Winchester rifle in the context of "Repeating rifle"

A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating plate armour. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket gradually disappeared as the use of heavy armour declined, but musket continued as the generic term for smoothbore long guns until the mid-19th century. In turn, this style of musket was retired in the 19th century when rifled muskets (simply called rifles in modern terminology) using the Minié ball (invented by Claude-Étienne Minié in 1849) became common. The development of breech-loading firearms using self-contained cartridges, introduced by Casimir Lefaucheux in 1835, began to make muskets obsolete. The first reliable repeating rifles, the 1860 Henry rifle and its 1866 descendant the Winchester rifle, superseded muskets entirely. Repeating rifles quickly established themselves as the standard for rifle design, ending the era of the musket.

The Henry repeating rifle is a lever-action tubular magazine rifle. It is famous for having been used at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and having been the basis for the iconic Winchester rifle of the American Wild West.

Designed and introduced by Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860, the original Henry was a sixteen-shot .44 caliber rimfire breech-loading lever-action rifle. It was produced from 1860 until 1866 in the United States by the New Haven Arms Company. The Henry was adopted in small quantities by the Union in the American Civil War, favored for its greater firepower than the standard-issue carbine. Many later found their way West, notably in the hands of a few of the Sioux and Cheyenne in their defeat of George Armstrong Custer's U.S. Cavalry troops in June 1876.