est light, and this is the principle
behind all aperture sights. Sup-
pose, long before William Lyman
discovered this in the 1890s and
designed his tang sight to accom-
modate it, that the buckhorn was
intended to function exactly the
same way, except farther out along
the barrel?
If so, then later modifications
in which the full buckhorn was
slimmed, trimmed and shortened
only eliminated its functional ad-
vantages while retaining most of
its loudly condemned disadvan-
tages.
These days, when someone ac-
quires an old rifle, the usual first
move is to replace the “out-moded
open sights” with something bet-
ter. Sometimes this is a scope,
other times a Lyman or Redfield
receiver or tang sight. Almost any-
thing is considered better than
the old Rocky Mountain buckhorn.
Quite often, though, attempts
to improve the sights impair the
rifle’s other qualities, such as ease
of carrying, or quickness to get on
target. Learning to use the buck-
horn sight as outlined above just
might be a better answer.a coarse bead” when a hunter was
dealing with an animal either up
close or far away. When the aston-
ishingly flat-shooting .280 Ross
was sprung upon the world in
1910, the M-10 sporting rifle had
one standing leaf with “500” en-
graved upon it. Supposedly, the
.280 had such a flat trajectory that
a man could shoot accurately all
the way out to 500 yards simply
by taking more or less bead in the
shallow notch.
The buckhorn sight as we
know it originated in the era of
black-powder cartridges, which
all had looping trajectories. Could
it be, I wondered, that the buck-
horn was intended to be a two-
or even three-distance sight, like
Fogg’s? For close-in work the bead
could be drawn down finely into
the notch at the bottom, but for
long distances the bead could be
centered between the points of
the ears as they curved around. If
you knew the capabilities of your
rifle – and most one-gun hunters
did – then you would know the dis-
tance for which this would be ac-
curate. Obviously, for anything in
between, the bead could be cen-
tered in the middle of the aperture
formed by the ears, exactly the
way a later receiver sight worked.
Generally, the aperture of a buck-
horn sight is large enough to allow
this.
In fact, since these sights have
a sliding ramp with multiple steps
that allow setting elevation, you
could sight it in in such a way that
the middle position – the aperture
sight, if you will – could be your
everyday sight, with a fine bead
(down in the notch) and the coarse
bead (between the ears) reserved
for targets very close or very far
away.
A common complaint about the
buckhorn is that the large ears
block the light, making it difficult
to pull the bead down into the
notch where, we assume, it be-
longs. As a result, in the heat of
the moment hunters have the bead
too high when they pull the trigger
and shoot over their target.
But what if that was the design-
ers’ intention all along? It is well
known that an object is automati-
cally centered in the area of great-—July-August 2019 http://www.riflemagazine.com 61300 Below, Inc. / Cryo-Barrel ............................. 15
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Yavapai College .................................................. 59AD INDEX
This variation on the
“semi-buckhorn” is
on a Winchester Low
Wall from the 1890s.
The notch can be
moved up and down
inside the aperture,
and the sight as a
whole can be raised
or lowered by means
of the usual stepped
slide. The front bead
can be positioned
between the upper
ears of the blade or
low in the notch.R