Sharps Rifle

Origins

Christian Sharps, a former Harpers Ferry armorer, patented his breech-loading action in 1848: a vertically sliding block, lowered by the trigger guard lever, that sheared off the end of a paper cartridge on its way back up and sealed the breech on firing. The Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, produced it from 1851, and the Model 1859 and Model 1863 in .52 caliber, with Lawrence pellet-priming and a gas-check plate that finally cured the breech leakage of earlier models, were the guns of the Civil War. Sharps himself had left the company by then; the guns that carry his name were mostly made without him.

Design & Construction

The falling-block action is strong, simple and fast. With the block down the soldier pushed a linen cartridge into the chamber, raised the lever, capped the nipple — or let the pellet primer do it — and fired; the block's sharp upper edge had cut the cartridge open on closing so the flame reached the powder. Rifles carried 30-inch barrels and set triggers; the far more numerous cavalry carbines had 22-inch barrels and a saddle ring. The percussion Sharps fired a .52-caliber conical ball with about 60 grains of powder, accurate to 500 yards and dangerous well beyond. After the war the company converted tens of thousands of carbines to .50-70 metallic cartridge and then produced the Model 1874 — the "Old Reliable" — as a purpose-built cartridge rifle in calibers from .40 to .50, with heavy octagonal barrels of up to 34 inches and weights to 12 pounds or more for the buffalo trade.

Combat Use

Colonel Hiram Berdan's 1st and 2nd United States Sharpshooters, recruited from the best marksmen in the North, demanded the Sharps rifle over the Springfield and used it to devastating effect from Yorktown to Gettysburg, where they held the Union left on 2 July 1863. The Union cavalry received some 80,000 carbines, more than any other type, and John Brown had armed his raiders with Sharps rifles at Harpers Ferry in 1859. The Confederate States Arms & Weapons captured and copied them as best it could. Then came the plains: at Adobe Walls in 1874 Billy Dixon knocked a Comanche warrior from his horse at a surveyed 1,538 yards with a borrowed .50-90 Sharps, and buffalo hunters with Model 1874s took the herds from tens of millions to a few hundred within a decade.

Legacy

The Sharps company failed in 1881, undone by the repeating rifle and the end of the buffalo, but the Model 1874 became the template for the American long-range single-shot rifle, revived by Shiloh Sharps and C. Sharps Arms since the 1970s for silhouette and black-powder cartridge competition, and immortalized on film in Quigley Down Under. Civil War carbines with cavalry cartouches, Berdan rifles and original 1874 sporting rifles are among the most valuable American firearms of the era.