magazine feeding device and streamlined many other aspects of the design. This model was variously known as Yellow Boy, because of its brass receiver, or the Henry and King, or the Improved Henry. It was almost entirely superseded, however, by the '73, with its more powerful firing mechanism and greater accuracy.

As the firearms historian R L Wilson wrote admiringly in his book Winchester, An American Legend: "It weighed but seven and one half pounds and could be fired 12 times without reloading. This weapon could be dropped across the saddle in front ... and with little practice, the magazine can be replenished without checking the horse. It can be held in one hand and fired as a revolver." All that, though, might have been long forgotten were it not for the second coming of the Old West - in the form of Buffalo Bill's travelling shows, the carefully burnished myths of the wild frontier that they spawned and, most especially, the power of Hollywood mythology. The Winchester was not the only lever-action rifle in production in the late 19th century, but when it came to the great Dream Factory's scriptwriters, it was the only name that ever seemed to count.

The mystique of John Wayne had a lot to do with that. So, too, did a celebrated Anthony Mann western starring James Stewart and Shelley Winters called Winchester '73. The plot of the movie (made in 1950) centres around a bitter rivalry between two brothers - one, played by Stewart, virtuous, and the other, played by Stephen McNally, as rotten as rotten could be.

More interesting than this relatively conventional set-up, though, is the subplot of a Winchester rifle they both feel is rightfully theirs. The rifle, originally offered as a prize at a Dodge City shooting contest, passes from one person to another, invariably bringing bad luck until, at the end, it is safely back in the Stewart character's hands. "That's too much gun for a man to have for shootin' rabbits," the villain says near the beginning of the film, as he lustfully eyes the rifle cradled in Stewart's arms. "Or for shooting a man in the back," Stewart retorts.

The Winchester also spawned a lesser-known, secondary mythology that is no less intriguing, concerning the family of the company founders. Oliver Winchester had a son, William Wirt Winchester, whose life proved to be both short and tragic. His daughter, Annie, died within days of her birth in 1866, and he and his wife Sarah - who teetered on the edge of madness for almost a decade after the loss -- found themselves unable to have another child. William died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1881, at which point Sarah suffered a new slump and slowly convinced herself she was being punished for all the violence unleashed by the weapons on which the family fortune was founded.

She consulted a medium, who told her: "You must start a new life and build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop, and you will die."

She moved to California, bought a house in San Jose and over the next 36 years, she built and rebuilt, making crazy alterations such as staircases that bumped into the roof. Construction crews were kept on a permanent payroll year round, 24 hours a day. By the time she died, her house was seven storeys tall and contained so many confusingly laid out rooms that every time surveyors conducted a count they came up with a different number. (It was somewhere around 150.)

Today, the Winchester House in San Jose has become a historical landmark and a tourist destination - perhaps the spookiest, and certainly the oddest, Winchester legacy of them all.