146 years after the ending of the American Civil War, I find it difficult to understand the Northern enthusiasm for killing their fellow Americans living in the South.

Slavery isn't a good thing, and, probably, with the passage of time, Southern slave-holders would have found their position a source of embarrassment, and , as a consequence, set their slaves free. All of us Northerners, taught at school to feel righteous, ignored the suffering of our fellow-Americans who lost even their citizenship. But we Northerners needn't have felt so righteous – they had tried using slaves in the North, not in agriculture where the growing season was shorter, and keeping slaves in idleness for part of the year made little economic sense. But to use slaves in industry without the burden of having to pay them, and with twelve months of full annual employment, seemed like a pretty good thing, until it was demonstrated that the complexities of industry made slaves less than viable for the task.

The Gettysburg battlefield was soaked with American blood. The cost was 50,000 combined casualties at Gettysburg alone.

We will continue with the story of the Sharps:

The Sharps, like the Henry, played its part in the American Civil War. Moving on from there we look at the Sharps in its non-military role in the development of the American West and the building of a nation – stretching from ocean to ocean.

After the Civil War professional hunters, frontiersmen end US troopers carried increasing numbers of Sharps weapons to the Great Plains and to the Desert Southwest.

Buffalo hunters, including legendary personalities such as Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett and William F "Buffalo Bill" Cody armed themselves primarily with large-calibre breech loading Sharp Sporting rifles sometimes equipped with mounted scopes. The plan behind it all was to get rid of the buffalo, and assume the Indians would follow.

The buffalo hunters furnished meat to construction workers who built railroads across the West. They supplied leather ($3.00 for each hide) to luggage manufacturers in the East. They created massive piles of bone, which foragers with wagons scavenged from the plains and sold to fertilizer manufacturers well up into the 20th Century.

Within a few decades, the hunters had cleared the Great Plains of millions of buffalo, leaving only a few at Yellowstone and in private herds. The hunters, mostly with Sharps rifles, had completed the slaughter.

The buffalo hunters, always fearful of attack by the Plains tribes kept their Sharps rifles as well as their side-arms close at hand. That foresight paid off near dawn on June 27, 1874, when some 15 professional hunters along with several other frontiersmen came under attack by two or three hundred Comanche, Klowa, and Southern Cheyenne warriors at the Adobe Wall trading hamlet and stockade on the north bank of the Canadian River on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Quoting from the Adobe Walls Internet site: "I could see that hundreds of Indians were coming. They were coming as straight as a bullet toward the buildings, whipping their horses at every jump. Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the south-western Plains tribes, mounted on their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind. Scalps dangled from bridles, gorgeous war-bonnets fluttered their plumes, bright feathers dangled from the tails and manes of the horses, and the bronzed half naked bodies of the riders glittered with ornaments of silver and brass.

"With their Sharps rifles and their pistols the defenders fought off the Indians through the morning, losing four men, before an uneasy quietness settled over Adobe Walls. They now waited anxiously from behind the walls of buildings and the stockade, not knowing what to expect. They watched through the afternoon and evening. They watched the following day as 15 to 20 of the Cheyenne gathered on their horses on a distant butte perhaps half a mile or more away, overlooking Adobe Walls. They wondered whether this fore-shadowed another attack.

"At this point, Billy Dixon, famous among the buffalo hunters for his skill with a rifle, levelled a borrowed ‘Big 50', one of the most famous of all the Sharps models, picking out one of the Cheyenne warriors. He squeezed the trigger. The discharge shattered the quietness. A long moment passed. Then, Dixon's target fell from his horse. "Early in the afternoon, the discouraged Indians gave up."

(material provided by Viking Arms)

Want to own a Sharps? See Viking Arms or the gun shops to which they distribute. www.vikingarms.com

© Sidney Du Broff 2011