When the brave men of Lexington, Mass., poured onto the village green on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, there were a couple of anomalies between them and the popular history of the era, as well as the bulk of American soldiery for the next 200-plus years.
First, they were not “Minutemen,” which were essentially quick-reaction forces formed from the local militia, but rather the regular “trained band” of armed townsfolk, a concept that had a rich tradition in British and British-American history.
Second, they were heavily outnumbered by the Royal regulars and served mostly as a speed bump before the Brits continued to their fateful encounter at Concord. As a result, those Lexington “trainband” men are one of the few groups of American warriors for generations who returned home from the battlefield with only the firearms they’d brought from home in the first place.
From the Revolutionary War in the 1770s up through at least the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, there was a robust tradition of American warfighters returning home with extra guns, whether war trophies liberated from vanquished foes or our heroes’ own issued firearms brought home as a sort of “service bonus,” to which Uncle Sam historically tended to turn a blind eye.
Working in gun stores over the years, I was privileged to hear the stories of many such firearms.
Actually, the first instance was long before I worked in a gun store. Way back in my late-elementary-school days when my parents were out of town, I’d get deposited with a classmate’s family for a week or so until they got home.
My classmate was a Jewish-American kid whose family had been here in the States since forever, which was exotic to a kid like me whose ancestors came over from Scandinavia in the 19th century. Thanks to my staying there, I learned about the meaning of Jewish holidays like Hanukkah and Passover. Even more relevant to my current life, since my folks didn’t own guns, was the fact that my friend’s parents did.
Oh, all the actual modern, cartridge-firing blasters were safely locked away from us kids, but that wasn’t so with the heirlooms. There was an ancient flintlock—looking back, I believe it was some variant on a Charleville—and a percussion rifle, which I’m pretty sure was a Springfield rifle musket, out where us youngsters could gawk at them and even touch. In fact, I blame that flintlock for my realization that reruns of the old “Daniel Boone” television series utilized surplus Trapdoor Springfields in place of actual muzzleloaders.
Speaking of Trapdoor Springfields and family heirlooms reminds me of another blaster I ran across in my days behind the gun counter. While working at the short-lived Montague Gunsmithing in the western suburbs of Knoxville, Tenn., we had a customer come in to get their ancestral family deer rifle checked out before opening day back in—oh, I reckon this would have been 2001.
In this case, the ancient family antique deer rifle was, in fact, one of the aforementioned Trapdoor Springfields, still chambered for the original .45-70 Govt. round.
A little bit of inquiring behind this antique unearthed the family story: Our customer’s great-great-grandpa had been issued this smokepole by his company of the Tennessee militia in the olden days of the 1890s when they marched off to fight the Empire of Spain in Cuba.
Great-great-grandpa survived malaria, typhus and Spanish Mauser bullets and came home with his trusty Springfield floptop. In the intervening years, the wooden forearm had been shortened and the barrel had been chopped back to a more manageable length for stalking whitetail in the laurel groves of the Appalachians, and at some point, a Lyman peep sight had been added to the old tomato stake, but that timeworn militia rifle had been making meat every autumn since William McKinley was in office. It was just in for a checkup.
Not all encounters with heirlooms were as heartwarming, of course. While working at Coal Creek Armory in Knoxville, I came in one day to find a Colt M1911 in the showcase. When I say “M1911,” I am being highly specific, because this was no M1911A1; it was the original—hand-to-God, John Moses Browning original.
Folks, this was a gorgeous pistol. When I say it was in 100-percent NRA Droolworthy condition, I am not kidding. This was, chronologically, the same time period when Colt released the World War I reproduction 1911s and when this 90-year-old pistol was placed in the counter next to the new replica, you couldn’t tell which one was the reproduction and which one needed to have “The Talk” about having its driver’s license taken away. It was absolutely immaculate.
To top off the perfect condition of the old M1911 (its serial number dated it to 1913), it also had a brown leather flap holster with the name of the original bearer—a lieutenant of the Quartermaster Corps serving during the Great War—penned on the underside of the holster flap. All us kids behind the counter swooned over the pistol, but it was—quite rightly—priced about like any of the vehicles we used to commute to and from work.
It turns out that the current owner of the pistol was the descendant of the young lieutenant who had been issued it during the First World War and, when he and his wife were expecting their first kid, decided it was time to put great-great-grandpa’s gun on consignment at the local gun shop. I’m not saying that we hoped his ancestor’s ghost haunted him for not passing that Colt down to his kid, but I’m not saying that we didn’t hope that, either.
As the years went by, bringing home trophies or keepsakes, whether an enemy long gun or an issue pistol that “accidentally” fell into your duffel bag around mustering-out time grew less common, but it lasted longer than a lot of people realize. I remember giving a presentation in high school on the Vietnam War to my history class in the early 1980s and among my props was a bring-back Chinese SKS that one of my parents’ friends had lent me for the purpose. Oh, sure, I had to store it in the principal’s office before and after class, but I distinctly remember walking down the hall with that prop for my oral presentation. That seems almost inconceivable now.
The past, as they say, was another country, and our troops brought home plenty of souvenirs to ensure it was a well-armed one.
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