known little bighorn guns

[5MadFarmers]

But then, you could buy a M1 for around $125 and a Lee Enfield for $9.95. 1917 smiths and Colt New Services could be had for $35

My boss, a few years ago, dropped some 1950s and 1960s American Rifleman magazines on me. After I climbed out from under that stack I started digging through them to find the ads for the lend-lease Garands and the Johnson rifles. There were ads for all kinds of military surplus rifles and equipment. What sticks out like a sore thumb is M1 Garands have always been expensive. $80 was a lot of money in 1962. Not that I remember that as I didn't exist but I can tell by the other guns that they were very expensive. The Krags and trapdoors were long gone by then.

Those aren't the ones that make me cry. The ones that make me cry are Dixie's selling of the old gun tools. They went for almost nothing. I was alive by the point. Quite young but I really should have bought gun tools from Dixie.

I can't account for the unpopularity of the trapdoors during that era. Were the CW carbines also not collected in the 1950s? I have enough Colt books around here that I can see those were already being collected 100 years ago. Was it pretty much just Colts and Winchesters?

The days of nailing a flintlock over the mantle as decoration or turning it into a lamp are long gone. As are the days of 13 year olds sporterizing Krags. We've lost something but gained something.

[free1954]

I'm not saying you created that page. That page is an indicator that people are taking the guns recovered from the Indians and equating them to LBH guns.



Why do I suspect that book does that? In which case it's been done for 30 years now.

i wonder what made those guns unservicable? was it cases stuck in the chambers?

[5MadFarmers]

The 1873 carbines in the ordnance notes sound as if they were pulled from an ordnance maintenance facility's scrap pile. How does one manage to lose the front sight? That takes effort. Breaking off the "ears" of the receiver? The stocks are uniformly busted. A trapdoor with a missing lock is useless. 18202 is missing the breech block. 17485 was ran over by a loaded wagon.

Everyone is familiar with the practice of taking a number of broken items and using the good bits to make a useful one. 2 old cars stripped down to make a functional 1 kind of thing. The listed guns sound like what was left behind after the good gun was made.

If you read the full report of Indian guns turned in you'll find it was less "we captured these from the Indians" and more "we asked the Indians for guns." If you were the Indians what would you turn in? The good ones? I'd turn in the chum. These certainly sound like the chum.

[sdkrag]

Spend a little time on theDakota, Wyoming, Montana prairie in the conditions that the Crook expidition endured and you would know what makes a weapon unseviciable. Stocks busted or finish gone, rust (it rained a lot that year), run over and banged around. From what I have read a lot of the weapons captured at the Slim Buttes were destroyed. Unservicable could mean that the weapon really just needed to be refinished after hard use and exposure.

[free1954]

thanks for the replies.

[rayg]

TDs were whale droppings in the early 1970s - anyone who actually "collected" ("but aren't they all the same?", I used to hear) them was seen as somehow being second class. You had to be into Winchesters or Colts to have any real standing. In some small way, I hope I've helped to change that. The other side of that coin is that many bargains were available to those few who did their homework. I've known what a triangular RB, and an 1875 SA-Lee were, since the 1950s, thanks to avidly reading and collecting back issues of the American Rifleman.

I watched where Dixie Gun works created a collectors market for the trap doors. While they were selling for $25.00 or so back then, they must have started buying as many as they could find for those prices until they had quite a few.
Then for a few years, they always mentioned in their catalog that to watch and see, trapdoors will become the next popular collectable. And of course prices for them started rising because of that statement
And low and behold, Dixie then decided to sell their large collection of trapdoors, which of course now the prices were not $25 anymore as now they are a hot collectable items and prices were listed at triple and double what they were bought for. All in a couple of years time. Good business people they were.
The market runs the same way. Let a few leaks out that a certain stock is going to increase in value a lot more, that spreads like wild fire. Of course that's after you bought it already for pennies. Then watch everyone jump on the band wagaon buying it and when it's reached it's high, then sell and go play with all the money you made. Ray

[Dick Hosmer]

Absolutely true, but Dixie probably out sold too soon - the prices in their "Dixie Collection" book are awfully low. But, if you read the descriptions, they had a lot of crap, too - stuff that would never sell in today's educated market. The real laugher, though is in the text. While there are little nuggets of truth, there are bush league mistakes as well - and some of the people he was sucking up to were not the experts he made them out to be. Too, Turner's homespun, clod-kicking attempts to buy up the real rarities still give me a chuckle! He was one hell of a businessman, though. What angered me about Dixie was that, once they took a position, that was it - for over 20 years, at least, they insisted that the rod they were selling for the .50-70 was correct. It wasn't. Thanks for reminding us of the Dixie TDs.

[jon_norstog]

Summer of '80 I spent hitchiking around the NW, chasing women and doing some research for grad school. I wasn't broke, and I had the cafe habit. As in Stcokman's cafe on Front St. in Missoula. After a big breakfast that couldn't be beat I checked out the pawnshop next door. I was in the market for a guiter ...

They had a trapdoor carbine on display, a pretty decent '73, with carpet tacks and a rawhide wrist repair. The sign on it said the S/N was betwen two numbers known to have been issued to the 7th. It was $300.

I was tempted, I had the money bt was not certain how the carbine would fit with my mode of travel. I bought the guitar and my son still plays it to this day. Stockmans is still there but the pawnshop is long gone. I'd give it 50-50 that carbine is still in the Missoula area.

I can think of a lot of ways it could have gotten to that pawnshop besides being picked up on the field of battle. I do like the narrative that Indians kept their good guns and only turned in the junk.

PS noticed the .44 SHarps in 5MF's document, too. Maybe the owner couldn't afford the ammo an didn't need a 13-pound gun?

jn

[Dick Hosmer]

Is the guitar now worth $5,000? Just kidding of course.

Sure would like to know the s/n. I'll bet it is in, or passed through, the hands of Hayes Otoupalik, resident super-collector.

[jon_norstog]

Dick,

Once I worked down the action the guitar played great. I figure it is worth at least $75. I keep thinking about that carbine. It could have been a fake, it could have been a real Indian-owned gun but not one that was picked up at Greasy Grass. As you yourself have pointed out, when it comes to S/N, close is no cigar. Still, I know they shipped the guns out in wooden boxes and would expect that any one box would have weapons with close, if not sequential S/N. Then there's the question of whAT happened once the box was opened at Ft. Union. Did all the guns go to the same unit? Etc. etc.

I guess we'll never now for sure. But I wish I could have seen a way to get that carbine.

jn