Thought you all might like to see a different spin on the words "High Powered Optics". This is how micro hand engraving is done today. Seven years in the making, two for the engraving. Different kind of .50, the .50-90 kind. For those that follow these kind of BP rifles, this is a Gemmer Sharps, where Gemmer took Sharps rifles and styled them after the Hawken Plains rifle for a market that was slow to adopt to breach loaders. Gemmers had Hawken trigger guards, patch box, sights, keyed forearms and carried ram rods in the Plains rifle style. TO my mind, it just doesn't get any better than this for a Sharps. This rifle commemorates the Franklin Expedition. Note, not in this variant, but Sharps rifles competed at 1,000 yards in the 1880s.
Fredrick Schwatka, an Army Officer (West Point) and physician, led the remarkable expedition that sought to find the lost Franklin Expedition. They took with them two factory Sharps Rifles. The Geographical Society in 1880, noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" of eleven months and four days and 2,709 miles (4,360 km) and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit. Later Schwatka was asked to explore the Yukon River. His group built rafts and floated down to the Bering Sea, naming many geographic features along the way. At more than 1,300 miles (2,092 km), it was the longest raft journey that had ever been made. Beginning in 1886, Schwatka led two private expeditions to Alaska and three to northeastern Mexico and published descriptions of the social customs and the flora and fauna of these regions. Later, he died in Portland, Oregon in 1892, suicide by laudanum, broke and homeless. Age? 43.
Fredrick Schwatka, an Army Officer (West Point) and physician, led the remarkable expedition that sought to find the lost Franklin Expedition. They took with them two factory Sharps Rifles. The Geographical Society in 1880, noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" of eleven months and four days and 2,709 miles (4,360 km) and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit. Later Schwatka was asked to explore the Yukon River. His group built rafts and floated down to the Bering Sea, naming many geographic features along the way. At more than 1,300 miles (2,092 km), it was the longest raft journey that had ever been made. Beginning in 1886, Schwatka led two private expeditions to Alaska and three to northeastern Mexico and published descriptions of the social customs and the flora and fauna of these regions. Later, he died in Portland, Oregon in 1892, suicide by laudanum, broke and homeless. Age? 43.
