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This is a freaky little horn, for several reasons. I seldom make a horn this small: capacity is probably less than a third of a pound of powder, not enough for me to shoot a rifle match or a day plinking at the range.
Around 1998, I found that my cache of raw horns had been hit pretty hard by carpet beetles. I mentioned this to Bill Knight (the legendary Mad Monk), and he suggested I look into using mineral pigment dyes. I finally got around to doing some experiments with it in 2000. One horn came out of the dye process looking bizarre, with streaks of brown and red intermixed with the greens of the copper solution. I set it to the side in the barn with an untreated horn to see what the bugs would do . . . . and there they sat. By 2004 the untreated horn looked like Swiss cheese, but the treated horn was untouched.
Flash forward 20 years. I started scraping the horn to see what was underneath the color streaks, but they appeared to extend all the way through the horn. In all my years haunting museums and private collections, I'd only seen one horn with similar coloration, so I copied it.
The original is in a private collection in Wyoming. It was purchased in Independence Missouri in April 1843, and carried west to Oregon by a boy of about 11 (some dispute over his age in contemporary documents). He and his family arrived in the Willamette Valley in October 1843. From time to time throughout his life he kept a journal (and the entries made while on the trail to Oregon are about what you'd imagine of any kid his age). By 1860-61 he was back on the Plains, carrying an 1841 rifled musket and this horn. He settled in Wyoming. The horn, musket, and his journals are still in the family.
My copy, as with the original, has a plug made of poplar. Not sure why it has those two grey streaks in line with the legs of the staple, the original has something similar. Kind of a serendipitous thing that they'd match in that way.
Now if I could just figure out what would possess someone to take off on a 2,000 mile trip with such a tiny horn, let alone being out on the Plains in the early days of the Indian Wars with such a small supply of powder--maybe 30 shots for that Mississippi Yaeger.
Topic: Shop time (Read 40 times)