Rusted, 132-year-old Winchester rifle found against tree in Nevada national park

The story of how it got there may never be known, but a rusting 132-year-old Winchester rifle -- known in U.S. lore as "the gun that won the West" -- was recently found resting against a juniper tree in a Nevada national park.

The gun, its stock split, gray and faded like driftwood, and its steel barrel rusted brown, blended in perfectly against the tree in a remote part of the Great Basin National Park until a National Parks Service employee spotted it.

“The rifle, exposed for all those years to sun, wind, snow and rain, was found leaning against a tree in the park,” said Nichole Andler, chief of interpretation at Great Basin National Park.

An engraving on the gun marks it as a "Model 1873," and Andler said further research showed the serial number on the lower tang, or portion of the grip, matched up with records held at the Center for the West at the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyo. with a manufacture and shipping date of 1882, Andler said.

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.

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