EMANUEL GOMEZ remembers the day that the company bought tickets for all its workers to watch the John Wayne film Stagecoach.

It was a source of pride for everyone at the factory that made the movie star’s signature Winchester rifle. “You have all these action scenes and you see him shooting his Winchester - killing Indians, of course,” Mr Gomez, who spent 44 years at the plant, recalled.

But the iconic American firearm known as “The Gun that Won the West”, featured in so many Hollywood Westerns, is now riding off into the sunset for good.

Workers at the factory that produced the quintessential cowboy rifle for 140 years were laid off this week amid howls of protest from gun-lovers around the world, and the plant closed yesterday. “John Wayne and so many actors carried a Winchester: They didn’t say: ‘Hand me my rifle’. They said: ‘Hand me my Winchester’,” David Bichrest, the secretary of the Texas-based Winchester Arms Collectors Association, said.

“We have got 2,000 active members in this organisation. It runs from Australia to England to Belgium to France to Norway,” he said. “The whole fraternity is upset. There is a website called ‘Save Winchester’.”

The first Winchester rifle was produced in 1866, when the shirtmaker Oliver Winchester took over an ailing armsmaker and renamed the firm after himself. The lever action breech mechanism of the rifle allowed the user, with a quick crank, to fire 12 times without reloading.

Winchester repeating rifles, particularly the 1873 model, gave settlers a decisive advantage over the natives in America’s westward expansion and became beloved of “Wild West” outlaws such as Jesse James.

The only known photograph of Billy the Kid shows the young killer brandishing a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver. The artist Frederick Remington painted Winchesters in his celebrated depictions of the American West.

Mr Bichrest said that the Winchester deserved its reputation, even though the high-powered Sharps rifle possibly did more to harm the native tribes because it was used to kill buffalo.

“The Sharps wiped out the buffalo, and when they wiped out the buffalo, that put the Indians on reservations,” he said.

It was not until 1919, however, that Winchester adopted “The Gun that Won the West” as its advertising slogan. By that time, the gun had become a popular hunting rifle, boosted by President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to take his own on his famous 1909 African safari. Hollywood embraced the slender firearm as part of the mythology of the “Wild West”. Two Westerns were even named after the gun — James Stewart's Winchester '73 and The Gun that Won the West, starring Dennis Morgan. Wayne used one in True Grit and later donated his personal Winchester, along with his saddle, spurs and a Colt .45 pistol, to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In the Second World War the Winchester factory employed 19,000 workers. But by the time the factory closed this week, only 186 were left. Last year, it produced only 80,000 rifles — about about a quarter of its capacity. The laid-off workers are angry that the Herstal Group, the Belgian company that licenses the Winchester name from Missouri-based Olin Corp, is shutting down a factory built with government help only a decade ago across the street from the original plant.

Local officials say that three companies - including Smith & Wesson - have shown interest in buying the factory if they can get hold of the name.

“The name is very important. That is why there is going to be a battle,” Denny Johnson, another Winchester worker, said. “If it does not say ‘Winchester, New Haven, Connecticut’, it's not a real Winchester.”

History of a legend

At the height of its production capacity, during the Second World War, the Winchester factory employed 19,000 people

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