[Music] From a tool of hunters and farmers to a legendary weapon of lawmen and outlaws, the gun serves as a central figure in building both the fact and fiction of the American West.

The role of firearms in the settlement era of the Great Plains is illustrated by the fact that they are frequently displayed in museums throughout the West.

One of the most impressive and detailed displays is, understandably, at the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City.

My name is Keith Wondra.

I'm the curator here at Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City, Kansas.

And we are in the Guns that won the West exhibit, one of the most popular exhibits at the museum.

We have the Winchester exhibit, which we have a rare cartridge display that Winchester would give out to dealers.

And then the next case is the Frontiersman case.

So we kind of start off with the earliest guns.

And then we go over to the Buffalo Hunters, and then right after that is the Gambler section.

And then we have some lawmen, and then right behind me is the Outlaw case.

And then we also have a case that has legendary lawmen of Dodge City guns, attributed to Bat Mattserson, Wyatt Earp.

And also some more important figures of Dodge City history, such as Chaulky Beeson and Han Bell.

Yeah, we are enlarging.

We got a donation of a collection of guns from a rancher south of town near Ashland, Kansas, by the name of Walter Couch.

One of them I can show you right now is this Colt gun.

It's 1875, single action on Colt.

This is a 1863 Henry rifle, and it was actually used in the Civil War by Charles Parrish.

Yeah, this one's probably the most rare of all the guns we have in this new collection.

And then we also got, this is a double-barreled shotgun.

And the really neat thing about this is it has this Wells Fargo Company stamp.

And this actually has stamped Joe Sterling agent Paris-Dallas on the side here.

A lot of these guns were actually put out as fakes.

They would reproduce them and then claim they're actually from Wells Fargo.

But I think with having the agent and also the stamp on it helps verify it's actually from Wells Fargo.

So chances are this was actually used on the help guard for the Wells Fargo stagecorders.

The buffalo hunting guns are the biggest, and they kind of went there.

Because you need the big guns to kill the buffalo.

Once buffalo started leaving especially western Kansas, you started getting a lot more settlement.

You still had guns.

But then you kind of, but then they got smaller.

You might shoot some coyotes or deer, and you don't really need the big, huge buffalo hunting guns.

Plus, also you started getting a lot more gamblers because they're trying to protect themselves, especially if they won.

They had a lot of money.

And women would also carry smaller guns and purses or in their pockets to protect themselves also.

From 1872 to 1875, Dodge City had no city law enforcement.

So you kind of, they're depending on the sheriff.

So 1872, 1875, that was when Dodge City really got its wild reputation of being very unruly.

Once 1875 happened and they passed the ordinance prohibiting guns from being carried, that drastically reduced the amount of crime that Dodge City had.

If you live out in the country, you would use guns for hunting and also for some self-defense if you had some wild animals come near you.

The myth of like, for example, the Cowboys having guns, that was very... Everybody having a gun was more of a Hollywood aspiration of it.

People had guns, but they didn't go off and just shoot everybody willy-nilly.

The Cottonwood Ranch Historic Site, the home of Cottonwood Connections, was a working sheep ranch built by Abraham, Fenton, and Tom Pratt, English immigrants in the late 1800s.

The friends of the Cottonwood Ranch support the work of the site and recently received a donation of firearms owned and used by the Pratts for sport, hunting, and as everyday tools in the working of the ranch.

These firearms happen to be with the Pratt family.

As far as we know, Abraham Pratt owned all of these.

A grandson of Abraham Pratt by the name of Frank Pratt.

Presented them to the Friends of Cottonwood Ranch so we can curate them and preserve them.

We have Tony Haffner, who is not only the president of the Friends of Cottonwood Ranch, but he is also a judge.

He is a gunsmith, avid hunter, and has hunted all over the world.

I wouldn't call me a gunsmith.

I've repaired firearms for 50 years.

The Pratt guns that were donated to us are all shotguns except one Belgium made 22 single shot rifle.

The shotguns, they're all double barrels.

There's one single shot break open 28 gauge.

And there's also the brass, the empty brass shells that go with it.

There is a muzzleloader, which is a Lancaster.

Was made in London, England.

That company's been in business from 1826 till the present day.

This company gave a shotgun to Annie Oakley.

She used a Lancaster.

There are two H. Acrell shotguns, the 28 gauge, and this, the pinfire double, were both Acrells made in Beverly, England.

They were made in the 1870s, 80s.

The unique thing about this shotgun is it is a pinfire shotgun.

You have a pinfire.

Yes.

Expkain how that works.

It's a mock-up of a pinfire cartridge, what it would look like.

They had a pin.

The firing pin is this pin.

The primer is inside the cartridge.

This pin rests against the primer.

Then you have your powder, shot, wad.

And when the gun fires, it hits that pin and drives it down into the primer, fires.

Primer fires, powder fires, and hopefully everything works.

And so you have the shotgun shell but these were also for revolvers?

They made them for revolvers and rifles also.

They were developed, I believe, There is a single shot Hopkins and Allen.

This is the only American-made gun.

And this would have been late 1880s, 1890s.

They also donated three handguns.

There's a little Remington vest pocket Derringer pistol that was a 22 short.

They were made from about 1868 to 1872.

They didn't last too long.

And there might be a reason because you had a cockpit to load it and then let the hammer back down.

And they might have had a tendency to go off.

There is a Remington 38 rimfire.

It's not a center fire pistol.

It's a rimfire pistol.

The primer is in the rim.

And then there's a little Stevens.

They had different names for it.

It's a little single shot break open.

They used them for gallery pistols, they call them.

They'd shoot indoors with little CB caps.

They were used for everyday use or target shooting, sporting use.

But it has a sight on it.

It has a rear and front sight on it.

But the Pratt guns, it's obvious to me that they were tools.

They may have used them for sporting use, you know, but they were tools.

This is a condition we received them in.

All I will do to them is try to preserve where they're at so they don't get any worse than where they're at at the present time.

I'll probably use a penetrating oil or light oil and bronze wool.

Most of them are in pretty good shape.

There is a little light surface rust and that bronze wool will take that off without touching the brown, the patina.

They should be left like they are but preserved.

Some of the other things were reloading supplies.

They obviously reloaded their shotgun shells.

Loaded cartridges, I don't know how I assume they were available but they had to come in on a train.

You could get loose shot, loose powder and primers.

Hand loads were cheaper than loaded cartridges.

When I started in 1964, I bought my first reloader.

A box of shells I could load for $1.60 and new shells at the hardware stores were $2.29 or something.

The hardware store would sell you shot by the pound, powder by the half pound or quarter, primers you had to buy 100.

But they were tools.

They were used to protect the sheep herd.

I'm sure from coyotes, varmints, they shot probably skunks, badgers, whatever they didn't want getting into the garden, whatever they didn't want getting into their sheep would be my guess.

That's what would have been normal to have done with them.

They went with them wherever they went.

They probably rode in the wagon.

Whatever, just like a pair of pliers.

I have hunting pictures from the glass negatives where there's a lot of dead rabbits on a rock.

But they were shooting a lot of prairie chickens too.

When it comes to competition, shooting in competition, a lot of these Englishmen in the river valley in the 1880s would have competition.

They'd have pigeon shoots.

They would shoot live pigeons because there were a lot of pigeons.

The tradition was, from the oral tradition, that whatever pigeons they happened to kill during the competitive pigeon shoot, they used those and had pigeon pot pie for the evening meal.

I'm sure they shot clay targets.

Yeah.

Well, there were glass balls.

They used a lot of glass balls before the clay target was invented.

Like I said, it's obvious from the condition they're in, they weren't abused, but they were used.

Tony's long interest in historic firearms includes participation in Cowboy Action Shooting events which can futher illustrate the conversation.

Following the discussion of the Pratt guns, Tony brought in guns from his own collection to illustrate the progression of firearms during the 1800s.

Just so everybody knows, every firearm in here is empty, been checked.

There's no live ammunition anywhere around.

I wouldn't be standing on this side if that was not the case.

We're going to start about civil war time, pre-civil war.

I showed you before, this is one of the Pratt's muzzle loading shotguns that you had to load from the muzzle.

Just so everybody knows it's unloaded.

The first thing you want to do if you ever get a muzzle loader is you want to make sure that it's not loaded before you put your head over the barrel.

You measure from the back of the breech to the end of the barrel.

You use a rod a little longer, but this one, it goes in plus a three-quarters of an inch.

That's obviously empty.

That particular thing, you tamp it in with it, but that's called the ramrod.

It's ramrod.

You would put your measured charge of powder in, whether it was a rifle or a shotgun, put the measured charge of powder.

With a shotgun, you would put a wad, whether it's a cardboard wad that fit the barrel or some people used a rag, whatever was available, but the cardboard fiber wads was best.

You put the wad in, then you put your measured charge of shot in.

Then you put your overshot wad, and at that point is when you rammed it, you put pressure on it so that everything is held back against the rear of the chamber, same way on both barrels.

Rifle, the same thing.

You push that ball, the ball fit tight so that it would seat into the rifle.

With a rifle, you use a bullet or a patched round ball, a ball that has cloth around it.

The ball went right against the powder, or the bullet went right against the powder.

Then put your ramrod away, and you put your caps on the nipples, and when you're ready to fire, obviously you cop the hammer and fire.

Then you go through it all again, whether it's a rifle or a shotgun.

During the Civil War, cartridges, they started using some cartridges, paper cartridges, or some brass cartridges.

The military used some, this is not a Henry rifle, but it was a brass looking frame, lever action rifle.

They used some sharps rifles.

The 1866 Winchester came into common use after the Civil War.

The 1874 Sharps rifle is what a lot of people equate with the Buffalo Hunters.

They were the big bore, breech loading, single shot rifles.

You run the lever, and there's a block of steel.

That's the way it drops.

You see it come down here.

That's what actually closes up the rear of the breech.

You still have to cock it in order to fire it.

This is a dummy shell.

You put the shell in, you close it.

When you're done, it ejects.

You load another one, one at a time.

After the 66s, in 1873, Winchester developed the 73 rifle.

It had the steel frame, shot a pistol caliber cartridge.

They were all, you know.

The reason it had the same caliber for both revolvers and rifles was because you could buy just one set.

You could use one cartridge.

You could add two different sizes of cartridges.

They were not extremely powerful as far as a rifle.

Winchester, in order to compete with Sharps and some of those, they developed in 1876 what they called their Centennial Rifle.

It's huge.

It's heavy.

Then they came out in 1894 with the Winchester Model 94 3030 still in use, still made today.

The 3030 was the first commercial smokeless powder round.

It was designed to be a smokeless powder round in 1893, 94.

Black powder explodes.

Black powder is actually an explosive according to the federal government.

Smokeless powder burns.

If you take a pile of each and hold a match to the black powder, once it catches fire, it will go, poof, there's your explosion.

Smokeless powder, you touch a match to it, it will burn.

See how it burns?

And the smokeless powder is more powerful grain for grain than black powder.

Okay I've got a pile of black powder and a trail of smokeless powder.

The smokeless powder will burn up to the black powder and the black powder will explode except it's not contained so it will just go, poof.

There's the smokeless burning.

The black powder smoked a lot.

If it was in real life and some of the movies would say, you know, after a couple rounds in a revolver, the room was full of smoke.

And then shotgun Winchester also developed in actually 1893 a pump shotgun, pump action shotgun where you actually work the action.

And then this is in 1897 which was a somewhat stronger version of that 93.

Remington had a pump shotgun.

Marlin had a pump shotgun.

Marlin had lever action rifles.

Whitney made a lever action.

There were a lot of different people making lever action rifles.

Winchester obviously the most, that everybody knows about.

In the series or evolution of firearms, we'd gone, you know, there were the single shots, Civil War period and after the Civil War.

Then the levers were developed.

And then in the 18, well actually bolt actions were developed prior to the Civil War.

The U.S. used a bolt action rifle, paper cartridge in the Battle of Antietam.

They were, it was somewhat limited and then the government decided in their infinite wisdom the gun was too complicated for the average soldier so they went strictly with the muzzleloader for the rest of the Civil War till towards the end they had some cartridge sharps and so forth.

Then we went to the trap door Springfield.

After the Civil War, the lever actions, late 1880s, early 1890s, the military actually got into the bolt actions.

And this would be an example of the first bolt action that the U.S. military used.

And the bolt, by bolt action I mean you have a bolt, opens and closes an action and it has a magazine.

This one holds five rounds.

In a way this was actually a Swedish design, Norwegian design.

You open the magazine box, you drop your cartridges into that box, closed it and it was ready to run.

And the way the military wanted it to be used because they were still in the single shot mindset, the generals, is you turned the magazine cut off on which shut the magazine off.

You could not feed out of the magazine.

You single shot, single shot, single shot.

Then when you got in a bind and needed rapid fire you turned the magazine cut off and you shot five rounds out of the magazine.

And they used this rifle in the Spanish-American War.

This was the first smokeless powder rifle that the American military used.

One at that same time period in Europe, this is an example, Europe used bolt action, this is a German bolt action.

Same theory only they loaded from the top.

The U.S. went to the Springfield in 1903 with the five round magazine, same cut off.

This was one of the two bolt action rifles from U.S. military in the First World War.

In the civilian market, the semi-auto, Remington produced semi-autos in 1908, sold available to the general public.

You load five rounds through the top, close the bolt, every time you pull a trigger it goes off.

That was comp, they were common rifles at that point.

The U.S. military stuck with the bolt action up even at the start of World War II and as the rifles were put into production, the U.S. military went to the semi-automatic M1 Grand, still 30-06.

It was not a mass produced bolt action rifle for the civilian market until 1925.

They had taken some military rifles, companies and cut them off, cut the barrels off because soldiers were coming back from the Spanish-American War, World War I, they were used to using bolt action rifles.

Winchester developed the model 54 in 1924 or 5.

Remington had a model 30 prior to that which was a kind of a commercialized version of the 1917 that the U.S. used in the First World.

Today the bolt action is probably your most common other than what they call the modern sporting rifle, the version of the M16 AR-15.

Hand guns, during the Civil War the percussion revolver was the most common.

You loaded it by one cylinder at a time.

You cocked it, you dunk powder in, you set a ball on, you pushed it down, do the same thing for each chamber.

When you were done you put a cap on each nipple and it was ready to fire.

You fired six, started all over, you loaded the cylinder by hand.

They talked about during the Civil War soldiers carrying multiple loaded cylinders.

This pistol, the cylinder comes out, you replace it with another cylinder and you're ready, you're back in action.

At the end of the Civil War when the cartridges started coming out they converted percussion revolvers, some of them two cartridges.

Then in 1873 Colt came out with the single action army.

Single action means you have to cock it each time you fire it.

You have to cock it by hand and you load it one round at a time.

While Colt was in business Smith and Wesson came out with a competitive firearm.

This is a small one.

The Smith and Wesson instead of loading it opened up.

That was Smith and Wesson's, they developed that, it was in use the same time in the 73 Colts.

Then later Colt came out with a so called double action revolver.

What they mean is you can either cock it each time or you can pull the trigger and it cocks and fires.

Also you can open it.

The cylinder swings out, empty, load, close.

It's quicker than a single action.

The first ones the military had were 38 calibers, they used them in the Philippines.

They used the single action army, the revolvers up until they developed the 1911, the semi-automatic 1911 Colt pistol that was used all the way through World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and is still in use with some units today.

It's a semi-automatic.

You fire, bang, goes back, loads of other rounds, fire, until you run out of bullets, put in a new magazine.

That's just a rough, real quick outline of the progression on some of, like I said, there were oodles and oodles and oodles of manufacturers.

In the old ones some various calibers never went away.

There were quality guns and they still make ammunition for some of these.

Up until today we're still using side by side double barrel shotguns.

We're still using single barrel shotguns like the Pratt guns.

Double barrels instead of being side by side, some of them are one on top of the other.

Semi-automatics, shotguns, rifles, technology is improved, the metal is improved, ammunition is really improved.

Well as Tony said, guns were a tool.

You had some of these for survival.

There was a lot of game most of the time and you needed a gun to shoot them.

They were everyday common items.

They were no different than a hammer.

They were no different than a hammer or a shovel.

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