Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors OT--inside the buttplate again

I realize that we've had discussions of what good stuff you can find when you pull the butt plate of various old guns. But I have a question that I don't remember being addressed (it probably was and has slid out of my cranial files or been et by a brainworm....).

Is it plausible that when the elders put a hunting license inside their gun's butt that they were providing a way of verifying their ownership should the gun get stolen and the owner later find it at the local PD, or in an auction or sale, or in a gunshop or the hands of another hunter?

I like this method one heck of a lot more than scratching your SS# on the receiver as too many owners did...."electric pencil," yuck.

I think there is merit in that. even folks that looked on these as tools would hesitate to scratch their name onto something. No evidence to back this up of course, contrary to the proof that many thought otherwise.

That's what my father's reason always was.., at least he didn't scratch his SS# into the receiver. He did etch his name on all his machinist tools, and paint our address on the galvanized garbage cans..., never knew when someone might steal your garbage cans...

yep those cans were precious

I’ve got one dated 1946, garbage can that is.

Anything is possible.

I got the bright idea to stuff my hunting license inside the trapdoor on a butt plate of one of my rifles once, thinking I would avert my forgetfulness and hence never be caught without it. Then one morning when sitting in the deer woods I realized I forgot and grabbed a different rifle that morning. Oops. At least I didn't have to tag anything and no game wardens were lurking about.

When I moved (NOT voluntarily, just as a mere matter of economic survival) from Idaho to Vermont, I went down to the local gunshop to buy a Vermont license. And was asked to present last year's.... Not required in Idaho, and mine was in the Moscow ID landfill (VT would have taken it as proof that I'd passed a certified hunter safety class--hell, I'd TAUGHT many of them!).

So I was stuck for two nights and an afternoon with a whole bunch of teenage and/or female hunting wannabes.

It was a very thorough course taught by NRA trainers and a game warden. AND I learned a WHOLE BUNCH--turned out my gun safety practices had decayed over decades of handling guns every day or so (familiarity sometimes breeds carelessness) and I knew nothing much about the very different game, game laws, environment, and landowner customs in the NE. And the wannabes asked all the right "stupid" questions to which I really didn't always have the correct answers.

Sometimes you just can't lose for losing. I even got a couple of bird and bunny hunting partners from among those "Woodchucks" in the class.

Idaho to Vermont to OC CA???????????????????? i am so sorry for you.

Well, it isn't all bad.

I moved from VT to upstate NY which is pretty close to a hunter and fisherman's paradise, and lived there 21 deer/grouse/duck/bass and trout seasons. And survived a major auto wreck--we used to say "you look like you were hit by a Mack truck!" I do, because I was. And survived many falls on black ice, which CA no got.

Then I retired and inherited a nice house near the beach in SoCal--very much like hitting the lotto, except tax free. A "gift horse" into whose mouth I did not look. The rest of CA I can put up with.

There are vast areas within an hour and a half's drive from me where you can hunt all day and never see anyone else who isn't in an airliner. Southern Californians are pretty much freeway-bound like most urban and suburban people. Fine by me.

And Mexico is right next door. Some people don't consider that a good thing, but I'm not one of them.

I've found that a thief will steal your name right along with the gun.

From your name... Otay Mesa?

And then there are places up north where you can get as rural as most anywhere in this country - with the possible exception of Alaska.. I once remarked to someone that the last time I went through Alturas I saw more tumble weeds crossing the street than people, and that is by no measure a dig against that fine town and its people up in Modoc County. Personally, I'd rather live in places like Alturas, Yreka, Dunsmuir or McCloud than many other places in this great country of ours.

PS - Mesa, I haven't forgot about the barrel. Just been plowed with work and other things lately.

try Orleans, Somes Bar, Happy Camp or Weitchpec for "getting out there"

Yeah, no foolin' and Del Norte County and the Lost Coast. The is way OT but what the heck. There is a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Crecent City that is on a rise about 1000-feet in from the bay. There is a line painted about five feet up in the wall of the KFC. The line represents the high water mark of the tidal wave that came down from Alaska during the Anchorage earthquake. That tidal wave knocked the underpinnings out from Crescent City!

I got a laugh when you called the local Vermonters "woodchucks". My brother-in-law lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, and that's what he calls locals.

"Mesa" was an old Search and Rescue call sign I dug up when I got lost in cyberspace behind the Campfire and had to be rescued by the mods some years ago!

I was briefly on Otay Mesa when I got stranded in Baja Norte and had to get back to school for an exam when the border was closed after the Kennedy assassination. The coyote/cabbie who drove me back to the US left me off on Otay Mesa so I could ride my thumb back to Santa Barbara.

Alturas IS California's "Northeast Kingdom, " isn't it? (Next stop, Rabbithole!) I was a traildog in Mt. Lassen Natl. park a couple of summers in college and got very intimate with that area on my Triumph Tiger Cub! A few years later when they weren't hiring at Peter Lassen Community College I was "heart-and- wallet broken"....

My heart is actually in the Dunsmuir, McCloud, Burney area along and east of the Upper Sac for up north. However that area is strongly rivaled by the area between Markleeville and Bridgeport south of Lake Tahoe and on the eastern Sierra Nevada front. I could move to either place in a heart beat! You say you scooted around that country on a Triumph Tiger Cub. That's cool and very courageous. I say that because I once had a Triumph T100R Trophy parallel twin 500. Venturing anywhere outside of a 20-mile radius is an act of courage with those bikes!