questions about buffalo guns
When I was five, my family was at a drive-in movie theater in the family car. It was about 1969, a long spell ago. We were watching some cowboy film, name unknown. A dude in a cowboy hat was pointing a two-barreled long gun that looked like a double-barrel shotgun either at some big game out in the desert or some other men, I can't remember which. I asked my father (dad RIP, bless his soul) what that funny gun was. He said it was a "buffalo gun".
Were there any side-by-side buffalo guns back in the American Old West? Were there any side-by-side guns back then used to actually kill American buffalo? I know short side-by-side shotguns were carried by the guy riding shotgun on stagecoaches for security but there had to have been some two-barred gun shooting rifle bullets for buff if there ever really was such a two-barreled buffalo gun. I know a Sharps .45-70 was a rifle common to shoot buff in early cowboy times but that only had one barrel.
Was it just a coach gun, like a Stoeger, as a film prop that my father mistook for a "buffalo gun"? I know big-bore rifles with two barrels (elephant guns) were once used in Africa (and still may be used in Africa) to shoot Cape buffalo. Maybe my father had such gun in mind when he said BUFFALO GUN in regard to a two-barrel long gun out in the American desert in an old west film scene. But what would an elephant gun be doing out in the Old American West?
Last edited by jonmyrlebailey; 01-18-2022 at 05:08 PM.