Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Rock Island
taking a look at a Model of 1881
Springfield Forager shotgun.
... It's a 20 gauge shotgun built on a Trapdoor Springfield action.
And while it looks like it is your generic sort of sporterisation,
this is actually a project that was done officially
and issued officially by the US Army.
So, to put this in context. Consider the situation of a
US Army trooper in the West, by which I mean anything
west of the Mississippi River, in circa 1880.
It's going to be very boring, there's not a lot of fun to be had, there's not much to do.
A lot of these western forts ... they're a long ways from civilisation,
they're also a long ways from any good fresh food.
The Army had a lot of less than interesting food at the time.
But right outside the gates of the base is this whole smorgasbord of wild game
that's running around because this is a sparsely populated half of the continent.
So, what if we go out and just do some hunting ourselves?
Well, in the 1870s the Army actually bought a number of
side-by-side Parker shotguns for just this purpose.
They were pretty darn popular, and in the spring of 1880 one Colonel J.C. Kelton,
who was Adjutant-General ... of the Western Division of the US Army and the Department of California,
he proposes, "Let's make this more of a standardised thing, and we can do it on the cheap."
Which is very important to the Army at this point because the post-Civil War Army,
especially out West, has approximately no money to do anything.
Their training budgets for ammo are like nil, cheap is good, cheap is really good.
So he figures, "Well, we've got a bunch of condemned .58 calibre rifles
lying around in storage that are useless.
Let's take those, let's bore the barrels out into 20 gauge shotgun smoothbore barrels,
affix them to 1873 pattern actions, cut down some stocks,
and presto, like we can make a foraging, single-shot shotgun for troopers to use."
The first two prototypes were presented by Springfield Armoury in ... September of 1880,
and they were pretty quickly approved and production began.
This was designated the Model of 1881, and it would prove very popular.
So let me show you exactly what they did,
and just how economical they were able to make this.
I think one of the guiding principles the US Army would have liked to be able to work off of
in the post-Civil War West was the idea of like,
"That's a great idea, how can we do it with zero monies?"
And they came darn close on this.
So these Forager shotguns required a grand total of only three new production parts.
They had to make the barrels, which were simply .58 calibre rifled barrels
that were bored out to ... 63.5 calibre, which is 20 gauge, and then fitted into the actions.
The receiver is standard, the breech block is standard.
They had to actually manufacture a new extractor in there
because it had to be a different profile than the standard .45-70 cartridge
in order to fit a 20 gauge. We'll take a closer look at that in a moment.
So, you need an extractor, you need a barrel.
And the one other part was the little lug that this screw connects into on the barrel.
Since there are no barrel bands because this handguard is so short,
they had to have some way to actually fix the barrel onto the handguard.
And so they added a little lug onto the barrel itself.
And that's the third and final new component required.
Everything else was either standard from the 1873 Trapdoor
or converted from a standard part.
Alright, there's a bit of a better view of the extractor there.
You can see the barrel's threaded in, and then it's actually cut away
at this top left area so that there is space for the extractor to go in.
Because ... no, you can't really see it, but it's connected in right here,
and that extractor goes forward when the breech closes.
When you open the breech, spring pressure is going to pull the empty cartridge case out.
And in a regular Trapdoor rifle that cartridge case comes back here,
hits the ejector, and gets kicked out of the action.
On this they didn't want the shells to be lost, so there was no ... ejector added.
There was originally a bead sight on these.
Unfortunately on this one the bead sight is missing, but
pretty obvious what that is. Just a bead on the front for aiming.
It's a little hard to see on the bottom of the stock here,
but you can get the best view of it right here at the back end.
This is a full-length Trapdoor rifle stock that was shortened for this Forager shotgun,
and as part of that they filled in the slot for the cleaning rod.
And you can see just a slight change in the pattern of the wood.
But they did a really good job blending this in, so that'll be filled in through there.
The back end of the gun is all standard Trapdoor Springfield.
This one has a brass inventory tag on it.
Whether that is a military unit that had it, or a museum, or
some other organisation that owned this shotgun previously, I don't know.
There are no real distinguishing marks on the lock plate.
These are standard 1873 pattern lock plates and marked as such.
The breech block however is marked 1881,
and they are all marked 1881 regardless of the actual date of production.
In fact this is a somewhat later produced example,
because it has a serial number here on the back of the receiver of 1151.
So this was right actually towards the very end of production,
probably 1884 this one was made.
But they're all marked 1881, that's really the only distinguishing mark, that and the serial number.
Now I mentioned that shells were to be reloaded, and the Frankford Arsenal
produced ammunition, and simply primed shells and reloading kits for these guns.
Because the idea was you would get metallic shell cases,
and they would then supply primers and powder, and you would reload these shells on base.
They didn't want to try to supply ammunition all the time.
This is yet another aspect of the military being incredibly stingy
in how they're going to implement this sort of policy.
So, very cool to have an original box here of the shells. You can see,
"These shells may be fired in the same gun ... an indefinite number of times without resizing."
Because it's a relatively low-pressure thing, ... these are black powder shotgun shells.
So, the reason that I suspect they went with 20 gauge instead of 12 gauge
is simply that you can rebore that .58 calibre barrel to 20 gauge
and have enough wall thickness remaining for it to be safe.
Couldn't do that with 12 gauge.
So, 250 of these were made in 1881. Production would continue until 1884.
There's a grand total of 1,376 of them manufactured.
The intention (which I think they fulfilled), was to issue two of these to
every infantry company stationed west of the Mississippi.
And they would prove to be very popular with the troops who got them.
... Going out and hunting with one of these things was an enjoyable pastime,
it was a very nice break from the rigorous and
very dull ... barracks life of an Army outpost in the West.
And of course the fresh food was a very nice and welcome addition
to the general chow hall routine in these forts.
So they would remain on base until at least past 1900.
Much beyond that though, I think they started to find other options,
and there was perhaps less of this sort of activity going on.
But in the sort of classic late Old West period this was a really popular thing,
and it was a very successful idea and very economically implemented.
So I would call this a success on all fronts from a military perspective.
Now there are of course a lot of fakes of these out there
because they are such a simple gun to put together.
Hopefully, having seen the details on this authentic one now
you'll have the tools at your disposal to distinguish between real ones and fake ones.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video, thanks for watching.