05/28/2026
We went looking for relic rifles on a wilderness ranch, and the owner graciously showed us this. He reached under a bed in a remote mountain cabin and pulled out this Wi******er 1873 and handed it to me. He knows I’m doing a video series on the 1873 rifle.
The carbine was jammed. I removed the side plates and used a Swiss Army knife to extract a relatively modern .44-40 cartridge. There was another cartridge rattling around in the magazine tube. The magazine spring was missing.
The carbine was made in 1891, based on serial number.
My GUESS is that the carbine was left outside or in an exposed place for a long time. It has been horribly rusted and pitted. As you can see the internals indicate that there was a lot of black powder fouling in the gun. The loading gate is corroded so that the edge is diminished.
The carbine was recovered on a ranch in Montana. It wasn’t in the Salinas Valley when it was first found.
Then someone took a buffing wheel to it without dismantling the gun beyond removing the magazine spring. The entire carbine is highly polished.
The stocks suffered some exposure damage and appear to have been chewed. They are now deeply sanded to the point of changing their dimensions. The buttplate is missing.
The bore was too filled with filth to evaluate it. It’s a .44-40, based on the relatively modern cartridge I extracted.
Someone then took an electric pencil and crudely inscribed the ranch owner’s initials and brand on the side of the receiver, added some more electro pencil writing on the underside, and gave it to the ranch owner.
So what now? Can we fix it?