Original 1873 Winchester found in mountains yesterday

Cool find . Defiantly one of those where you have to say ; if only it could talk .
As to why it was left there . Who can say . Around here we still find such items . Not as often as we once did but still enough that folks are not overly surprised . Many are muzzleloaders found along the Oregon trail . Other times up along the White Bird trail where Miles chased Joseph and his people .
Also a lot of mining went on around here . I remember my father found a Spencer leaning up against a tree while hunting one year . After doing some looking we concluded that probably the owner either gotten snake bit or trap in a cave in of a mine shaft .
When I was a boy living up in the salmon river area , we would often come across old cabins that were caving in . sometimes you would come across one where the plates , silverware , rock drills , saws , even can goods , would still be inside.
I remember one such cabin that still had plates with forks and knives still laying on them . like they had finish eating , got up , walked off and never came back .
There are still a few of those that have not been all dug up by folks looking for plunder or burnt down by the USFS back in the later 1970’s
 
Here's the 92 I dug up.



After soaking in kerosene for three months it freed up but its too far gone to do anything with.

 
I thought about getting a stock and forearm and leaving them out in the weather for awhile and hanging it on a wall but the stock screws are broken off in the tang and I dunno of I could ever get the fore end cap and mag tube off to install the forearm.
 
Hawg, since it won't ever be a shooter, you could split the forestock on the bottom to mount it in two pieces and just JB weld the wood parts in place. If you like the idea, I would saw most of the way through the forestock, then split it with hand pressure so the crack would be natural looking and the wood wouldn't be to short around to fit properly.
 
Alright, something is amiss here. My wife, who works for the BLM, brought those two photos home to me the other night and said that two of her coworkers found the rifle south of Lone Pine, CA. I had no reason to question it, as they had also found the 1851 Navy a couple of years ago, and I handled it in person and took that photo of it. She will inquire more about this rifle tomorrow at work and I will post an update here.
 
If this came from the vicinity of Lone Pine, it could explain a couple of things.
It's certainly possible it was a movie gun, and has only been out in the elements for a few decades, instead of 100+ years. That could explain the butt stock not being completely rotted off, and the seemingly relative young age of the tree it was allegedly found leaning against.
 
If the rifle did come from the Lone Pine area or even nearby Nevada, that area has extremely low humidity (the lowest humidity ever recorded anywhere on Earth was taken in the nearby White Mountains) and gets very little rain, about 2 inches per year, and maybe four feet of snow per Winter so I can see the stock looking like it did after 100 years or more. The trees grew very slowly here and the Bristlecone Pine trees about 60 miles north of Lone Pine are the oldest living trees in the World, some over 4,500 years old and are small and stunted looking.
 
Yep, that stock has all of the hallmarks of something that has been out in a low moisture low ambient humity area for a LONG time.

My Grandparents would go throughout the West every couple of years and would bring back wood like that, stuff that had been exposed for decades.
 
I have seen axes leaned against trees that the tree grew around before the hickory handles began to rot...

I have a very hard time buying that rifle has been there anywhere near 100 years...
 
Jbar4Ranch wrote:
It's a '73. You can tell by the shape of rear of the side plate and the length of the action between the rear of the side plate and the butt stock.
Click to expand...

Personally, I prefer just glancing at the trigger; if the trigger's almost directly under the bottom rear corner of the receiver, it's a '76 and if there's an appreciable amount of receiver behind the trigger, it's a '73.
 
Well, I gave my son a North American .22lr mini revolver for Christmas 2013.

A couple weeks later he sheepishly asked me if we had found it left behind at our house. Nope, so he sadly concluded the little tiny gun had been tossed out in the trash with the wadded up wrapping paper.

One month ago we got a call from him - he was excited because his wife had just found it zipped up in its little rug in the bottom of a box full of unused wrapping paper that she had gotten out to start wrapping presents for this Christmas.

Nevertheless, I didn't give him any new guns this time. :p
 
Mike Irwin - Sorry about the duplicate thread in the General Discussion section! I looked for a thread before posting, but didn't look here!

That said, things like this take me back to the old west! So very interesting and intriguing!
 
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