Gun Digest 2011. Dan ShidelerЧитать онлайн книгу.
questionable authority during the same time. Wild Bill Hickok seems to have left an endless string of human beings that knew him well, judging from the printed evidence.
Not everyone was entranced by the common guns of the immigrant or pioneer farmer, the guns that really won the West. Everyone was, it seems, interested in the guns of the gunman. I daresay we still are. A few of these firearms that once were used by the infamous made their way into the hands of an individual or a family, where they had been closely held for two or three decades before they were presented to readers of an outdoor magazine. Collectors had a few of them too.
The Saunders collection contained at least three guns used by Jesse James: a .36 Colt Navy, a Starr, and a Colt M1873. From Outdoor Life of October of 1923.
Belle Starr’s ‘73 Winchester .44-40 came to light in the July of 1920 Outdoor Life. Belle was the daughter of a Methodist minister, a good girl gone astray. One of the West’s great outlaw leaders, she ran with the James gang and Jim Cummings, and generally terrorized Oklahoma when it was known as Indian Territory.
Missourian Fred E. Sutton wrote in his brief note that Belle was killed at Younger’s Bend in the I.T. (Indian Territory) on February 3, 1889. Edgar Watson was credited with the deed. After Belle hit the ground, her saddle mare Venus swam the river and was intercepted by U.S. Marshal James Boles, who lifted the carbine from its saddle scabbard. Sometime later he gifted the gun to Mr. Sutton, its owner in 1920. The photograph accompanying Mr. Sutton’s essay indicated that BELLE STARR is rather crudely but conspicuously carved on the right side of the butt stock . On one side of the breech in her name in brass letters. On the other side is a brass figure of a bell and a star. One would suppose that this precious Winchester is in a major collection. On the other hand, it could still be reposing in a closet somewhere in Missouri.
The largest collection of old guns that was made public knowledge was that of C. Burton Saunders of Berryville, Arkansas. Outdoor Life editor J.A. McGuire judged that an account of Mr. Saunders’ vast collection was sufficiently noteworthy to warrant a three-and-a-half page coverage in the October 1923 issue. Perhaps the centerpiece of Saunders’ 700-plus guns was a Colt Navy once owned by Jesse James. Supporting the claim was a letter from the son of the man Jesse gave the pistol to in 1877. Thomas G. Davis had done James a favor of some sort, and the method of demonstrating his appreciation was to present Mr. Davis with a gun when he happened to be temporarily weaponless. The barrel is inscribed “Jesse James, Sep.12, [sic] Pilot Knob, Mo.” Also worthy of mention is a Single Action Colt that was said to have been given to James’ brother-in-law at Sonora, California. The relative later lent it to a forest ranger and the gun was ruined when his cabin burned. Saunders was later able to acquire it.
A 44-caliber Starr six-shooter was decorated by James himself with a copper dagger and an inverted letter “J” inletted into the grip. Driven into the grip was a number of small nails, each of which was believed to have represented a man fallen dead to the Starr. Included in this count were four law officers who tried to arrest Jesse in 1876 at the Miller Ranch, five miles out of Joplin. Legend has it that after the revolver was emptied, James threw it on a table and made his getaway. A servant woman present immediately dropped the gun into a jar of warm lard that was on the hearth. She later buried the jar together with the concealed gun, and it was preserved in this fashion until it was recovered at a later date. Ultimately, it wandered into the collection of C. Burton Saunders.
Joaquin Murrietta was a conscienceless Mexican bandit and gringo-hater who specialized in brutally plundering California mining camps. He lived by the sword, and at age 23, died the same way. He was decapitated, and his pickled head was kept on display at the Gordon Museum in San Francisco. During the 1906 earthquake/fire, the gruesome thing was lost and never found. Taken from his headless corpse in 1853 was his Colt Dragoon, which also found its way into the Saunders collection. Killed with Murrietta was a hopeless criminal known as Three Finger jack. Saunders got his gun too.
For those clinging to a vestige of hope that some remaining elements of the Old West still survived, a singular event signaled its finishing throes. The demise of the Old West was official when its personified symbol passed away in the Spring of 1917. Buffalo Bill Cody, Army scout, buffalo hunter, and the showman who took the frontier West around the world, died quietly in Denver, and with him the era of the frontier and the conquest of the plains and the mountains. With his passing, the Old West was gone, hopelessly and irretrievably lost to a glorious and semi-mythical past.
Period advertisement for Joaquin Murrietta’s traveling head.
Fittingly, Chauncey Thomas was the last man to interview Cody as he lay on his deathbed. Mr. Thomas’ wordy account of his audience with Buffalo Bill appeared in the May, 1917 number of the Magazine of the West. In his last days, Bill and Chauncy talked guns and Western experiences. Cody spoke of his heavy buffalo guns, the type favored by bison killers who sniped them from a stand. Bill used two Sharps rifles, a ponderous .45-120-550 weighing 18 lbs. and an 11-lb. bottlenecked .44 caliber.
Cody liked to shoot his bison from a horse’s back, galloping close to the herd and lung-shooting them at very close range. For this, a light powerful rifle was his weapon of choice. A Winchester 1873 was especially well liked, as was a Spencer carbine.
Cody smiled when he named his favorite buffalo gun: “Lucrezia Borgia,” a breechloading 50-caliber Springfield that was special to him. With it he slew 4,250 animals in a single year. (The real Lucrezia Borgia, a sixteenth-century Italian socialite, had an equally bloody reputation.) The Indians had a nickname for Cody’s Lucrezia. To certain red men, she was known, affectionately or fearfully, as “Shoot Today – Kill Tomorrow.” When Buffalo Bill and the West he knew were both gone in 1917, Lucrezia Borgia remained draped across a set of elk antlers at the ranch, next to the knife Cody used to kill Yellow Hand.
When Cody died, the “real” Old West died with him. Today, we’re fortunate that the recollections of those who really had “been there, done that” have survived in the yellowing pages of the old outdoor literature. The witty Chauncey Thomas, the orator most capable, delivered a succinct but sufficient eulogy for this unique period in American history: “The Old West is dead, and the frontier six shooter is a relic. Where the Indian roamed we have the suffragette; we run short of carfare instead of cartridges, and instead of pulling the .45, we are pulled by the 5:40.”
Emerson Hough was an habitual Forest and Stream columnist through the peak of the frontier years and a familiar provider of sporting, natural history, and conservation material. When he contributed a short feature, unimaginatively titled “The West and the Gun” in the June 23, 1900, number, it must have struck his loyal followers as uncharacteristically reflective. When he published his observation, it was a trifle too early in the century for the sort of thoughts that were on his mind.
Mr. Hough spent the best part of his life in the West; for many years he was a New Mexican. He wrote that he lived through a time when seeing a sidearm strapped to a man’s hip was the usual and expected thing. He once shot – informally at targets – with Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, the man who ended the career of Billy the Kid with a bullet.
While visiting a Chicago gun store during the first Spring of the twentieth century, Hough caught his initial glimpse of the new-fangled Colt .38 Automatic pistol and puzzled over its complex gadgetry. It was a curious, right angled, out-of-balanced affair. Hough had grown old enough to be resistant to change and to progress. With sad strokes of his pen, Mr. Hough foreshadowed the attitude that would preoccupy the minds and imaginations of Westerners for the next 20 years when he wrote: “These Browning boys, out in Ogden, Utah, who get up all these revolutionizing inventions in firearms, are Western men, and they must have an odd reflection now and then that there is no longer any West, no longer any Billy the Kids, no longer much use for guns, big or little.”
By the time of the European War, the Wild West had been broken and tamed. The boom town was now a ghost town. The nester had fenced himself in and was there to stay.