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Buffalo
Hunting Time Machine - The Rifle By: Bryce M. Towsley |
 For
my first buffalo hunt, the rifle was never in question. I think it
would have been a sin to use anything other than a Sharps rifle. Certainly
other rifles saw plenty of use during the buffalo hunting era, but
none came to signify the essence of the buffalo hunting era more than
the Sharps rife. The first Sharps first rifles were made by A. S. Nippes of Mill Creek, Pennsylvania. Later they were made by Robbins and Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont, not far from where I live. In 1855 Sharps established a factory in Hartford, Connecticut. Christian Sharps died in 1874 and the company was reorganized as The Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company. In 1876 it moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut where it faded out of business and closed in 1880. Buffalo hunting was about over by then and the need for big bore single shot rifles faded with it. For years nobody paid much attention to Sharps, until a couple of things happened. The 1990 movie Quigley Down Under stirred a lot of interest in the Sharps rifle and long range black powder silhouette shooting grew in popularity. The demand for Sharps rifles took off and the few custom rifle builders true to the Sharps design found themselves inundated with orders. A decade back, when I first started to become interested in owning a Sharps, the waiting list was four years and the price high enough to consider a second mortgage. Clearly, the reincarnated Sharps Rifle had touched a modern nerve. What was even clearer was that I would have to wait for something to change before I could afford to own one. The “working man’s Sharps” arrived in the form of an imported rifle from Uberti. This Sharps is affordable, accurate and rugged. Unlike some other imports that have been prostituted by the lawyers until the soul of a Sharps no longer inhabited the rifle, the Uberti is historically much more accurate. Mine is the mid-grade, Special Sharps. It features a 32-inch octagon barrel and weighs eleven pounds. The receiver is case hardened and the barrel is blued. The beefy butt stock features a pistol grip and a wide steel butt plate. The splinter type forend is finished with a silver endcap. The gun has a set trigger and when set, the forward trigger breaks with a thought. The Sharps features a side mounted external hammer and a massive falling block receiver. It was the “magnum” rifle of it’s time and with today’s steels the action will withstand heavy hunting loads with ease. All the Uberti Sharps rifles are chambered for .45-70 Government. While it lacks the romance of the “Big 50,” or some of the other famous Sharps cartridges, the .45-70 did see a lot of action on the plains due in part to a preponderance of government supplied ammo.  The
.45-70 of the day was considered a bit on the light side by most hard-core
buffalo hunters. But, remember, they were using black powder and the
relatively small case capacity of the .45-70 restricted the power
of this cartridge. Today’s factory loads are still restricted
because of all the old Trapdoor Springfield rifles and the fact that
ammo loaded to the full potential would reduce one of these rifles
to shrapnel in a millisecond. I had heard too many horror stories
about modern hunters trying to shoot bison with factory loaded .45-70
ammo to know that it’s a bad idea. So, I made up some handloads
using 460-grain hard cast bullets. (I will note that Lee Hawes prefers
soft lead bullets.) Because the Sharps is such a strong action and
the barrel is so long, I was able to push them at about 1,800 feet
per second, which makes the .45-70 a serious buffalo gun. Actually,
my load is considerably more powerful than any of the traditional
“buffalo cartridges.” My Sharps is on hiatus from buffalo hunting for a few years, but is living large as my long range rifle for Cowboy Action Shooting competition. |
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