132-year-old rifle found propped against a national park tree

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/14/the-mystery-of-the-132-year-old-winchester-rifle-found-propped-against-a-national-park-tree/

by smacktoward • 12 years ago

172 78 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

blfr• 12 years ago

$25 in 1882 is about $600 today. That's like losing an iPhone.

kristopolous• 12 years ago

losing an iphone? in that case they should be looking for an empty 1882 bottle of liquor there too.

ckinnan• 12 years ago

Real per capita income was roughly 1/9 of today's...so it is more like losing something worth $5,400.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

Aren't you then making the correction twice?

It appears it would have been between 1 and 3 weeks wages for someone in a job where they would carry a gun:

http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2012/01/wh...

A somewhat decent low skill job these days pays $30,000-35,000, which puts the comparison in the ballpark of $500, not $5,000.

ctdonath4• 12 years ago

Making such corrections is interesting. I'd like to hear more comments on it.

Whether it's equivalent current value is $600 (as posted elsewhere) or $5400, both numbers are believable. The functional difference between a modern $600 rifle and a $5400 one is, to most casual observers, minimal - though the owner may have reason to pay $4800 for that difference.

jackgavigan2• 12 years ago

I once found a $200+ pair of sunglasses (Oakley Juliets) under a tree in the Yosemite backcountry. They were moss-encrusted and half-buried in the humus but still perfectly serviceable once I gave them a quick wash/polish.

mhb• 12 years ago

The price of sunglasses is insane.

refurb2• 12 years ago

Not too far off what a decent rifle would cost today!

ctdonath4• 12 years ago

That particular model is still in production, costs around $1000.

Yes, similar rifles can be had around $600.

There's an old (as in 1-2 centuries) aphorism that a good handgun costs about an ounce of gold. True then, true today; doesn't matter how currency fluctuates, solidly built classic products retain value.

dahart• 12 years ago

Wild! I already learned something today -- read this and gut reaction thought to myself it has to be much higher, but I was wrong. Apparently I don't know how big the Great Depression really was.

scoot• 12 years ago

A 30 year old iPhone? (If it was, as suggested in the article, lost about 100 years ago.) Sure, the gun will have retained its resale value, but the owner will have also had years worth of use.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

I can't helping thinking of this:

https://www.jupiterartland.org/artwork/landscape-with-gun-an...

scoleman3• 12 years ago

Was my first thought too. Great place, Jupiter Artland.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

Have you been to Little Sparta? I saw that Little Sparta was a big influence for the couple that created Jupiter Artland (and they have works by Ian Hamilton Finlay) - we went just before it closed for the winter and I thought it was incredible:

http://www.littlesparta.org.uk/

Can't wait to go back!

spacecowboy_lon• 12 years ago

You do wonder if the ower had heart attack or some other acident and there is a set of human remains nearby presumably local scavengers might make it hard to find much forensic evidence.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

Conspiracy theory: it was recently used as a murder weapon and left there to stump the investigation. This is of course not true, but fun to speculate about.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

Glad they're preserving it. That said, my bet is that with an afternoon in a machine shop it'd work perfectly!

I'm not into firearms, but rifles like this are an object lesson in how to design something so that it'll last.

rifleman442• 12 years ago

How old is that tree?

emcrazyone• 12 years ago

@rifleman44 ha! I was thinking the same thing. The tree looks like it has a small trunk. I was thinking there can't be 100 rings and if there were, it would be the whole tree.

I'm Mr. Skeptical... It's hard to believe with the tree growth and over a hundred years of weather that the gun stayed propped up like that. It does look a little wedged between two trunks but wow...

minikites• 12 years ago

Trees grow from the top.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

The park service helps narrow down what sort of Juniper it is likely to be:

http://www.nps.gov/grba/naturescience/treesandshrubs.htm

One of those species is famously long lived (and slow growing):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_scopulorum

Reaching ~5-6 meters and living hundreds of years.

I guess the other is similar, though no mention of ages in the wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_osteosperma

jpindar• 12 years ago

Don't trees grow very slowly in arid areas like that?

rifleman442• 12 years ago

The gun could also have been laying down at one point then raised slowly as the tree grew.

julienchastang• 12 years ago

Not sure, but by the way, Great Basin National Park has some of the oldest trees in the world, bristlecomb pines. They are used to study past climates through dendrochronology. If you ever get a chance to go to GBNP, do. It is completely beautiful and the "sky island" ecology is not one you would expect to find in the middle of the Nevada desert.

McKayDavis• 12 years ago

The third oldest living organism ever documented was a Bristlecone Pine dubbed "Prometheus" in Great Basin National Park (the same park as the story).

It was at least 4862 years old before being cut down for study!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29

davidw• 12 years ago

Not many people in that area these days: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7630869,-114.6965377,9z/data... - then it must have been incredibly remote.

cmsmith• 12 years ago

This kind of isolation is very interesting to me. There is a lot of space out there, and there are probably a lot of acres that only get one human visitor every 5 years. I'd give myself a 1% chance of noticing the rifle if I walked past, based on this picture. So it's not at all surprising that the last time anyone looked at this tree was in the 19th century.

ghaff2• 12 years ago

Highway 50, which runs near there, has been dubbed the Loneliest Road in America (http://ponyexpressnevada.com/highway50/index2.html) and that's a relatively populated corridor in that area with small towns "only" 50+ miles apart. Great Basin in a national park but doesn't get a lot of visitors relatively speaking and most of those are either going to the caves or the summit of Wheeler Peak.

akgerber2• 12 years ago

The areas right next to parking lots in National Parks are very busy, but usually once you get a mile down a trail, even in a very popular park, it's very nearly empty.

jandrewrogers• 12 years ago

That region of the US, which is maybe half the size of Germany, has been largely devoid of human habitation since the neolithic Lake Lahontan civilization disappeared a few thousand years ago. It is difficult to overstate just how vast and uninhabited that area is.

When I was in my 20s, some friends and I would make long treks into the deep off-road parts of it to explore it precisely because so few people had been there in modern times. Back then, we made our way into areas where we were probably the first humans to come through since the 19th century. The area is actually littered with archaeological artifacts that remain undisturbed. Those were fun times.

sixothree• 12 years ago

For a hundred years that tree may not have even been there. The gun might have just been completely hidden by underbrush.

avalaunch• 12 years ago

Just because nobody alerted the authorities doesn't mean nobody else saw it.

litha• 12 years ago

You just don't walk off without your gun.

freedombeer• 12 years ago

why do people want to goto space when There aré so many undiscovered gems on hour doorstep!

themodelplumber• 12 years ago

Good luck feeling like a real explorer in a national park :-)

stonogo• 12 years ago

I love the irony of an "undiscovered gem" being "a place where a dude forgot some stuff"

alxndr• 12 years ago

One person's old trash is another person's incredibly valuable archaeological artifact...

jordanthoms• 12 years ago

Because the marginal value is higher. Wander around on Mars for 10 minutes and bring back some samples and you are guaranteed to discover something new and important - same can't be said for wandering around my local park.

Nicholas_C• 12 years ago

It's interesting to wonder if the owner thought anyone would find it.

lubesGordi• 12 years ago

I wonder if someone is buried under it.

FroshKiller• 12 years ago

An unused object persisted for over a century? Would never have happened with garbage collection.

shalmanese• 12 years ago

it would if you accidentally left two guns pointing at each other.

132-year-old rifle found propped against a national park tree

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