—in the entry to the Mojave County Museum in Kingman , Arizona , there is an elderly Winchester on display , grown into the “Y” of a large tree trunk—was in a horizontal position—similar situation—somebody left it and never came back to get it-—
They’re assuming that was left there in the 1880’s. Could have been last week.
The contact surface of the tree where the gun was leaning, what did that look like? How about the ground where the butt was resting, was there an impression was there dirt caked all around the base of it? If you lean something against a tree for a very long time it tends to become part of the tree. Same with the ground. Something resting on the ground for a long time has a way of settling in.
My hunch is that someone recently found this down a ravine, or hidden between large rocks and then stood it up there.
Very cool discovery. I’d say don’t restore it but stabilize it and display it in the visitor center.
Froze to death or died of natural causes, but the yotes or other critters took what was left. Could have been there 100 years, 75, 50, or who knows but starting around 1960 that rifle would have been a high dollar collectors rifle and nobody’s going to leave that behind or forget about it.
Wonder if it was still loaded or empty? Were there any empty cases left around it? What caliber 44-40 or 38 -40?
It is a fun mystery to stumble upon. I have found old knives and bottles in the high Sierra’s above 10,000 ft. elevation and pieces of aircraft from crash sites, but a Win 1873 would have been an epic find.
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.