Juice Newton and the battle of the Little Bighorn

Or, the Mystery of the copper cartridges

I have done some  stupid things in my life that I will admit to.

One was handling a .22 caliber automatic pistol belonging to my older brother. I was cautious and looked down the barrel to make sure it was not loaded. Then, just for extra safety, I pointed to the sky and pulled the trigger.

I was unfortunately sitting in the back of a 1958 Ford hardtop at the time. Ruining the trade-in value of a perfectly good Ford was one thing; mother's screaming from outside the car was quite another. I was pretty sure the world had ended, and so did my older brother by the time she was through with him.

The reason I am admitting this is to illustrate my extensive firearms training, when many years later I discovered a cache of ancient ammunition in Sun Valley, California. When the ammo was discovered in the course of a gardening project, I was approaching my 11th birthday in 1964. The discovery has troubled me since.

Most of the ammo was spent cartridges but oddly they were made of copper instead of brass. Also oddly, they did not seem  to have ejector rings required of repeating firearms, Who the hell had been shooting up the place? The neighboring house 10-feet away from the find dated at least to the 1920s. Some other houses in the vicinity dated to the turn of the 20th century at least and may have dated to the 1880s when Charles Maclay carved up the old Verdugo ranchos into 10 and 20-acre farm plots.

For years, my youthful brain entertained the idea that my backyard may have been the real site of the two Battles of Cahuenga, where the California Rancheros sought autonomy under Mexican rule in 1831 and 1845.

Or was it possible that there was a third Battle of Cahuenga, between the Californios and the United States troops in 1848. The treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo was said to have been signed at Campo de Cahuenga. Could there have been a little last-gasp shooting there?

Officially, my brain is wrong, because there is no record of metal cartridge ammo being used before 1850 and mostly not until after  the Civil War  decades later.

Unofficially, I've discovered a lot of history is wrong or has completely disappeared.

A case in point: The Battle of Juice Newton. In 1978, or thereabouts, I saw the singer Juice Newton fronting the band, Asleep at the Wheel at the Palamino nightclub in North Hollywood. I may have consumed a lot of expensive liquor that night, but I know what I saw, but can find no evidence the two ever associated in the modern internetti world. It never happened, according to current folklore.

Which logically brings us to the Battle of the Little Bighorn of June 25, 1876 - The centennial of United States of America. Copper cartridges abound, both of the Indian forces and the Seventh Calvary. A 1984 field survey established what was shot and who shot what.

Juice Newton was not involved in any of this, I'm pretty sure, and no automobiles were wounded.

Lore (almost as good as a fact) indicates that copper cartridges were used as late as the Spanish-American War, among state militias and volunteer militias, who were issued the surplus 1873 Springfield carbines and rifles of the post-civil war era.

The problem is that these weapons were .45 caliber; my little stash of ancient ammo was no more than 30-ish caliber. All the cartridges appeared to be the same.

So the winner is ...

The Winchester .32-20, designed in the 1882 as a small game cartridge, which was adapted by Colt  and Smith-and-Wesson into a revolver cartridge. I learned this on the internet, which sometimes is almost as good as a fact.

So perhaps some militia group training for the Philippines or trying to remember the Maine, did some practice in the sandy rangeland that Roscoe (later Sun Valley) was at the turn of the 20th Century.

This stash of ammo had a military look to it. The Army likes to collect things in  groups. Hunters or sportshooters would not be so tidy. One time on the Arizona border I came across about a gazillion churchkeys, used to open tins and bottles. This was at the Blythe Intaglios, a prehistoric site that was used by George Patton for  armored tank training in preparation for the North African campaign of World War Two.

Or ...

This backyard in Sun Valley was the site of the famous Apache attack of 1914.

The  silent-movie cowboy William S. Hart, made something like 74 western movies in Southern California between 1914 and 1925. The black smoke from the black powder cartridges would have been ideal, since these movies did not have any sound.

Back then you wouldn't have needed blank cartridges since the attacking Indians and the Blue Coats would have been separate movie shots.

At this point, I am kind of going with the movie idea, since I make some movies and kind of understand the process.

And anyone who reads this will be happy to know I have only killed one other automobile during my firearms career. In the high Sierra, the howls of the coyotes in the night were troubling my wife, who suggested I load the Crossman pellet revolver, just in case.

We had no intention of shooting at coyotes but the thing made a pretty good bang, which might discourage them.

Marcia was trying to sleep in the tent while I sat by the campfire sipping snakebite tonic just in case the snakey people were planning  sneaky snake shinanigans.  I fired off a round to see if the gun worked and hit our black Nissan pickup truck that I  couldn't see in the black of night and the fog of snakebite tonic.

It was only a flesh wound. Somewhere in the night, I heard coyotes chuckling. 

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