Sporting Arms
- Elephant Guns
- Cape Guns
- Buffalo rifles
These guns are all seen as reminders of epic expeditions, pioneering railroad expansions into wilderness areas, and of the golden age of big game hunting throughout Africa, India, and the United States. To sum up their fascination, collectors have been known to use the phrase "if this gun could only talk" when they hold a historic piece - guns such as a Boer War era Mauser rifle stamped "OVS" (for Oranje Vrij Staat - Orange Free State), a "Trapdoor" Springfield Model 1873 cavalry carbine from the Custer era, a Martini-Henry .577/450 single shot rifle with dozens of successive ordnance marks from England, India, Nepal and Tibet, or a well-worn Winchester lever action rifle with its stock studded with American Indian tribal brass tacks.
Read more about this topic: Antique Gun
Famous quotes containing the words sporting and/or arms:
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It does not come to a man that to be separated from a woman is to be dislocated from his very self. A man has but one centre, and that is himself. A woman has two. Though the second may never be seen by her, may live in the arms of another, may do all for that other that man can do for woman,—still, still, though he be half the globe asunder from her, still he is to her the half of her existence.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)