rifle

John Barney Wright’s Sharps rifle
Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company
Hartford, Connecticut, mid–late nineteenth century
Lent by the Berkshire Historical Society

TRANSCRIPT:
It has heft—almost ten pounds—and the length you’d expect from a sharpshooter’s rifle: just over four feet from butt plate to muzzle tip, its octagonal barrel extending thirty-one inches alone. Line up the Vernier peep sight—a dime-sized black disc with a pinhole on a folding mount—with the hooded front sight, complete with a level, and you understand the gun’s reputation for long range accuracy. To qualify for their units, Civil War sharpshooters had to be able to fire ten rounds into a three-inch hole at two hundred yards. Buffaloes could be knocked to their knees at five hundred to one thousand yards—the power provided by a .44 caliber cartridge, and the design by the renowned gun maker Christian Sharps.

This was John Barney Wright’s gun, modified for bear hunting. Barney lived on Henderson Road. Most bears he caught in traps and clubbed to death, but around forty of the 100 that he killed were likely killed with this rifle. In 1874, when he had been at it for thirty years, he fetched $15 for the hide, a $15 bounty from the state, and $20 for the meat for each bear. He had worked his father’s farm until at the age of nineteen he decided that the wilds were his real home. Although married, he tramped those woods alone for the next fifty years, an anachronism even then—unfriendly and solitary and impressing all until his death at ninety-three, with his whalebone constitution and teeth as sound as ivory. One late eyewitness account described him as “an eerie-looking cuss” who appeared “mean as hell.” Those bears staring down the business end of his rifle would have had to agree.