A blast from the past--New rifle follows me home.

I have no idea whose attic this old relic has been sitting in or for how long, but it's mine now.

It's a rather neglected Model 1866 Springfield rifle, caliber .50-70, also known as a Second Allin conversion.

Now mine's not as nice as the one pictured in the link above at the NRA museum, but then again, mine was a lot more affordable, being somewhat shopworn and in need of several missing parts. But parts are out there and I'll find them. And when I find those parts, I plan to shoot this rifle.

These early Springfield breechloaders, also known as "Trapdoors" due to the pop-up breech on the action, were all made from Civil War .58 muzzle-loading muskets which were obsolete by the end of the war. As usually happens at the end of a war, the government had a lot of these obsolete rifles that they couldn't really use, and we were expanding into the West and running into major problems with those pesky Indians, a problem which required newer rifles. Since our government was notoriously cheap back then, it chose to convert thousands of the old muskets to new breech-loading cartridge rifles by sleeving the barrel down to .50 and cutting the rear of the barrel to add this breechlock.

The new rifles were then issued to US troops out west starting in 1867, and none too soon as the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne Indians had just gone on the warpath against white settlers and the Army in 1866, totally wiping out a force of 81 soldiers in the Powder River area of what would later become Wyoming in December of that year. The fallen troops had the old muzzle-loaders and the Indians had learned by now that all they had to do was wait for the soldiers to fire their rifles and then they could attack and kill them while they were reloading. New troops were sent out, and the Indians attacked them again in July of 1867 in two battles known as the Wagon Box Fight and the Hayfield Fight. The soldiers had been guarding woodcutters and haycutters when the Indians attacked, and they took up defensive positions as the Indians tried their old trick of rushing them after the first volley of musketry. But the Indians got a surprise that day, as these new breechloaders could be reloaded very fast, and the Indians got their feathered butts handed to them in a fashion that would have made John Wayne proud.

Eventually these Model 1866 rifles were replaced with the newer Model 1873 Trapdoor in .45-70, which was factory-built as a breechloader, but many of these old ones soldiered on for a long time. In fact, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody used one, which he named Lucretia Borgia in tribute to it's deadliness, to kill an estimated two thousand buffalo to feed railroad workers while he was employed as a hunter for the Union Pacific as it worked it's way west across the plains.

Well this old warhorse has certainly seen better days, but given time, it will be cleaned up, repaired and firing again. Right now though, I'm still inspecting it. This one has a breechlock and a sideplate with later dates, indicating that the originals were replaced sometime during it's shooting life, but aside from a few missing screws, it seems complete and functional.

This one has the US stamp on the buttplate, indicating military issue, but no signs of who it was issued to.

But even without any unit history, this rifle is one heck of a piece of American history, and I feel pretty lucky to have come across it. I can hardly wait to fire it for the first time in who-knows-how long, just as soon as it's fixed and I make up some black powder loads for it.

Oh wait--I just checked under the buttplate and found an old yellowed piece of paper that reads: "Issued to Old NFO, 1868."

If true, that certainly explains the shortage of Indians today. Old NFO can still shoot like Hell!