62 http://www.riflemagazine.com Rifle 305N
o sight in the history of
rifle shooting has been so
roundly condemned as the open
rear blade generally known as the
“Rocky Mountain” or “buckhorn.”
It’s known by other names, too,
most of them unprintable. It has
been around forever, and forever it
has been reviled as not only poor
for sighting a rifle, but an actual
hindrance. Some riflemen even in-
sist you’d be better off with no rear
sight at all.
For those who have not had the
pleasure, the buckhorn sight is fit-
ted into a dovetail slot at the rear
of the barrel. Instead of a simple
leaf with a little ‘V’ notch, however,
it has great soaring “ears” on each
side, like the antlers of a red stag- hence the name. These ears blot
out the surrounding countryside
as well as most of the target while
contributing nothing, allegedly, to
the positioning of the front sight.
In low light, they actually make it
harder to see the front bead.
There is a slightly modified
version called the “semi-buck-
horn,” the ears of which only go
up about half as far but get in the
way almost as much. If this was
supposed to assuage the critics,
it did not. I could quote many au-
thorities but will limit myself to
just one: Jack O’Connor wrote,
“The worst open sight is the Rocky
Mountain buckhorn or semi-buck-
horn sight which blots out about
three-fourths of the game, as these
sights have big ‘horns’ or ‘ears’
sticking up on either side of the
‘U’ or ‘V’. Exactly what the func-
tion of those horns was supposed
to have been in the first place, ex-
cept to look fancy, I have not been
able to dope out in forty years of
melancholy brooding.”
But here’s the thing: Making
a buckhorn sight is considerablymore complicated and expen-
sive than a simple standing leaf,
so there must have been a reason
and, one assumes, a good one.
There is a modern tendency to
sneer at mysterious things that
come down to us from times past
as the follies of “idiots” who didn’t
know as much as we do. Garry
James, my friendly firearms his-
torian who keeps up with trends
more than I do – Garry is from
California originally, which may
explain it – says this is known as
“now-ism.” It’s the belief that any-
thing now is better than anything
older.
Neither Garry nor I are fans of
such thinking. One does not have
to read much about gun inventors
from the past – from Ferdinand
von Mannlicher to Frederich Bees-
ley to John M. Browning – to real-
ize that these were very smart men
indeed, highly skilled and inge-
nious. That being the case, start-
ing from the premise that there
must have been a reason even for
something as seemingly idiotic as
the buckhorn sight, what could it
have been?WALNUT HILL by Terry Wieland
buCkHorn sigHTs
(Continued on page 60)The rear sight found on a Fogg caplock rifle as sketched by Ned Roberts. To shoot
at 110 yards (20 rods), the bead was positioned above the bottom notch; for 40
rods (220 yards) it was placed above the upper ears.