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Curio & Relic/Black Powder Curio & Relics and Black Powder Firearms, Old School shooting fun! |
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#1
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Found a 100+ year old spent cartridge on my property today
I've been clearing scrub oak bushes on my property for the past few weeks. Today I found a very old .44 Henry rim fire spent cartridge under about 6" of old dried oak leaves.
As far as I can tell it would have been fired from either a 1860 Henry rifle or a 1866 Winchester rifle. Both of these rifles used "firing pins" which caused two marks on the cartridge rim 180 degrees opposite of each other, just like the cartridge I found. The case has a "H" head stamp which was from New Haven Arms which was the predecessor to Winchester. So it was probably made in the 1860's or so... This is the second old spent case I have found while cutting brush. The other was a Mauser 7.63 pistol case.
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#4
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Very nice. Time to get display case and metal detector.
-g
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#5
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Very cool. That is a neat piece of history.
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The race is not won to the swift or the strong, but to the one who endures until the end. Safety Rule #1: 1) Treat all tweakers like they are loaded |
#7
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Pretty neat!
You have to wonder who left it there
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#13
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Could be? |
#17
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Great collectible piece of history...
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https://www.calguns.net/calgunforum/....php?t=1884858 |
#20
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Worthy of putting a frame and keeping as an heirloom for sure. I instantly thought of that story a few years ago where a lever action rifle was found propped up against a tree in the middle of nowhere, presumably a cowboy relic from 130+ years ago.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/07/18...nv-desert.html |
#21
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I may try and borrow a metal detector, however I think I would find mostly nails and screws, as a few years ago I build my shop near where I found this case. I can clearly remember throwing bent nail in this area... However maybe..... Quote:
However when I was excavating for the shop I built I did find a Indian "metate". A Metate is a stone used by Indians to grind corn and other nuts such as Pinon nuts and acorns. There is evidence of other Indian dwellings and other artifacts within a mile of my house... Pinon pines and scrub oaks are all over this area... That led me to see if there was evidence of Indian use of Henry 1860 and Winchester 1866 rifles. I was surprised to find that in fact the Indians did use both of these rifles chambered in .44 Henry rim fire. The most famous use of these rifles and the .44 Henry rim fire cartridge was by the Indians against Custer at the little Big Horn. According to the article below thousands of spent .44 Henry cases were found by archeologists when they excavated Indian fighting positions and the surrounding areas... https://gunsmagazine.com/guns-of-the-plains-indians/ So maybe some Indian was responsible for leaving this case behind!!! Here are a few pic's of the Metate. I took this to the local Indian Museum and they confirmed it was a legit metate... Right when I found it, just cleaned of dirt and sand. We keep it on our hearth. I also found the "grinder" near the metata. It's about 18" long. The area I found the .44 Henry case would be just to the right of the jeep under the scrub oak bushes.
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Poke'm with a stick! |
#25
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The grinder stone is called a "mano." Pretty easy to see why.
In areas where there are oak groves near some exposed flattish bedrock you can often find where the bedrock was hollowed and then used for metates. Such sites are usually winter village sites. The trees were the "property" of the village group and the metates went with them. I have a cigar box full of old, odd fired ctg. cases I've collected from deer stand areas (usually where two finger ridges come together at the top with two intersecting "deer hiways." When I was back east for many years I'd run my metal detector around the bases of trees in the woods that had obviously been the sites of deer tree stands (some still were). Found lots of ctg. cases and some unfired rounds, coins, pocket knife skeletons, and 3 1880 silver Deutschmarks among other coins. How the heck did THEY get there? That .44 case is a great find! I never found one of those....yet (I'm only 75). |
#27
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Pitfighter. CA/AZ |
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