it wandered into the collection of C. Burton Saunders.
Joaquin Murrietta was a conscienceless Mexican bandit and gringo-hater who specialized in brutally plundering California mining camps. He lived by the sword, and at age 23, died the same way. He was decapitated, and his pickled head was kept on display at the Gordon Museum in San Francisco. During the 1906 earthquake/fire, the gruesome thing was lost and never found. Taken from his headless corpse in 1853 was his Colt Dragoon, which also found its way into the Saunders collection. Killed with Murrietta was a hopeless criminal known as Three Finger jack. Saunders got his gun too.
For those clinging to a vestige of hope that some remaining elements of the Old West still survived, a singular event signaled its finishing throes. The demise of the Old West was official when its personified symbol passed away in the Spring of 1917. Buffalo Bill Cody, Army scout, buffalo hunter, and the showman who took the frontier West around the world, died quietly in Denver, and with him the era of the frontier and the conquest of the plains and the mountains. With his passing, the Old West was gone, hopelessly and irretrievably lost to a glorious and semi-mythical past.
Period advertisement for Joaquin Murrietta’s traveling head.
Fittingly, Chauncey Thomas was the last man to interview Cody as he lay on his deathbed. Mr. Thomas’ wordy account of his audience with Buffalo Bill appeared in the May, 1917 number of the Magazine of the West. In his last days, Bill and Chauncy talked guns and Western experiences. Cody spoke of his heavy buffalo guns, the type favored by bison killers who sniped them from a stand. Bill used two Sharps rifles, a ponderous .45-120-550 weighing 18 lbs. and an 11-lb. bottlenecked .44 caliber.
Cody liked to shoot his bison from a horse’s back, galloping close to the herd and lung-shooting them at very close range. For this, a light powerful rifle was his weapon of choice. A Winchester 1873 was especially well liked, as was a Spencer carbine.
Cody smiled when he named his favorite buffalo gun: “Lucrezia Borgia,” a breechloading 50-caliber Springfield that was special to him. With it he slew 4,250 animals in a single year. (The real Lucrezia Borgia, a sixteenth-century Italian socialite, had an equally bloody reputation.) The Indians had a nickname for Cody’s Lucrezia. To certain red men, she was known, affectionately or fearfully, as “Shoot Today – Kill Tomorrow.” When Buffalo Bill and the West he knew were both gone in 1917, Lucrezia Borgia remained draped across a set of elk antlers at the ranch, next to the knife Cody used to kill Yellow Hand.
When Cody died, the “real” Old West died with him. Today, we’re fortunate that the recollections of those who really had “been there, done that” have survived in the yellowing pages of the old outdoor literature. The witty Chauncey Thomas, the orator most capable, delivered a succinct but sufficient eulogy for this unique period in American history: “The Old West is dead, and the frontier six shooter is a relic. Where the Indian roamed we have the suffragette; we run short of carfare instead of cartridges, and instead of pulling the .45, we are pulled by the 5:40.”
Emerson Hough was an habitual Forest and Stream columnist through the peak of the frontier years and a familiar provider of sporting, natural history, and conservation material. When he contributed a short feature, unimaginatively titled “The West and the Gun” in the June 23, 1900, number, it must have struck his loyal followers as uncharacteristically reflective. When he published his observation, it was a trifle too early in the century for the sort of thoughts that were on his mind.
Mr. Hough spent the best part of his life in the West; for many years he was a New Mexican. He wrote that he lived through a time when seeing a sidearm strapped to a man’s hip was the usual and expected thing. He once shot – informally at targets – with Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, the man who ended the career of Billy the Kid with a bullet.
While visiting a Chicago gun store during the first Spring of the twentieth century, Hough caught his initial glimpse of the new-fangled Colt .38 Automatic pistol and puzzled over its complex gadgetry. It was a curious, right angled, out-of-balanced affair. Hough had grown old enough to be resistant to change and to progress. With sad strokes of his pen, Mr. Hough foreshadowed the attitude that would preoccupy the minds and imaginations of Westerners for the next 20 years when he wrote: “These Browning boys, out in Ogden, Utah, who get up all these revolutionizing inventions in firearms, are Western men, and they must have an odd reflection now and then that there is no longer any West, no longer any Billy the Kids, no longer much use for guns, big or little.”
By the time of the European War, the Wild West had been broken and tamed. The boom town was now a ghost town. The nester had fenced himself in and was there to stay. The bad man didn’t come to town to drown his thirst any longer; law and order were on tap.
LIGHT CARTRIDGES FOR DEER: A New Shooting Trend — or Impending Disaster?
BY L.P. BREZNY
Author zeroing his .22-250 Savage from a bench rest table. Accuracy is very much required when using .22 centerfires for big game.
It was the third and last deer season in western South Dakota. That meant the air temperature was hovering around eight degrees above zero, and the winds off the Big Horn mountains were gusting to a strong 55 mph, with a constant breeze settling in at about 35 mph. Not the best day for deer hunting, but the only one our group of four hunters had. Tom Hanson, my friend and neighbor on our South Dakota mountain hideout, had been glassing several deer down on a wide flat half-cut winter cornfield about an hour north of home for better than an hour. With the time now approaching 8:00 a.m., Tom knew that very soon those whitetail would bed down about mid-field and at that point it would be time to move down against the stiff wind, walk the corn row edges, then glass between the quarter-mile long rows until a target could be located.
With a pair of hunters blocking the natural exit route downwind on the field, two more took up positions on each side of the field, but at a staggered pattern with a good 150 yards between each of them. This was to establish a safe fire zone and not shoot across that short cornstalk-infested flats and thereby hit the hunter on the opposite side. Now with everyone in position, it was time to glass and comb those rows. Maybe with luck, some winter meat would be brought to the table.
Tom and another friend, Jerome Bressler, had already hunted the corn a week earlier. At that time the same system had netted four plump doe, and on this wind-driven morning, the system would be exactly the same. Now the hunt was about to progress. Jerome and I had drawn long straws, and it was my job to take the position on the back side of the corn field as Jerome walked the two-track roadside a full 200 yard to my rear. Glassing his half of the long clean rows of slightly snowdrifted corn stalks as I did the same on my side, we proceeded down the mile section toward our blocking partners, working as a team.
At about mid-field, a large doe stood up and walked directly across my end of the field. She was at or close to 200 yards and standing in a location that presented a clean, clear shot. I was using a set of Bog Pod shooting sticks, and they were extended to my full shoulder height. Moving back against a fence post so as to steady myself against the gusting wind, I locked down my crosshairs, dropped a half breath from my lungs, and touched off a round, which consisted of a 55-grain Norma ORYX soft nose bullet. At the shot, the .22-250 Remington was sent downrange by the Savage Predator turnbolt rifle. The doe shuddered a bit, then turned away, breaking into a slow trot toward some higher-standing cornstalks.
Knowing the drill that had taken place all to often in my 50-plus years
