Evans Carbine Rifle

Welcome back to another Owen Guns Firearm Friday! This week we’re looking at one of the more unusual American repeaters of the 1870s, a firearm associated with none other than William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, yet one that never achieved the fame of its Winchester and Spencer contemporaries. This is the Evans Repeating Carbine.

The Evans is a firearm that looks unusual at first glance, but its real party trick is hidden inside the stock. Designed by Warren R. Evans, a dentist from Thomaston, Maine, the Evans repeating rifle was developed with assistance from his brother George. The Evans Repeating Rifle Company began manufacturing the design at Mechanic Falls, Maine, in the early 1870s. Production continued through the decade, with roughly 15,000 Evans firearms believed to have been manufactured.

What makes the Evans particularly fascinating is its magazine.

Rather than the familiar tubular magazine underneath the barrel seen on many American lever actions, the Evans carried its ammunition in a rotary helical magazine running through the buttstock. Operating the lever rotated the magazine mechanism and advanced the cartridges toward the action.

Depending on the model, the system could carry up to 34 cartridges, an extraordinary capacity for a commercially produced repeating rifle of the 19th century.

That gave the Evans one hell of a selling point.

The earlier Evans models used the proprietary .44 Evans Short, while the later New Model was designed around the longer and more powerful .44 Evans Long cartridge. The Evans appeared in several configurations, including sporting rifles, military-style muskets and the shorter, handier carbines.

The company hoped its design might attract military contracts, and the Evans was evaluated by the United States military. However, despite the enormous magazine capacity, it never became a standard U.S. service arm. The unusual mechanism, proprietary ammunition and competition from established manufacturers all worked against the relatively small Maine company.

The Evans did, however, find its way into the hands of some colourful characters of the American West.

One of the most famous was William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who is recorded as having used an Evans repeater. Cody was already one of the most recognisable frontiersmen of his era and would later become internationally famous through his Buffalo Bill's Wild West performances.

By the later 1870s the design had evolved into what collectors now call the New Model Evans. These firearms incorporated improvements to the receiver, hammer, lever and magazine system, while retaining the unusual rotary magazine that made the Evans immediately recognisable.

Despite these improvements, the Evans Repeating Rifle Company could not compete indefinitely with companies such as Winchester. Production ended around 1879, leaving behind a relatively small number of rifles, muskets and carbines compared with the enormous production runs achieved by the major American manufacturers.

Today, that commercial failure is part of what makes the Evans so interesting.

The Evans represents a period when repeating-firearm design was far from settled. Designers were experimenting with different actions, cartridges and magazine systems, and Warren Evans came up with one of the most unusual solutions of the entire era: put the magazine inside the stock and make it rotate.

It was complicated, distinctive and ultimately unsuccessful commercially, but it worked well enough to attract military attention, travel beyond the United States and find its way into the hands of men such as Buffalo Bill.

And more than 150 years later, we're still talking about it.

That's another Firearm Friday wrapped up from the Owen Guns Museum. The Winchester might have won the popularity contest, but when a dentist from Maine builds a lever-action capable of carrying up to 34 rounds and Buffalo Bill decides it's worth using, you have to admit he was onto something interesting.

See you next week!.