132 Year-old Winchester rifle found against a tree at Great Basin National Park

For the "just too cool" file:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/14/132-year-old-winchester-model-1873-repeating-rifle/

132 Year-old Winchester rifle found against a tree at Great Basin National Park
‘The gun that won the West’

By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Archaeologists traversing the Great Basin National Park in Nevada came across an interesting find: a 132-year-old Winchester Model 1873 repeating rifle.

The Facebook page for Great Basin National Park said in a post last week that researchers found the rifle, known as "the gun that won the West," leaning up against a tree.

"The 132 year-old rifle, exposed to sun, wind, snow, and rain was found leaning against a tree in the park. The cracked wood stock, weathered to grey, and the brown rusted barrel blended into the colors of the old juniper tree in a remote rocky outcrop, keeping the rifle hidden for many years," Great Basin National Park said in a statement.

The website said that "Model 1873" was distinctively engraved on the weapon and that the serial number corresponds with Winchester records held at the Center for the West, Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyoming, with a manufacture and shipping date of 1882.

"Winchester Model 1873 rifles hold a prominent place in Western history and lore, commonly referred to as "the gun that won the West." The first of Jimmy Stewart's string of popular Westerns in the early 1950s with director Anthony Mann was simply named "Winchester '73" after the weapon.

Between 1873 and the end of production in 1916, 720,610 rifles were manufactured. In 1882 alone, over 25,000 were made. Selling for about $50 when they first came out, the rifles reduced in price to $25 in 1882 and were accessible and popular as "everyman's" rifle," Great Basin National Park's statement added.

Staffers for the national park are looking into old newspaper records in order to answer the questions: "Who left the rifle? When and why it was leaned against the tree? And, why was it never retrieved?"

Great Basin National Park said that it will provide a viewing opportunity for the community before sending the rifle to conservators "to stabilize the wood and apply museum conservation techniques."

 

Very cool.

 

Better than anything any of us hoarders ever found stuck in a tree! I think my 28 ton splitter would not get through that.

 

I love old stuff like this! Probably a bear hunter fell asleep and got eaten?

 

Interesting topic and it makes you wonder what events led up to this gun being left there.

While deer hunting three years ago, a friend found a very old muzzleloader barrel leaning against a tree on my uncles farm/ranch in Canada. It's about 20" long with the nipple still attached and transforms from a octagon barrel to a round barrel at about half way. I still want to go back a look around the tree with a metal detector to see if anymore remains.

 

Now that's cool

 

That's pretty cool it's been there this whole time. A buddy of mine found a Remington 597 in the middle of their property when he was a kid. Of course his dad turned it into the police (I might have just kept it).

My parent's neighbor found a flintlock pistol under the foundation of their barn too. There was supposedly a battle on the property between Tecumseh and Simon Kenton fought there. People used to come out with metal detectors and find musket balls, and we've found several old flint arrowheads after the fields were plowed.

 

Boy I've looked high and low for that gun. Forget I left it at that tree.

 

The property that my parents bought revealed an old revolver while tilling for a new garden site along the driveway.
Asa far as that poor fella placing his gun and being unable to find it, just how many times have we misplaced our car keys? Only thing is with the rifle, it would have been such a major loss! Wonder if there are any cliffs or bodies of water around there that maybe the guy lost his life or was ambushed while cleaning up????

 

My dad has some old gun missing the falling block or something. Cant remember the story on it anymore. Was interesting to me long long long ago but forgot about it till now. Nice post OP.

 

House I bought back in the late 70's- found an old but contemporary 16ga bolt action Mossberg jammed between the studs behind some cheap paneling. Rusty on the outside but minty internally, cleaned it and cold blued it, quite a few pheasants and grouse ended up in the pan with that unit.

 

I never find any guns or other neat stuff in my yard or walls


Edit: On second thought, I did find a neat old gas cap off a pickup once

 

That's awesome. I like old history stuff like that.

 

I showed this to a friend and he commented that "Maybe if they take another look around they'll find the original owner....leaning against another tree....."

 

Makes sense that they would.

 

Some more details:

132-year-old rifle found leaning against tree in Nevada 'where it was left'
Archaeologists have found a 1882 rifle leaning against Nevada desert tree – possibly where it had been left in the 19th century



The Winchester Model 1773 found by park workers in Great Basin National Park Photo: Reuters


By Peter Foster, Washington

5:52PM GMT 16 Jan 2015



It was a moment frozen in time – an 1873 Winchester repeating rifle propped up against the trunk of a juniper tree exactly where its owner had left it over a hundred years ago.

Eva Jensen, an archaeologist out scouring the hillsides of Nevada’s arid Snake Mountains for Native American artefacts, let out an involuntary cry of surprise when she stumbled across the find, and then fell into silence.

“I recognised it instantly, but it takes your brain a little while to catch up,” she told The Telegraph. “The reality of it, I let out an exclamation and the rest of my staff thought I must have fallen off a cliff or something, because I just couldn’t say anything else after that," she said.

The find was pure chance - the rusted barrel of the rifle just catching in a gleam of the late afternoon sun. Otherwise it was perfectly camouflaged, the walnut stock that once been a rich, burnished brown bleached grey and rendered indistinguishable from the juniper wood by a century of desiccating winds.

From the first moment of the rifle’s discovery last November, Ms Jensen and her staff at the Great Basin National Park found their minds racing with speculation about the how the rusting repeater came to be abandoned in the hills.

“Everyone gathered round and the questions began right away,” recalled Ms Jensen. “Who would just leave their rifle? Why did they lean it against the tree, and what happened that they never took it back?”

To add to the sense of serendipity, Ms Jensen and her team were sweeping the hills 300 miles north of Las Vegas to check for artefacts before a controlled vegetation burn. If they had missed the rifle, it would almost certainly have been destroyed by the fire.

Very carefully, using tape to hold the crumbling stock together, the park officials removed the gun from where it had been placed all those years ago, its butt nestled between two rocks and slightly sunken into the mud. Curiously, it was not loaded.

More than likely, Ms Jensen said, it belonged to one of the many mining prospectors who from 1869 filed claims in the high desert mountains for silver, copper and tungsten, leaving the area littered with early mine excavations – none of which were profitable.


Great Basin National Park (Frank Kovalchek)

Some basic detective work revealed the facts about the gun, which was not special of itself, but one of more than 720,610 examples produced by Winchester’s factory between 1873 and 1916. Indeed so popular was the Model 1873 that it became known as the “weapon that won the West”.

Experts said the weapon, which originally sold for $50 - the equivalent of more than $1,000 (£661) today – would not have more than curiosity value to collectors who will pay up to $15,000 (£9,920) for a mint-condition example of an original Model 1873.

However a unique serial number that Winchester stamped on all their rifles enable researchers to cross reference with records at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum in Cody, Wyoming, to establish the weapon had been manufactured and shipped in 1882.

In 1882 alone more than 25,000 left Winchester’s Connecticut factory, as the Model 1873, with its distinctive action capable of firing 15 shots without reloading, quickly became the “everyman” rifle of the settling of the West.

But there the trail went cold, since Winchester shipped the rifles in batches to local “jobbers” or dealers whose records - if they ever kept them - no longer survive.

Despite Mrs Jensen spending hours trawling through local newspapers and family histories to try and trace the gun’s owner, or any record of an incident – a gun fight, a sudden storm – that might explain why it was left behind, the mystery remains unsolved.

There is one last hope, however, which will come on Saturday when staff at the Great Basin National Park show off the piece at a local inn hosting the annual Old Sheepherders Gathering.

“Just maybe somebody, somewhere has a family history that tells how "grandpa lost his rifle up in the mountains there,” Ms Jensen said wistfully. “Perhaps we’ll find out, you just never know.”

 

This story is total awsome.

 

Jeez! I would think these reporters are college educated and would either know how to spell or at least use spell check and to proof read their articles. Artifacts, not artefacts.
I wonder if there was a mining claim filed for the area where the rifle was found??