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Old Western guns
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: Old Western guns (in reply to Escribano)
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A very nice looking Winchester, Simon!
I have always been interested in old firearms and blades (both swords and knives/daggers). I'm not a major collector, but have picked up a few along the way. During the mid-'60s I spent several years in the U.S. Air Force and at one point was assigned for over a year at an intelligence gathering Air Force station near Peshawar, Pakistan. Visited the Khyber Pass and some tribal areas on several occasions, and went to Afghanistan as well (which still had a king, which tells you how long ago it was!)
In Afghanistan, I picked up a flintlock pistol in the Kabul Bazaar. It was originally British but had been decorated at some point in the mid-19th century with mother-of-pearl inlay on the grip. The mother-of-pearl would have been obtained from the Arabian Sea at the time and brought up from India (now Pakistan). The tribesmen in what is known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan still carried the long-barreled jezails and the occasional British .303 Lee-Enfield, the workhorse of the British Army from about 1895 to the 1920s and beyond. Once, some friends and I went camping and fishing in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, and we hired a tribesman to guard our camp. He carried a .303 Lee-Enfield and let each of us shoot it. I still have the shell casing from my shot as a souvenir.
Swords have always interested me, but one of my treasures is a kukri, the inwardly curved and sharp-edged weapon carried by the famed Gurkhas. I visited Hong Kong in 1977, when there were still a couple of British-officered Gurkha battalions stationed there. I made arrangements to meet the commander, a Lt. Col. who had cut his teeth in Malaya during the 1948-60 Malaya Emergency. We had a great conversation, and as I made ready to depart, he graciously gave me a kukri as a memento of my visit.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Jan. 4 2016 18:28:06
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Old Western guns (in reply to Escribano)
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No clue of real guns. But I loved colts as toys. In the sixties there were some really nice specimens to be had, some of which could probably be drilled to real shooters. My favoured one, manufactured like a gem, was gone like most of stuff when I returned from abroad as teenager. Darn nephew ...
Always loved the way winchesters are. Shoot, load, shoot, load.
Never got beyond air guns though with which I aimed at backstops exclusively.
Just like with bow and arrow (which I like the most), hatchet, throwing knifes, speers, ... billiard, boule playing ... I consider them all means to train one´s imaginary preparation.
Practically, ... in childhood I once hit a wild bird with a throwing knife, and another time pierced a guy´s calf from around 150 m distance with the bow. Both occurances cured me from pointing anything at anyone.
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The shape of the pictured stock looks not right to me. Too short, too small, too skinny. And it doesn´t appear like of dense hardwood. (After all, one needs to knock out cattle-thieves with it. And it must survive slipping down the rocks when you wrestle with the cougar.) Also the barrel part is not fitting accurately / not crafted well.
I would either let the wood parts be removed and redone by a specialist if possible, or redo it with lots of dedication myself.
Some things need only mms here or there to look wrong.
Ruphus
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Date Jan. 5 2016 21:17:12
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Old Western guns (in reply to Escribano)
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I suppose the most interesting firearms I grew up with are the pair of Colt Third Model Dragoon revolvers my great-grandfather carried regularly and had with him when he was wounded at the battle of Shiloh in the Civil War, taking him out of action for nearly a year. They are in the gun room at the ranch, and are taken out of the cabinet and fired on special occasions.
At some point they were converted from cap and ball to metallic cartridges, though the black powder cylinders are still with them. My great-grandfather carried them throughout his active life.
In several post-Civil War photos he is seen in a gray frock coat and slouch hat, strongly resembling the uniform of a Confederate officer, with the ribbons of Confederate medals on the lapel, astride a gray Tennessee walking horse, said to be the first cousin of Lee's famous Traveler, though I haven't seen the stud book..
In one photo, somewhere in northern Mexico around 1890-1900, he and the ranch foreman appear with the dome of a church in the background behind a wall, accompanied by their regular escort. The foreman wears a traje de charro, and is mounted on a handsome Palomino rigged in black leather studded with silver conchos.
The escort consists of seven fairly rough looking vaqueros, mounted on wiry quarter horses. They sport handlebar mustaches, sombreros de alas anchas, bandoleros crossed on the chest, filled with spare cartridges for their 1873 Colts and the 1873 Winchesters under their left legs. They are formed not in a rank, but in echelon, affording each a free field of fire in nearly all directions.
The foreman's great-grandson and I have asked quite a few people whether they could identify the church, but no success to date. Descendants of four of the vaqueros still live on the ranch.
Also in the gun room are my grandfather's Purdey double rifle in .450 Rigby Express, his Mannlicher-Schönauer carbine in the Spanish 7mm Mauser cartridge, his 1894 Winchester octagon barrelled and engraved lever action in .30-30 caliber, and three 1930s Browning bolt actions in various calibers, with matched Circassian walnut stocks and Grade 1 engraving.
My father's Purdey side-by-side 12 gauge went directly from him to my son, with a stock refit by the shop in London. When I moved overseas in 1991 I left my firearms with my son for safekeeping. I have'nt asked for them back, but I think I might ask for one of them. It is a Colt 1911A1 .45 Auto, accurized by Bob Chow in 1960, decorated as a birthday present from my girlfriend Alicia by the San Luis Potosi artisan Silvio Barragán Velazquez. It's in the older silver and gold cactus flower style, not all shiny gold and jewels like the narcos have nowadays. The mother-of-pearl grips have the Mexican eagle and serpent carved into the left scale, the Texas lone star on the right.
I probably won't fire it much, but I would like to have it as a souvenir of those now-distant days.
RNJ
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Date Jan. 6 2016 4:29:40
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Old Western guns (in reply to Escribano)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Escribano
Can you share the photos of the charros - my favourite look 
The original exists as an 8"x10" glass plate negative. It was recognized by a relative of the foreman's great-grandson while going through personal effects after his own grandfather passed away. The relative lives near Sabinas Hidalgo, between Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo. He gave the negative to the foreman's great-grandson, a close friend of mine, who was himself ranch foreman for nearly thirty years. He is two days younger than I. We spent a lot of time together in childhood and youth, when I spent every summer on the ranch, along with my brother and my cousins.
16"x20" prints were commissioned for descendants of the photo subjects, including the four vaqueros who have been identified, more than 150 in all. Before reading your post, I began to wonder whether the photo had ever been digitally scanned. Speaking on the phone with the foreman's great-grandson, he confirmed that it had not, as far as he knows. We agreed to look into getting the negative scanned.
RNJ
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Date Jan. 6 2016 22:30:59
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Old Western guns (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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Hunting and fishing were, and still are integral parts of Texan rural culture. My father and all of my uncles were country boys, and competitive sportsmen. My father hunted only birds. He was a fairly good wing shot. He was the best sport fisherman I ever met.
His younger brother was the best wing shot of the group, one of the very best in Texas, northern Mexico, and Cuba before the revolution.
I hunted deer three times with my uncles and cousins, but quit at the age of 19, having seen more people than deer in a day of hunting. I was not as enthusiastic a fisherman as my father and brother. I was probably over 30 years old before I learned to take a book, a good cigar and a flask of coffee when I went with them. If the fish were biting, I would fish, if not I would read, smoke or drink coffee. They could have great fun fishing from dawn to dusk, without ever catching a single one.
We fished the Texas bays and the Gulf of Mexico, inland lakes in Texas and Oklahoma, trout streams and lakes in Alaska, and the Patuxent River, Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic while we lived in Washington, DC. My father had also fished a number of other waters while stationed overseas.
Bird shooting in particular was a competitive sport among my extended family. We hunted quail and doves in south Texas. For each species there is a limited hunting season and a legal limit on an individual's daily take. The competition was to see who could get his limit first, with the least number of shots fired. My father's younger brother was the usual winner, by a fair margin. Their brother-in-law, Beaufort Hale McC. was the usual runner-up, sometimes winner.
When I began to hunt birds with the men at age 12, after getting his limit Uncle Mac would stand behind me and coach. It takes bright sunlight and copper plated shot to be able to see the actual pellets, but the wadding that is discharged with each shot can be an accurate indicator of errors in leading the bird and allowance for the falling of the shot with range.
My favorite recollection of Uncle Mac is seeing him smiling after taking two birds from a covey of quail that had been flushed by the dogs on command, his double-barreled 12-gauge broken open over his left forearm, casually dredging in the pocket of his vest for two more shells, and reloading to take a third bird at long range--a virtuoso feat of marksmanship which he carried off as though it were perfectly routine.
During the Great Depression Uncle Mac supplied much of the fish and fowl for his family's dinner table, with that shotgun and his fishing rod. Quail are especially good eating.
My grandfather and the ranch foreman taught me to fire a rifle. I was given a BB gun at age ten. In bright sunlight you can see the copper plated pellet as it flies away. They likened hitting the target to reaching out with a long slightly arched twig to touch it. At age twelve I received a single shot .22 caliber rifle for Christmas, and used it under adult supervision, with the understanding that any violation of the rules of safety and good judgment would result in the immediate surrender of the weapon.
While at university I hunted squirrels with my friend Lovell Adair P., in the several hundred acres of oak and juniper woods his widowed mother owned, then in the outskirts of Austin. His mother made a fabulous squirrel stew. She was a dead shot with a pistol. Having spent the night at their house I awoke to a fusillade of gunfire. His mother called to us, "You boys get out of bed and come pick up these rabbits." She had shot four, standing in the front door with her Colt Woodsman .22 pistol. We had rabbit pie for supper.
At that time there was an outdoor pistol range open to the public in Zilker Park. One day Lovell and I were there shooting larger bore pistols, when the Police pistol champion appeared and challenged us. We weren't doing that well when Lovell's mother showed up. She knew we would be at the pistol range when she got off work as the head of the state's purchasing agency. Seeing that we were losing, she went back to the car, got her Smith and Wesson .357 magnum revolver from the glove compartment, and showed the Police champion how it was done.
At times Lovell's cousin Jacob P. would go squirrel hunting with us. Jakie was the great-great-grandson of the first hardware and firearms merchant in Austin, a business established at about the same time the city was in 1839, and which lasted well into the mid-20th century.
The first time Jakie came with us, Lovell and I walked a little behind. Picking up a 2- or 3-inch pebble, Lovell muttered to me, "Watch this." He tossed the pebble into the air, at the same time calling out, "Hey, Jakie!" Jakie turned and shot the pebble out of the air with a .22 caliber bullet. His weapon was a Stevens .22/.410, a single shot rifle barrel over a small bore shotgun barrel. The bluing was almost completely gone, and it had no sights whatsoever.
I said to Jakie, "You must have practiced a fair amount with that thing."
He replied, "Well, from the time I was ten years old I shot a box of .22 shells every day except Sunday, until I got to where I could pretty well hit what I wanted to."
I said, "That's some practice, but only 50 rounds a day?"
"A big box," Jakie responded. A "big box" of .22 ammo holds ten small boxes, 500 rounds.
About the only wildlife I am exposed to here in edge of the city are the birds, and the deer which are still out foraging on my neighbors' lawns if I go out early enough on my morning walk. Once or twice a month I can hear the coyotes howling in the woods a few blocks away.
It has been at least forty years since I fired at a living thing.
RNJ
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Date Jan. 7 2016 4:18:57
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