12-15 SS Heirloom Gun

 A $7 shotgun that’s priceless to its owner.

 If you have any fondness at all 4 shotguns and history, you’re going to love this story. Regular contributor Randy King is a seasoned outdoorsman and there is no pun intended on the use of the word seasoned. He serves up a lot of his wild harvests with great seasoning given that he is an executive chef.  Something else that is well seasoned is a shotgun that is a family heirloom. We have this family heirloom which goes back 6 generations of Kings. There is a town in Oregon called Jordan Valley and they used to do runs up to Silver City and we had a stablery in Silver City in my family for the longest time and this was the shotgun that rode shotgun. We have used it for a long time, it literally passed through 6 generations up to me. The last couple of years though it has been broken and we could not figure out why. The breach was coming apart and we tore it open and we found in this 100 year old shotgun a piece of a barb wire fence. It was holding the spring action together. We did some repair jobs on it and this gun that I have used up until about 2 or 3 years ago was back in action once we decided to replace the piece of fencing that we found inside of it with a real spring for the gun. It is taking a family heirloom that we have had for a very long time and putting it back in action. It is a 16 gauge, side-by-side with the extended old barrel on it. We looked it up in the Sears and Roebuck catalog and it was selling for $7.