America’s gun culture is the stuff of legend. Apparently more than many of us realize according to a new history of the subject. Pamela Haag, who holds a PhD in history from Yale University, brings us the history we thought we knew about our vast gun culture in her new work “The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture” (Basic Books, $29.99). The stories from the gun industry’s early attempts to create markets for repeating arms sometimes sound like the stuff of movie fiction: one tale involved a harrowing stagecoach journey out of Mexico in 1866 following a lucrative sale, a trip that couldn’t have been more exciting if Indiana Jones had been involved.

Hard to believe today, but back in the late 19th-century, the people who created the gun manufacturing industry (particularly with the advent of repeating arms) struggled to find markets for the weapons they were developing or perfecting. Names that are ubiquitous today such as Samuel Colt, Oliver Winchester, Eliphalet Remington, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, along with Eli Whitney and many others, battled for customers as they sometimes battled each other for patents, contracts and factories.

When one thinks of the wild west days of cowboys, ranchers and the like, one thinks there must have been a huge market for six-shooters and rifles to protect property and kinfolk out on the prairie, not to mention hunting. Far from it, Ms. Haag details, as the Winchesters and the Colts and many others often traveled overseas to find markets in unstable European settings for their money-making ventures.

Gun-fighting legend appears to be a 20th-century creation about those Wild West days and their weapons, according to Ms. Haag. In detailing the pivotal Winchester Model 73’s actual low circulation numbers in its initial year of 1873, she writes “Its celebrity biography backdated its diffusion and even its popularity.”

The author presents some very telling facts regarding the largely manufactured mythology surrounding the “rugged individualism” of the western cowboy and the firearm he so deftly used to rule his solitary kingdom in the lawless West. Ledgers reveal the truth and Ms. Haag lays out how gun sales stacked up by 1880: small game and bird hunting. After 1869, places like Missouri and Nebraska were already mostly shooting rabbits and quail, not Indians and rustlers.

She details the rise of the “dime novel,” those little stories so popular in the post-Civil War era, which spread and embellished the myths of brave, fast-draw gunmen and the desperados they needed to kill in large numbers. Other stories featured the mostly fictionalized biographies of those infamous killers themselves, usually increasing the number of people they gunned down in cold blood. Billy the Kid, if one were to believe the tales of the day, killed over 20, when the reality was about eight.

Pamela Haag’s history, though, takes an interesting approach as she lays out the backdrop of the early days of the gun in America. Her thread through the stories of multiple manufacturers and their wares, is the Winchester empire, because it contains a unique personality, that of Oliver Winchester’s daughter-in-law Sarah, who ultimately inherited the family business. Hers was a tale of a haunted conscience while her former shirt-maker father-in-law wasn’t troubled in the least about selling devices of death.

Before 1900, as Ms. Haag details, Sarah Winchester was living in a sprawling and mysterious mansion she had expanded, “reputed to be the most expensive private residence” ever built. The legends that arose about Sarah’s obsession with ghosts and spirits, particularly the ones felled by Winchester guns through the years, became invariably tied to the bizarre structure she continually built, rebuilt, remodeled, tore down, rearranged or abandoned “like a maze to trick and confuse” them.

Heavily damaged by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that Sarah was convinced she’d caused through the evils of her gun empire, her estate became even more mysterious. Its own history would make a compelling book.

Regardless of her attempts to shed the guilt-riddled wealth she had acquired, particularly on her massive estate, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company shares she held were worth well over $6 million (over half a billion in today’s dollars).

Alongside Sarah’s story, which would make a fascinating miniseries, the gun story and its champions and detractors unfolds in Ms. Haag’s book in great detail, to include the early NRA and its work in Washington D.C. to protect guns and gun owners at a time when early gun control involved things like banning sawed-off shotguns and semiautomatic weapons from being used in hunting or stopping the 15,000 Colt Tommy guns that nefariously found their way into the mobster world by the 1920s. Pamela Haag’s detailed history of America’s gun culture is as colorful as it is surprising.

Perry Munyon is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.

First Published: August 14, 2016, 5:02 a.m.