Curious Relics #145: Heavy Boy – The 1860 Henry Rifle Part IV

By Sam.S • Published November 11, 2026

Welcome, if you are a newcomer to this fun bi-weekly segment of AllOutdoor.com! Over the last three articles, I covered the history, the variations, and the dating, specifications, and parts situation of the 1860 Henry. In this article, we are closing the series out with a range session on the Uberti that has been standing in for an original this whole time. Finally, we are into the shooting business! Let’s dive right into the Curious Relics rabbit hole one last time with the Henry!

Recent Curious Relics Coverage:

Welcome to our recurring series of “Curious Relics.” Here, we want to share all of our experiences, knowledge, misadventures, and passion for older firearms that one might categorize as a Curio & Relic – any firearm that is at least 50 years old according to the ATF. Hopefully along the way you can garner a greater appreciation for older firearms like we do, and simultaneously you can teach us things as well through sharing your own expertise and thoughts in the Comments. Understanding the firearms of old, their importance, and their development which lead to many of the arms we now cherish today is incredibly fascinating and we hope you enjoy what we have to share, too!

Range Time: The 1860 Henry Rifle

First impression? It is heavy. It is a heavy boy. It is also a gorgeous rifle, and I caught myself just looking at it more than once before I ever loaded it. Most of that weight lives out in the barrel, and since there is no forearm on a Henry you are holding that barrel directly. I would not call it balanced at all. It feels like a musket, or honestly like holding a long piece of steel bar stock with a brass frame stuck on the back of it. I was a little worried about heat with nothing between my hand and the barrel, but that turned out to be a non-issue. The barrel never got hot.

1860 Henry Rifle

As promised in Part III, here is what I fed it. Everything that went through it was Herter’s 250 grain lead flat nose factory ammo in .45 Colt. Herter’s sells it as target ammo rather than calling it a cowboy load, but at a listed 725 feet per second it is about as mild as standard .45 Colt gets. No black powder this time around.

Loading it the old way felt fine, though there is a little part of you that feels weird about it the first few times. Every round you drop in sits with its primer right on the nose of the round ahead of it, and then you let a spring loaded follower down on top of the whole column. The manual makes it very clear that you ease that follower down and never let it slam onto the cartridges. That is a very big deal. There are reports out there of exactly that going wrong and things going kaboom, so there is a sense of carefulness the whole time. It is not hard to do right. What worries me is somebody getting comfortable after a few hundred rounds and letting it get away from them. All it takes is one slip of the hand.

Back in Part III I mentioned that your support hand can stop the follower and choke the whole thing. I never had that happen by accident, mostly because I was pretty cognizant of where my hand was. I did try it on purpose to see what it felt like. The rifle gives you a little grace there. With the follower held up you can still work about one more round through before it turns into a complete stoppage, at least in my experience.

Cycling with live ammo was clean. No malfunctions, no short strokes, and nothing getting hung up. It is a little more clunky than I thought it would be. I expected a smoother system. But for one of the first lever action mechanisms to really take off, it sort of makes sense. One thing that did trip me up early on was my dummy rounds. They were homemade from real cases, and since the case mouths were not crimped the way most factory ammo is, they would not feed and caused some jams while I was getting to know the gun. So if you want to practice, stick with one-piece molded snap caps, or make sure any homemade dummies have a proper crimp on them. Same goes for loaded ammo, I suppose.

The lever lock on the bottom tang… I noticed it, and it never got in the way. That being said, I am not a fan. It is a knob that locks the lever shut, and from what I have read, the idea is to keep the lever from flopping open while the rifle rides in a saddle scabbard. It unscrews easily enough, but I would rather have the knob than an empty hole there, so if this were mine, it would stay put. I also need to clean up something from Part III, where I said the originals did not have a lever lock. That is not quite right. As covered in Part II, most original Henrys have a spring lever latch that does a similar job of holding the lever closed. It is just a different design than the knob Uberti uses.

Onto shooting! The sights are where this rifle and I did not get along. The rear is a ladder sight and the ladder portion is usable. The front is the problem. It is a thick, wide, flat-topped triangle, while the rear has a fairly thin notch shaped like an upside down V (or a little pyramid, whatever you want to call it). They do not really fit one over the other, so being precise is tough. Is that accurate to the originals? Originals wore a nickel silver blade up front, but I could find no helpful information pinning down whether the Uberti’s profile is a faithful copy or not.

The trigger on my sample is not great. It is very heavy and stiff, with no take-up and no squeeze to it. All wall. A heavy wall, and then a weird clunk of a break. Not the best trigger in the world, folks, and I am sure a gunsmith could slick it up. Cocking the hammer, on the other hand, is not an issue at all. It is not stiff in the slightest.

Recoil is nothing. It is .45 Colt coming out of a nine pound rifle (and I do mean nine pounds), so there just is not much there to feel.

As far as holes in paper go, I shot at 25 yards and at 100 yards. At 25 my shots landed high, which tracks since these sights are made with 100 yards as the minimum, and the group came out to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 inches. Not terrible, but I have seen better. At 100 yards it was not even worth taking a picture. With 3-inch circles as my targets, I was lucky to hit the paper at all, and a lot of that comes back to that fat front sight covering everything up. This rifle would be a whole lot more fun on a big steel silhouette or a torso target at that range, where you might actually ring something.

Functionally, nothing surprised me at all.

Final Thoughts: The 1860 Henry Rifle

I really, really enjoyed this rifle. It feels cool just lugging it around, let alone loading it the old way and shooting it. There is nothing else quite like it. Curious Relics aside, I would highly recommend one to anybody who is even a little curious about where the lever gun got its start. The trigger and that front sight are the two things I would change, and neither one kept me from grinning every time I closed the lever. I would also be interested to see how other 1860 Henry reproductions (like the New Original Henry from Part II) feel by comparison, whether they shoot better or worse and how their features stack up. Maybe that is a story for another day… Thank you for sticking with me through all four parts of this one, folks. See you next time!

A big thank you to the folks at Uberti for sending out the 1860 Henry for this whole series. Getting to load and shoot one the old fashioned way made all four of these articles better, and I appreciate it.

This installment is part of the Curious Relics series – an ongoing archive of historical firearms documentation. Browse the full series here.

In closing, I hope our Curious Relics segment informed as well as entertained. This all was written in hopes of continued firearm appreciation and preservation. We did not just realize how guns were supposed to look and function. It was a long and tedious process that has shaped the world we live in. If you have a question or you are sitting on information that could sharpen up an article like this one, you can find me through my Linktree. Until next time!

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