Sharps rifles are a series of large-bore single-shot rifles, beginning with a
design by Christian Sharps in 1848, and ceasing production in 1881. They are
renowned for long-range accuracy. By 1874 the rifle was available in a
variety of calibers and had been adopted by the armies of a number of nations and
was one of the few successful designs to transition to metallic cartridge use.
Reproductions of the Sharps rifle are currently made by different rifle
companies and the rifle has become an icon of the Old West due to its use in a
number of movies and books in the Western genre.
History Sharps' initial rifle was patented
September 12, 1848 and manufactured by A. S. Nippes at Mill Creek,
Pennsylvania, in 1850. The second model used the Maynard tape
primer, and surviving examples are marked Edward Maynard - Patentee 1845.
In 1851 the second model was brought to the Robbins & Lawrence Company of
Windsor, Vermont where the Model 1851 was developed for mass production.
Rollin White of the R&L Co. invented the knife-edge breech block and self-cocking
device for the "box-lock" Model 1851. This is referred to as the "First
Contract", which was for 10,000 Model 1851 carbines - of which approximately
1,650 were produced by R&L in Windsor. In 1851 the "Second Contract" was made
for 15,000 rifles and the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company was organized as a
holding company with $1,000 in capital and with John C. Palmer as president,
Christian Sharps as engineer, and Richard S. Lawrence as master armorer
and superintendent of manufacturing. Sharps was to be paid a royalty of $1
per firearm and the factory was built on R&L's property in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Model 1851 was replaced in production by the Model 1853. Christian
Sharps left the company in 1855 to form his own manufacturing company called "C.
Sharps & Company" in Philadelphia; Richard S. Lawrence continued as the
chief armorer until 1872 and developed the various Sharp models and their
improvements that made the rifle famous. In 1874, the company was reorganized and
renamed "The Sharps Rifle Company" and it remained in Hartford until 1876,
whereupon it relocated to Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The 1874-pattern Sharps was a particularly popular rifle that led to
the introduction of several derivatives in quick succession. It handled a large
number of .40- to .50-caliber cartridges in a variety of loadings and barrel
lengths. Hugo Borchardt designed the
Sharps-Borchardt Model 1878, the last rifle made by the Sharps Rifle Co.
before its closing in 1881. Reproductions of the paper cartridge
Sharps M1859 and M1863 Rifle and Carbine, the metallic cartridge 1874
Sharps Rifle, and Sharps-Borchardt Model 1878 are being manufactured today. They
are used in Civil War re-enacting, hunting and target shooting.
Sharps military rifles and carbines The military Sharps rifle was a falling
block rifle used during and after the American Civil War. Along with being
able to use a standard percussion cap, the Sharps had a fairly unusual pellet
primer feed. This was a device which held a stack of pelleted primers and
flipped one over the nipple each time the trigger was pulled and the hammer
fell - making it much easier to fire a Sharps from horseback than a gun
employing individually loaded percussion caps.
The Sharps Rifle was produced by the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company in
Hartford, Connecticut. It was used in the Civil War by the U.S. Army Marksman,
known popularly as "Berdan's Sharpshooters" in honor of their leader
Hiram Berdan. The Sharps made a superior sniper weapon of greater accuracy than
the more commonly issued muzzle-loading rifled muskets. This was due mainly to
the higher rate of fire of the breech loading mechanism and superior quality
of manufacture. At this time however, many officers were
distrustful of breech-loading weapons on the grounds that they would encourage
men to waste ammunition. In addition, the Sharps Rifle was expensive to
manufacture and so only 11,000 of the Model 1859s were produced. Most were
unissued or given to sharpshooters, but the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves carried
them until being mustered out in 1864. = Sharps military carbine =
The carbine version was very popular with the cavalry of both the Union and
Confederate armies and was issued in much larger numbers than the full length
rifle. The falling block action lent itself to conversion to the new metallic
cartridges developed in the late 1860s, and many of these converted carbines in
.50-70 Government were used during the Indian Wars in the decades immediately
following the Civil War. Some Civil War-issue carbines had an
unusual feature: a hand-cranked grinder in the stock. Although long thought to
be a coffee mill, experimentation with some of the few survivors suggests the
grinder is ill-suited for coffee. The modern consensus is that its true
purpose was for grinding corn or wheat. Unlike the Sharps rifle, the carbine was
very popular and almost 90,000 were produced. By 1863, it was the most
common weapon carried by Union cavalry regiments, although in 1864 many were
replaced by 7-shot Spencer carbines. Some Sharps clones were produced by the
Confederates in Richmond. Quality was generally poorer and they normally used
brass fittings instead of iron. Sharps sporting rifles
Sharps made sporting versions from the late 1840s until the late 1880s. After
the American Civil War, converted Army surplus rifles were made into custom
firearms, and the Sharps factory produced Models 1869 and 1874 in large
numbers for commercial buffalo hunters and frontiersmen. These large-bore
rifles were manufactured with some of the most powerful black powder
cartridges ever made. Sharps also fabricated special long-range target
versions for the then-popular Creedmore style of 1,000-yard target shooting.
Many modern black powder cartridge silhouette shooters use original and
replica Sharps rifles to target metallic silhouettes cut in the shapes of animals
at ranges up to 500 meters. Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company, and C Sharps Arms
of Big Timber, Montana, have been manufacturing reproductions of the
Sharps Rifle since 1983 and 1979, respectively.
Cultural significance Some movies which showed the strengths
of the Sharps rifle are Billy Two Hats, Rancho Deluxe, Valdez Is Coming, Quigley
Down Under, Pixar's Up and True Grit. In Valdez Is Coming, Burt Lancaster's
character, Bob Valdez, uses a Sharps against character Frank Tanner's men at
1200 yards. Glen Campbell's character, Texas Ranger La Boeuf, is armed with a
Sharps and uses it to kill Lucky Ned Pepper in the famous "Fill your hand,
you sonofabitch!" scene in the 1969 movie True Grit.
In the 1990 western Quigley Down Under, Tom Selleck's title character uses a
Sharps rifle. Theater Crafts Industry went so far as to say, "In Quigley Down
Under, which we did in 1990, the Sharps rifle practically co-stars with Tom
Selleck." This statement was echoed by gunwriters including John Taffin in Guns
and Lionel Atwill in Field & Stream. The rifle in Quigley has a 34" barrel
length, as opposed to the standard 30" length. Firearms manufacturers such as
Davide Pedersoli and Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company have credited
these movies with an increase in demand for those rifles. As a result of the
popularity of the film, a Sharps match is held annually in Forsyth, Montana
known as the "Matthew Quigley Buffalo Rifle Match". Originally a 44-inch
target was placed at 1,000 yards for each shooter, remniscent of a scene from
the movie. The match is billed as the "biggest rifle event shooting in Eastern
Montana since the Custer Massacre" and has since evolved into a two-day
competition with eight shots for score on six steel silhouette targets at
ranges from 350 to 805 yards. On television, the Sharps rifle plays a
central role in the murder investigation in the pilot episode of the Longmire
series. A Sharps is the weapon used in the murder, and its firing action is
central to the climactic action sequence. In the Longmire novel The Cold
Dish the author is incorrect in ascribing the name Sharpshooter to the
Sharps. The term sharpshooter, referring to marksman had its origin in English
from at least 1801 from the German term Scharfschütze.
See also .50-90 Sharps
Beecher's Bibles Berdan rifle
Billy Dixon Frank Wesson Rifles
Private Truman "California Joe" Head List of individual weapons of the U.S.
armed forces Second Battle of Adobe Walls
Spencer rifle Listing of Sharps rifles in movies
Not to be confused with Sharpe's Rifles, as the 95th Rifles used the Baker rifle.
Notes References
Coates, Earl J., and Thomas S. Dean. An Introduction to Civil War Small Arms.
Gettysburg, Penn.: Thomas Publications, 1990. ISBN 0-939631-25-3.
Sellers, Frank M. Sharps Firearms. North Hollywood, Calif: Beinfeld Pub, 1978.
ISBN 0-917714-12-1. Smith, Winston O. The Sharps Rifle, Its
History, Development and Operation. New York: W. Morrow & Company, 1943.
Oyvind Flatnes. From Musket to Metallic Cartridge: A Practical History of Black
Powder Firearms. Crowood Press. pp. 123–125. ISBN 978-1847975935.
External links Sharps Model 1874 - Background history
Sharps Model 1874 - Shooting and reloading
The Sharps Rifle, RifleShooter magazine http:shilohrifle.com/