Probably the result of a time warp bleed through.
You can’t take guns into a national park!
That is the third one they found just today. :)
Very cool.
A friend of mine found a pistol of that era and some barbed wire in a barrel in the middle of the anza borrego desert.
They will need to remove the cartridges in order to make it safe to display or even examine further, and they need to assume they are loaded with black powder and use mercury fulminate primers, which aren’t necessarily stable after what is clearly a very long time.
The headstamps on the cases will provide a clearer picture of just how long.
Rip Van Winkles?
I wonder how many people the gun attacked while it was resting there. We all know how violent guns are.
1883, not far from when Wild Bill Hickock was killed. Unbelievably cool.
THAT is so funny, I was just sharing with my friend today that an 80 year old friend used to come coon hunting and left his rifle up against a tree on the farm. It took us 4 years to find it. He got it back about 2 years after his silent trailer coon dog died and it was about 2 years later he passed. Good times coon hunting!!!
detailed history of the park areas http://archive.org/stream/historicresource00unra#page/n0/mode/2up
A man was teaching his son to hunt. He wanted his young 13-year-old son to set up his shots carefully, not just pop off a bunch and hope for the best; so the father removed the rifle’s lifter so that the boy could only discharge one cartridge at a time. And so the man and his son went hunting, leaving the lifter back in the man’s one-room house to be put back into the rifle when the boy matured a bit and learned to hunt the right way.
One day, while out on a hunt with his father, the young man, being easily distracted as youth are wont to become, put his gun up against the tree and went exploring around. When his dad finally caught up with him, he asked him, “Where’s your rifle, son?” The boy said, “Oh, it’s over there up against the tree, Dad.” His father said, “Which tree? Where?” “Over there, Dad!” “I don’t see it, son. Let’s go get it.”
So they looked, but the boy forgot where exactly it was, and the trees all looked dauntingly similar. And the boy forgot how far and in which direction he had traveled. So the boy and his father looked all afternoon, but they eventually had to go home because Mama had a pot roast in the stove for supper.
They tried over the next few months to find that rifle, but they never did find it. Then, 132 years later, the rifle was found by a society that hates guns, loves sodomy and frowns upon fatherhood. The gun was happy to be found but went into a major depressive episode later because the free and wild society that offered so much promise of Liberty to Americans and the world was turned into a sniveling little European nanny state. The rifle pined for the day when he could finally go hunting with a free child and his loving father again, but he found that, like the Constitution that protected the boy’s freedom, he was put under glass and consigned to a slow spiritual death by cultural malaise and general apathy.