Click here to download the catalog as a PDF file. To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. MONTANA MUSINGS • MIKE “DUKE” VENTURINO • PHOTOS: YVONNE VENTURINO HISTORICAL GUNS They mean a little more. don’t know what came first for me, my love of American history I or my love of firearms. What is certain is the two feed upon one another. For reasons not understood by me certain aspects of hand it seems I can’t get enough .45-70s or .44-40s, and now .30-06s, 8x57mms and even 9mms. That is if they are chambered in firearms prominent in historical happenings. (Clones, replicas, copies and reproductions count, too.) Let’s go back to the Custer Battle. After visiting that battlefield in 1968, a Colt SAA .45 with 7-1/2" barrel and a trapdoor Springfield .45-70 carbine were at the head of my wish list. After college in 1972 I bought one of those Harrington & Richardson trapdoor carbine replicas and it was a good gun. But, then in 1975 on a foray back east, I was standing in a gun store in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, when a gent walked in with an original trapdoor over his shoulder. The store clerk said he didn’t have authority to buy it, but for once I had some cash in my pocket. I still own it. The H&R version is long gone. That Colt SAA was a bit harder to come by. Original US Colt .45s are extremely valuable and I personally would consider them too fragile for shooting. However, for the centennial of the SAA, Colt produced 2,002 .45s that were spitting images of the ones originally sold to the US Army. That same year of 1975 I saw one in a gun store in Huntington, West Virginia. Not having enough cash on me I drove back to my hometown 80 miles away and returned the next day with the money. The Colt was gone! I never saw another until 1993 at a gun show here in Montana. It’s still with me too. Perhaps even better are the Custer Battlefield single action .45s being made by the USFA. They are antiqued to look like they date from the 1870s, but of course are made of modern steel and are perfect shooters. Lucky me I was even able to get serial number 1876 — the year of the Custer debacle. A few years back when I decided to put together a collection of WWII firearms, some of my friends thought I had gone nuts or changed the course of my life. But that wasn’t it. I just had more discretionary income at my disposal than when I was young. So now there’s an entire rack of M1 Garands, M1 Carbines, 1903 and 1903A3 Springfields, K98k American history have attracted my attention more than others. For example, the American West with special emphasis on the Indian Wars era fascinated me at an early age and I’ve been an avid student of World War II for as long as I can remember. Conversely, I’ve never paid much attention to the American Revolution and have only done cursory study of World War I. Even though I grew up in the east, thoughts of visiting Revolutionary War battlefields never entered my mind, but at age 19 I drove 2,000 miles to Montana to visit the (then named) Custer Battlefield. While in Europe in 1982, I took a train right past the World War I battle sites in order to get to Omaha and Utah Beaches in Normandy. From about age 12 my ultimate dream was to see the island of Iwo Jima and that happened in 2008. All of this explains why I’ve never been considered a “cutting edge” gun’riter. The new line of short magnum cartridges make me yawn, and although I do own some handguns made of synthetic materials they have a single purpose; concealed carry. On the other InordertoalsoexperiencefiringaWorldWarIIBARDukehadtosettleforasemi-autoreproduction madebytheOhioOrdnanceWorks(above).Itweighsover20pounds!Duke’sinterestinhistorical gunscausedhimtobuythesethreeAmericanM1sofWorldWarIIvintage(below).Fromtop:M1 Carbine,M1Thompson,andM1Garand. 26 WWW.GUNSMAGAZINE.COM • DECEMBER 2009