It all began with an extremely unusual rifle. On the way home from work one day, I chanced to stop in a local gun store, curious to look over their used rifles, as you never know what may have just been taken in on trade. In a display case, I happened to see one of those “old single shot rifles,” a real Shiloh Sharps buffalo rifle with a half octagon, half round barrel that looked to be almost a yard long! Next to it was a set of RCBS dies, and even better, a very large bag of new brass! At that time, the waiting period for a Shiloh Sharps was around five years. Here I was, looking at one priced way below what you would pay, after waiting nearly half a decade!
I used my best poker face; talked about how it probably kicked real hard. Can you hit anything with those open iron sights? Where would you get loading data for a .40-70 Sharps Straight cartridge? And I mumbled something about, “if it was a .45-70, I just might be interested.” But ended up walking out of the store paying about one-third what I should have for a like-new rifle. I had no idea what a .40-70 was, but with brass and dies, I could reload and shoot anything. Actually, not being too interested about even trying black powder in a single shot rifle (and having to mess with cleaning it), I had enough savvy to know that a case long as a finger in .40 caliber could handle most any game I would tackle with it out to a hundred yards or so. I quickly left the store, waiting to smile until I was driving away in my truck. Not really too sure what I had just stumbled across, I was very eager to find out.
My lucky find turned out to be a Shiloh Sharps #3 Sporter with a 30” half octagon, half round barrel. It had a beautiful color case hardened (by the bone and charcoal method) single-shot, falling block action, manufactured to duplicate the original 1874 Sharps rifle used by buffalo hunters in the 1800s. It came with set triggers, a simple blade front sight, and two rear sights. One was a fancy aperture tang sight used by long range shooters. The other, more traditionally located one, looked like a “funny” but fancy semi-buckhorn open rear sight. It turned out to be a dual-purpose sight which also had a flip-up feature allowing it to be used at more distant ranges.
The front trigger had a nominal pull of around 3.8 lbs. However, this could be greatly reduced with the rear set trigger, allowing the shooter a very gentle 0.6 lb. touch to the front trigger for...
precision shooting. To use the rifle, the under lever was swung down and forward, dropping the falling block at the same time. A cartridge is inserted directly into the chamber. The lever is pulled to the rear, lifting the block up to the locked, fire position. The big side hammer is pulled back to the rear, where upon you aim and fire. Opening the lever again kicks out the fired case. There is no fancy safety- if you do not want to fire the rifle, don’t cock the hammer!
In no time at all I had worked up a great load using a 300 grain jacketed soft point bullet (with .025” jacket) from Hawk Precision Bullets in Salem, NJ (www.hawkbullets.com). They use dead soft copper tubing to make their jackets and pure lead cores. Great expansion and high weight retention is delivered by this combination of materials. They look and shoot very well, and I had read that the performance on game has proved to be outstanding. My hunting load with the 300-grain Hawk gave me almost 2,250 fps from the 30” barrel. Using the open sights on the rifle, the Sharps would shoot three rounds into 1.5 inches at 100 yards. For a shooter used to modern rifles with high power scopes, I was very happy with the results the Sharps was delivering. Now what game should I attempt to tackle with it?
Later that year, just after Christmas, I made a short hour and a half drive to the Jicarilla Apache Indian reservation (www.jicarillahunt.com) in north central New Mexico for a cow elk hunt. From a bench, I could keep all of my shots on a tennis ball at 100 yards. However, out in the field I was concerned with how my 48 year-old eyes would do with the simple open sights. Oh how I wished for a good scope the morning of the hunt!
My hunting load with the 300-grain Hawk gave me almost 2,250 fps from the 30” barrel
Early on my guide spotted a herd of about forty elk on a small hill covered with pine trees. Our plan was for me to position myself downwind of them in a small patch of trees on the point of a ridge. The guide went and circled well around and upwind from the herd, hoping he would spook them over towards me. About a half hour after I had settled in, things got real exciting. Instead of a few elk working their way over towards me, dozens and dozens of them started to boil out of the trees several hundred yards from me.
...
As luck would have it, a small group did emerge closer in and milled around a bit in the sage. Well hidden from their view in the trees, I cocked my Sharps, took steady aim, and sent a 300-grain Hawk at a large cow standing broadside to me. At the shot, she staggered but ten yards or so and then fell over, raising a cloud of snow. The 300 grain Hawk bullet worked great- I centered the lower part of the heart and had the bullet exit her far side. Not a bit of meat was wasted from the shot, which I later paced off at 137 long strides. The cow weighed around 500 lbs. and provided us with lots of good eating meat.
Of interest is that my guide was well behind the elk and off to the side in the trees. As such, he first heard the “whump” of the large bullet and then heard the boom of the Sharps. He said that was a first for him and smiled knowing I had connected.
Just one week later, I was off to Wyoming to take a nice buffalo bull with the Sharps. Seeing how well the Hawk 300 had worked on the elk, I decided to stay with it for the buffalo, as most likely I would be taking a broadside shot again. Though a buffalo is very tall in the chest (around 4 feet), they are not very thick through this area.
My chance came early in the morning at just over 100 yards. A 1,100 lb. bull was shot broadside as he stood on a gentle hillside. Visibly shaken by the impact of the bullet, he walked for only five or six steps before falling over. Surprisingly, he fell with all four feet pointed uphill- not the best pose for taking photos. I thought it would be no problem at all to simply roll the bull over to get his legs pointed downhill- was I ever mistaken! By myself, there was no way I could even get him part way rolled over. It finally took the rancher and me using a farm tractor to get him into a posing position.
The Hawk bullet passed just over the heart, taking out both lungs and breaking a rib on the far side. On the recovered slug, there clearly were pieces of rib bone stuck in the pure lead core of the mushroomed bullet. It was found under the hide, expanded to over 0.82”, having lost only 17-grains while passing through a buffalo! At better than 94% weight retention, it really...
impressed me with its performance on such heavy game. Cleanly taking my second big game animal in one week, with a real buffalo rifle using open iron sights, was a real thrill for me. It truly gave me a real appreciation for how well armed the early hunters were when using Sharps rifles in the late 1800s.
Montana: Elk - Four Hour Drag
As a young buck in my mid-thirties, there may have been more to inviting me along on a western Montana elk hunt than first appeared, but after all, that’s what friends are for. Greg lived in Helena and had invited me to go on an elk hunt with his brother-in-law, John. While Greg was my age, John was perhaps eight years older, and we all
were in pretty fair shape. No more gentle rolling hills hunting. This was real Rocky Mountain hunting we were going on in the Elkhorns, between Helena and Boulder, MT. We would be hunting at between six and seven thousand feet, and being in good physical condition was going to be very helpful, especially for me, during this hunt.
No more gentle rolling hills hunting; this was real Rocky Mountain hunting we were going on in the Elkhorns, between Helena and Boulder, MT
Very early the first day, we set off straight up the mountain. John went up quite a bit above us on his own, as he had a favorite place he liked to hunt. Since I was totally new to the area, Greg stayed with me, and we hunted a little lower down that morning, not actually seeing any elk. Around 9:30 in the morning, John came down searching us out. He had the look of success on his face when he came into view.
“I dropped a real big bull up the mountain. He’s only a spike, but his body is as big as any mature elk I have ever taken.” He was smiling ear to ear.
After a short discussion detailing the finer points of his hunt, we all agreed to go up there, quarter his elk, and then carry it back all the way down to the trucks. They were parked in the bottom of the valley, right near a frozen creek where we had left them in the dark that morning.
“Oh and… it’s kinda rough country up there,” forewarned John as we took off headed up to his spike.
The three of us finally arrived at the spot where John had dropped his trophy with one shot. The whole way going had been pretty rough. The path to his elk was a steep draw, with steep sides and a considerable amount of blowdown...
timber lying helter-skelter on the sides and bottom of the large, rock strewn draw. I did not give the conditions much thought going up. We were on an elk high, enjoying his early success as much as if it had been our own. And besides, it couldn’t be too hard to bring an elk DOWN a mountain; it’s not like he shot it in a deep canyon, and we had to pack it up and out. Please note: the first elk I ever took, we backed the pickup right up to it, put a cable around it and winched it up into the bed of the truck. That’s about all I knew about “packing out” an elk.
John had already field dressed the elk, and as it was just a spike, there was no large rack to contend with. He just cut the simple antlers off at the base. But he was right about the body size. It was every bit as big in the body as a fully grown 6 x 6 bull. I, being the beginner in the group, just stood there wondering what came next. How do
you cut a whole elk into sections when there are only three guys? And because of the elevation and great distance from our trucks, it really needs to be a one-trip-downevent, not going back up the mountain late in the day for a second trip.
So the neck gets boned out, and the meat only gets placed in a pack, then the elk is split between the 4th and 3rd rib from the back, leaving everything behind the 4th rib attached with both hindquarters together as one. The front half was split down the middle, making two manageable sized quarters. With the two hind legs flopping around, Greg cuts a strap off his backpack to tie them together, making things just a little less cumbersome. I helped by holding the front or rear legs while all this is going on, making mental notes of what to do when I am on my own someday. We tidied things up a bit. Greg and John cleaned their knives and saw. Then one of them announced that we had better get going because it was a fair distance to the trucks.
John was carrying the neck meat in his pack, so he walked up and grabbed the right front quarter. Then Greg, a kind man, my friend who invited me, walked up and grabbed the left front quarter. I stood there looking at the back half of a fairly large elk, from the last three ribs, back all the way to the tail and both...
hindquarters.
“Let’s get going guys, long trip ahead,” one of them proclaimed.
Without saying a word, I grabbed the rear half of the bull by the legs and started to pull. I felt like a draft horse trying to move a stuck-fast frozen sled… like a tow truck trying to pull a loaded van with its parking brake set… like a locomotive engine trying to get a mile long line of rail cars going. It felt like I was trying to move three 80 lb. sacks of cement bound together with steel banding. John and Greg took off, happily whistling, while my legs dug in and started to power my heavy, lugged hunting boots into the mountain to get my portion moving. I didn't say a word, or gripe or complain, but looked upon this as a personal challenge, the likes of which I had never experienced before.
Just guessing, but it was at least four miles to the trucks down below, and not like I just had to let the mass slide down a grassy incline. We were in the mountains, heading down a draw, which is a steep “V” cut into the side of rock. Not only is the draw steep, but the sides are also very steep. And the ground has ROCKS, which are like football and basketball-sized or larger, causing my load to hang up, or wedge in between several rocks, and be lifted out to get it moving again. So I was pulling half an elk down on the side of a decline, and for every yard down I went in elevation, the elk also wanted to slide down towards the center of the draw. I couldn’t let it do that. That was where nasty sections of trees had fallen and were strewn all about, lying every which way. So no, I could’t do the easy thing and let it naturally slide down to the bottom of the V… I had to work very hard to keep the elk on the side of the V, or else I’d never make any significant progress.
So if I didn’t get caught between huge rocks, and either back up and go around, or lift the elk up over them, I was constantly battling with all of the trees lying across our path. When I say path, there was no actual path. I just use the term loosely to describe wanting to go from point A to point B; from near the top of the mountain to the bottom of the valley. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, John and Greg paused for a rest. I stopped too, never saying a word about the unevenness of our burdens. I'm proud to say though, I was keeping up with them the whole way down. An hour of dragging passed, then two, then three. At times it was so bad because we came...
across blowdown areas where it looked like a giant simply stepped down and laid flat all the trees in a huge area in a helter-skelter mess. In those areas I was constantly picking my load up, dragging it across the tree, and then down the other side, hoping to not get it snagged up in places where several downed trees crisscrossed.
I went through several phases. Initially upset about the unfairness of the loads, then cheerfully determined to prove to myself that I could do it, and then angry that no one ever offered to give me a break and switch loads. Surely, I thought… I won’t be burdened with half an elk the entire trip down? Someone or both of them will offer to trade loads, to give me a break from my burden; but that never happened. John and Greg continued with their “featherweight” loads just ahead of me and carried on light conversation. I was unable to talk at all. My mind had to constantly plan and make decisions for every step I took, assessing the lesser of two evils, as far as the path I chose to take. So not only was the trip down exhausting physically, it was also just as so mentally. I was not having fun.
Thankfully, the last phase my mind got into was one of determination. There is no way, I told myself, that I will not make it to the valley below with this heavy load. So I pressed on. I had to keep changing my gripping hand, because my for end was fatiguing from having to hold on so tight and drag with only one hand. Right from the start I tried to grip with both hands behind me, but that was far too hard on my lower back. I actually found that one handed pulling was easier to do- easy being a relative term. It was
hard as hell to keep up with the other two having loads less than half mine. I went through my quart of water in the first hour, and was dying of thirst the rest of the way down. I had long since shed my warm coat and was sweating up a storm in my flannel shirt. It had been almost four hours of back-breaking work like I had never experienced in my whole life. Finally, things smoothed out a little bit, the rocks almost disappeared, the openings between down tress increased, and we were at last getting to the valley below.
As we hit the flats and could see our trucks maybe 400 yards distant, I considered myself successful, as having made it, when it finally happens.
“Hey Ken! You want to switch loads for a while? Yours is pretty big there.” Greg said tome, as if he suddenly...
remembers something he intended to offer hours ago. Again, we were only 400 yards from the trucks.
“Damn straight!” was my prompt reply.
How the heck did you ever drag this for four hours?!?!
I finally could stop dragging half an elk. Letting go, I saw a frozen creek just to my left. I staggered over to it, fell to the ground, and started pounding on the ice with my fists.On the third try, the ice broke open, and cold clear mountain water swirled before me.
““That water might not be good to drink, Ken. Bacteria and stuff is in it for sure. You could get real sick,” Greg warns.
I buried my face into it and sucked in swallow after swallow of the ice cold mountain water, my body rejoicing in replacing all the liquid I had lost on the hard trip down. I got back up, feeling totally refreshed. Walking over to Greg, I grabbed the front quarter with one hand, which he had been dragging for the past four hours. I tossed it up onto my shoulder and headed for the truck as a John Denver song came to mind- Rocky Mountain High.
Greg walked over and gave a tug to start moving the back half of John’s elk. He let out a primal GRUNT from the strain of even trying to get it moving.
...pounding on the ice with my fists. On the third try the ice breaks open, and cold clear mountain water is swirling before me
“Holy cow Ken,” I hear from behind me, “How the heck did you ever drag this for four hours?!?!”
I kept walking the last 400 yards to the trucks, singing softly the entire way, and did not look back or even care. For today, I faced a physical and mental challenge like I had never before in my life, and I did not give up. As weak and tired as I felt, never in my life did I have more spring in my step. Now, it was my turn to smile ear to ear…