Best Lever-Action Rifles of The Golden Age

Above, several lever-action rifles displayed at the Billy the Kid
Museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Lever-action rifles are making a comeback in popularity. The venerable lever-action rifles of yesteryear are in high demand in gun store used gun racks, some discontinued models are being reintroduced and new ones are being introduced by such companies as Smith & Wesson, Rossi and others.

If one is interested in obtaining a lever-action rifle, Field & Stream has posted a list of the five best lever-action rifles of 2023.

They begin it with:

Lever-action rifles are turning up by the scores in used-gun racks, their wooden stocks battered and once-blued steel worn silver. The grandfathers who used them are afield in happier hunting grounds, and the grandkids who would have gotten them either don’t hunt or prefer a precision bolt-action.

The time of the lever-action as America’s Number One Gun has passed.

But from 1861 to 1918—from the Civil War to World War I—we were a lever-gun nation. Lever-action rifles took us from the era of the muzzleloader to the modern bolt-gun. Nor have we forgotten that. There is still no shortage of people to whom “deer rifle” means “lever-action rifle.”

Cowboy Action shooters were behind Winchester’s re-introduction of the Model 1873 lever gun. Ruger just resurrected the Marlin Model 1895, and there are any number of custom shops who will build you a hot-rodded 1895 for a great deal of money. Lever-action rifles can shoot at long range, drop elephants, and print minute-of-angle groups. Doug Turnbull has transformed them into an art form with his magnificent restorations. And if you want an original lever gun, scars and all, you need only look to that used-gun rack.

The best lever-action rifles are neither gone nor forgotten. Here are the eight greatest models from the lever action’s Golden Age.

To read more, go here.