The Henry Rifle

And Zombies!

Henry 1860 rifle - .44 Rimfire

While I was looking up stuff about the movie True Grit, I noticed this little blurb about the Henry rifle on the Internet Movie Firearms Data Base page:

Note how the rifle clearly has a twisting barrel instead of a loading gate.

A twisting barrel?!? What the heck is a twisting barrel? And no, I don't see any evidence of such. Of course, since I don't know what they are talking about, I might not recognize it anyway. So naturally I had to track this down. So I point and click for a while (days it seemed) and I finally found this explanation from stormgale89 on Yahoo! Answers:

the originals had a lift and turn to the side cover on the magazine tube, pull the follower all the way up to the end of the barrel, lift the sleeve towards the end of the barrel and turn it sideways, this opens the loading gate, now drop your cartridges bullet end up, lift and turn the sleeve to close and allow the follower to fall into the notch, done, ready to action and fire.
only other cheaper "replicas" use the kings gate(found on all new centerfire lever actions), which wasn't invented until 6 years(1866) after the henry 1860 was started, so the uberti is the only authentic replica that I seen.

Source(s):
side note: it was a Henry 1860 that was used in the movie "night of the living dead" they actually show exactly how it's loaded:

(6:10 into the video, skip to it)

also, here's a picture showing the sleeve that needs to be turned:

Twisted!

I had heard about the Henry, but I thought it was just another old gun from another old gun maker who has gone out of business. It is actually a pretty significant weapon. Near as I can tell it was the first commercially successful repeating rifle. This is during the time of the civil war when most soldier still used muzzle loaders.