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Object lessons 

 

Klamath Indian Rifle 

 

Etching dates rifle to time of tribal police 

 

By ELON GLUCKLICH 

H&N Staff Reporter

January 13, 2012

 

Museum officials are unsure how old this Remington Rolling Block rifle is.

 

     One of the Klamath County Museum’s newest acquisitions still baffles its staff.

 

   It’s a Remington Rolling Block rifle with a wooden exterior, covered in marks and scratches that suggest it dates back more than 100 years.  

 

   Of most interest to museum manager Todd Kepple is an etching near the rifle’s shoulder stock. It reads: “Klamath Indian Reservation.”

 

   “We don’t know much about this gun, or how it was used,” Kepple said, adding he couldn’t even provide a ballpark guess on its age.

 

   But it did make its way into the hands of a retired Grants Pass rifle enthusiast, Tony Heitz. And Heitz believes he knows its age.

 

   “It would be from the 1880s, maybe the 1890s,” Heitz said.  

 

   Heitz bought the rifle from a dealer in New York in the early 1990s.

 

   His intention was to strip the rifle and use its parts, potentially in other rifles that needed fixing. But when he spotted the faded Klamath Indian Reservation mark, he knew he had an artifact on his hands.

 

   “I said, ‘I can’t ruin a historic gun,’ ” Heitz recalled.

 

   So he drove to the Klamath County Museum and showed the rifle to Kepple, offering to give it to the museum on a long-term loan.

 

   Heitz knows the approximate date because of its model, and the fact that it’s a black powder model of the Remington Rolling Block brand. The company switched from black powder to smokeless powder in 1897.

 

   And the date is consistent with the time period in which Klamath Indian Tribal Police force members used the guns to enforce laws.

 

   “We presumed this gun was used for the law enforcement patrols on this reserve,” Kepple said.

 
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