Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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For those clinging to a vestige of hope that some remaining elements of the Old West still survived, a singular event signaled its finishing throes. The demise of the Old West was official when its personified symbol passed away in the Spring of 1917. Buffalo Bill Cody, Army scout, buffalo hunter, and the showman who took the frontier West around the world, died quietly in Denver, and with him the era of the frontier and the conquest of the plains and the mountains. With his passing, the Old West was gone, hopelessly and irretrievably lost to a glorious and semi-mythical past.

Period advertisement for Joaquin Murrietta’s traveling head.

Fittingly, Chauncey Thomas was the last man to interview Cody as he lay on his deathbed. Mr. Thomas’ wordy account of his audience with Buffalo Bill appeared in the May, 1917 number of the Magazine of the West. In his last days, Bill and Chauncy talked guns and Western experiences. Cody spoke of his heavy buffalo guns, the type favored by bison killers who sniped them from a stand. Bill used two Sharps rifles, a ponderous .45-120-550 weighing 18 lbs. and an 11-lb. bottlenecked .44 caliber.