Scoped Sharps 1874 Buffalo Rifle

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgotten weapons comm I'm he and McCallum and I'm here today at the James Giulia auction house taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming spring of 2018 firearms auction and today we have a really cool piece of history this is a sharps model of 1874 that has been refitted with a new barrel and a gigantic telescopic sight by gunsmith out of Cheyenne Wyoming and this is a really cool piece of Western American history kind of embodied in a firearm now the sharps rifle company first got its notoriety with marksman's rifles well single-shot cavalry carbines and also used as marksman's rifles during the Civil War and at that point the rifles look very similar to to this basic style same sort of action but they used paper cartridges well over the ensuing decades the sharps company updated this design and set it up to use the new metallic cartridges and sharps became a very popular target and hunting rifle brand in fact I've seen suggestions that the term sharpshooter comes from competition shooters using sharps rifles not entirely sure that that's accurate I can see it coming from other places as well but even the supposition really shows you just how much of a reputation sharps rifles had in fact the sharps company had a specific Creedmoor model named after the shooting range in New York that Creedmoor range were some of the major matches in the United States were held now this particular rifle is a model of 1874 which is a little bit of a misnomer because they were actually introduced in 1871 however the company introduced a new action the sharps borchardt rifle in 1878 and when they did that they retro actively renamed the the previous model they didn't want to call it like the old model because they did want to continue selling them and they apparently chose 1874 as an appropriate date so despite the fact that the rifle had been in production for several years before then the 1874 is what it became officially named now this particular one we know from sharps company records which survived we know that it was shipped in 1879 two sharps major distributor in New York and it was actually shipped with a medium weight 45 caliber barrel with a double set trigger like this and with open iron sights at some point in its history probably not long after that it was actually refitted with a new barrel and this scope by a gunsmith in Cheyenne Wyoming who has signed the barrel and in this configuration it's really an iconic example of the American Buffalo rifle of course buffalo hunting became quite the tremendously huge business in mostly in the 1870s by the time this rifle got rebuilt in Cheyenne it was really on the tail end of commercial buffalo hunting because quite frankly almost all of them had been killed by that point by the late 1880s there was something like there were literally only a few hundred Buffalo remaining on public lands in the United States really really quite the historical crime the Buffalo had been hunted at first for their commercial purposes for fur not really so much for me the meat was usually just left to rot on the plains they were hunted like initially for fur but then also as a very literal and and conscious act of warfare against the Plains Indians tribes there were not a whole lot of US Army soldiers conducting the the Indian Wars in the West and one of the tactics they used when they were unable to basically unable to have the manpower to successfully track down and corner and fight the various Indian tribes was they just went after their sources of food namely the Buffalo and the military actively encouraged the wholesale slaughter of Buffalo as a way to deprive the Indians of food and forced them to come into the reservation system No the slaughter of Buffalo was literally so widespread and so tremendous that afterwards there was actually a legitimate trade or there was income to be made substantial income to be made by settlers salvaging buffalo skeletons off of the plains and grinding them up for use as fertilizer that's that's how many skeletons were simply lying on the plains where they had been shot at any rate this probably was not a rifle that had us direct specific use in that campaign because it was simply manufactured too late but it does have a lot of the same characteristics of the rifles that some of those commercial hunters would use so let's take a closer look at those the optic on this rifle was manufactured by a fellow by the name of WC rice of Warren Ohio and it is typical of early telescopic sights like this the reticle is just a plain simple crosshair and it is mounted in a free recoiling mount now these are often spring loaded this one is not but the whole scope slides back and forth in its mount now this one has seen quite a lot of use and it rattles around a little bit not entirely stable they would have been better originally you know this one's 150 years old now but the idea here was that when you fired the rifle would tend to come backwards the scope simply because of inertia would want to stay in place and so if you had the scope permanently fixed to the rifle where it couldn't move you stood a pretty good risk of damaging the rifle that damaging the scope over time these early scopes were pretty fragile so by having it free-floating the rifle could cycle backwards the scope would be able to float forward in its mount and the impact the energy transfer into the scope would be much reduced or softened this also has the advantage on this particular rifle of allowing you to push the optic forward here to allow more easy access to the breech of the right thing for loading and unloading the Sharps was of course a single-shot rifle this particular one has been chambered for the 40 40 100 sharps cartridge that was a slightly necked cartridge actually it and the 40 90 sharps are the identical case just two different loadings as is typical the first number there 40 is the bore diameter so it's a 40 caliber cartridge and the second number is the powder charge black powder charge that it's loaded with so 4090 is 90 grains of powder and that was put behind a 370 grain bullet which gave a muzzle velocity of 1450 to fourteen hundred and seventy-five feet per second and that's quite the hefty cartridge that would have been an excellent big game cartridge with a lot of penetrating power the 4100 was the same case with ten grains more powder charge in it and a substantially lighter bullet the 4100 was loaded with a 190 grain bullet I don't have any specific muzzle velocity numbers for it but it would have been at least a couple hundred feet per second higher that would have been the Express or high velocity version of the cartridge better at long range because a higher velocity meant less drop however it probably wouldn't had as much penetrating capacity on heavy skinned game like Buffalo the windage on this scope mount can be adjusted with this little screw right here which slides it in its base elevation interestingly is actually controlled at the front by this rotating wheel which has a cam surface on this side you can see the notches right in there so the more you turn it the higher at lifts and that increases your elevation there's a screw in the body of the scope right there on its rail that prevents it from going too far backwards so before each shot what you would have done is pull the scope back to its rear most position and that's where it would be zeroed and then when you fired the scope could travel conceivably as far forward as that now I can also remove the eyepiece here and actually take the scope entirely off the rifle so that allows us to see the manufacturing marks on the plate here you can see rice and then war in Ohio I'm pointing the scope directly into a light here so that you can see the crosshair that is the reticle just a very fine crosshair not a lot of magnification on this scope but honestly the clarity is pretty remarkable it doesn't it looks a little bit better person than it does here on camera but I'm impressed by how good it still is after well 150 years removing the scope also allows us to see the gunsmiths name gunsmith signature there on the barrel P Bergersen who was out of Cheyenne Wyoming kind of interesting this rifle appears it looks to me like it was at some point fitted with a Tang sight as well you can see that this screw hole has been filled and when they when they drilled or filled that they actually moved Rhys tamped one of the serial numbered digits so you can still see it it's a one five six six zero eight and there is a little marking on the side of the receiver sharps rifle company and a patent date double set triggers like this would have been very common on a target or well match rifle or a good shooters hunting rifle the idea here is you pull the rear trigger and it has quite a heavy take-up and once you have pulled the rear trigger all the way you can see the front trigger moved just slightly now the amount of pressure required to release the front trigger is just a tiny tiny bit so this act says basically as a safety device you get what is literally a hair trigger but not until you fully pull the rear one meaning that the rifle won't go off accidentally or unintentionally to me the most interesting rifles are the ones that aren't brand new out of the box but rather ones that have a bunch of history to them and show it while still being fully functional and to me this is kind of a perfect example of something in that realm the custom the customization the refitting in cheyenne of this rifle I think is very interesting and just the pattern that was made into a very heavy barreled target or hunting rifle with a very early optical sight which clearly has has gotten a tremendous amount of use I think it's a really cool rifle if you agree and you'd like to have this on yourself take a look at the description text below you'll find a link there to Julia's catalogue page for this rifle where you can check out their description and their pictures and their price estimates and everything else you might want to know about it place a bid either online through their website or live here at their auction thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 465,937

Rating: 4.9535294 out of 5

Keywords: Sharps rifle, sharps, 1874, Buffalo Rifle, scoped sharps, western buffalo rifle, Rice telescopic sight, Forgotten Weapons, 45-70, Tom Selleck, 1874 Sharps, cartridge, rifle, Quigley Down Under, Black Powder, double set triggers, caliber barrel, Pedersoli, Cowboy, heavier barrel, Cheyenne gunsmith, Replica, 45-110, free-floating mount, rice, optic, 40-100, 40-90, gunsmith, rebarrel, heavy barrel, buffalo, bison, mccollum, history, development, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, gun

Id: MxdGExIJntI

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SniffyMcFly]

So is Sparks just a „rip off“ name for Sharps? Neat Video, thank you for posting this.

[u/Juba1337]

Thanks!

[u/Mikebx]

I hope that's how the scopes should be, which I'm sure they will. If you bring in a rifle with a scope is should be about useless in shorter to mid. Hard to acquire the target. Make people who want to bring a scoped mosin or something bring something else besides a shotgun for the mid range.

[u/J-E-T]

I saw this pop up in my YouTube feed and thought how appropriate it was for Hunt immediately, but was afraid posting it would get it removed. Very fitting for the game's aesthetic, so excited to see old tech brought into the game. Still nervous about how scopes will act in the meta but I'll wait till they are actually available before I judge.