Rancher left historic rifles, humorous stories

Austin Monk, a crusty Pleasant Valley rancher, didn’t win for dying with the most guns, he took top honors for leaving some of the most important rifles and engaging stories.

Just before Austin died at 91 in 2005, his daughter Janet retrieved his more than 100 guns, including 21 historic Sharps rifles, scattered everywhere. She lugged up 65 found layered in blankets on a twin bed in her aunt Louise’s basement.

Each triggered memories.

“I’d been around these guns all my life,” Janet said. “They would gouge up the corners and once in a while they fell down and made a big bang.”

For years, she worried the loaded guns would someday fall down and take out an innocent bystander. But Austin assured her that required pulling the trigger.

“That was mostly true,” she said.

Secured in a high-quality safe away from her home for years, the guns and their stories tugged at Janet until she relented and wrote “Sharps Rifles of Montana: The Austin Monk Collection.” She timed the debut of her book for the gun show that will take place Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Flathead County Fairgrounds.

“I’ll have the 21 Sharps there and the book. It sells for $29.95,” Janet said. “There are probably 200 pictures, and they’re beautiful pictures.”

For those uninitiated in gun lore, Sharps rifles refer to a series designed by Christian Sharps beginning in 1848. Renowned for long-range accuracy, these large bore, single-shot rifles were available in several calibers by 1874 and were one of the few successfully converted to metallic cartridges.

Several other nations adopted the rifles for their armies. Sharps rifles played a role on both sides of some Indian wars and were a favorite gun of buffalo hunters.

Janet can testify to the pure power released by the long-range buffalo gun Sharps.

When her dad got a new acquisition, he immediately tore it apart, tinkered with this and that and reassembled it on the dining room table. After dark, he couldn’t wait to shoot it, so he stacked up big chucks of wood in the basement to try it out.

“One time he did it when my mother was fixing dinner,” she said.

“It made an awful racket and all this dust, gunpowder and stench came up through the heat registers. My mother finally got him so he would tell us before he was going to shoot. It was like the house was coming off the foundation.”

Gun enthusiasts and those who enjoy great stories about local characters will find much to keep them turning pages of this new book from Scott Company Publishing. Janet’s storytelling gift deftly weaves the role of guns in ranch life as a backdrop for a unique biography of a man born loving guns.

“My grandmother said when he was 3 or 4, he liked rifles. He would kind of sleep with one,” Janet said. “She would try to pull it away but he would reach out and kind of pat it. He loved guns all his life.”

Yet Austin always considered guns a tool. He and his four siblings spent many hours target shooting, bettering their expertise for hunting game or perhaps fending off a marauding bear.

Austin’s sharp aim persisted until he was 73 when he won the 1,000-yard (about six blocks) Virginia City buffalo shoot for the second time, besting competitors 25 years his junior. He used his trusty Sharps model 74, 45/90 (2 7/8 cartridge) caliber sporting rifle with a 28-inch long barrel.

According to Janet, Austin was working on a dragline project in Seattle in 1935 when he bought that gun for $50 from a skid row pawn shop. He was staying in a formerly grand hotel downtown grown seedy with age but retaining the marble staircase.

After worrying about buying the gun he’d spotted several days earlier, Austin bought it and then wrapped it in his overcoat to discreetly carry it through the lobby and up to his room.

“He got right to the top of the stairs and the gun slipped out of his overcoat and went clattering down all those marble stairs into the lobby,” Janet recalled with a laugh. “It didn’t hurt the gun. Maybe some of these nicks are from it. It made a heck of a racket. So much for being discreet.”

Austin first spotted another of the Sharps rifles in an old granary on a farm where he was working in Choteau at age 17. He turned down the farmer’s offer to give him the 52 caliber percussion Hartford carbine, but stuck it up in the rafters to protect it from the leaking roof.

About 40 years later, Austin had second thoughts and went back. He told the story to the woman who then owned the farm. The lady said she was sure there wasn’t any gun in the granary but if there was one, and he could find it, he could have it.

“He climbed up a ladder and reached his hands under the eave and found the gun and brought it home,” Janet said.

Another “free” Sharps rifle came to Austin via Janet’s uncle George, who found a model 74 44/70 caliber sporting rifle buried in the muck on the shore of Whidbey Island, Wash. When George moved, he offered the relic to Austin, who uncharacteristically accepted the nonworking rifle, disassembled it and found a cartridge in the chamber and a plug of dried mud in the end of the barrel.

He had read that boiling vinegar would help clean the rust- and barnacle-covered barrel.

“Somehow, he got it in one of my mother’s big kettles — half in and half out — and cooked it on her cook stove,” Janet recalled. “When he got it boiled out and cleaned, the bore was good.”

Austin reassembled the gun, replacing missing wooden parts with those appropriate to a military model Sharps. Serial numbers on the barrel and action match as those have always been together.

“It shot pretty well,” Janet said. “He carried it with him a lot because he liked the idea of having this old gun that hung in my uncle’s garage for 40 years — that he could clean it up and it would be a workable, respectable gun.”

Janet included more than just stories about the Sharps in her book. She regales readers with stories of Austin’s dueling pistols, tied to the king of France, and a 31-caliber Colt pocket pistol, the last gun he ever bought at age 88, which belonged to a Maj. Smith who served on the Union side in the Civil War.

Austin, who ranched, logged and operated a tie plant, became ill and spent his last years terrorizing the staff at local nursing homes. Janet remembered one call to come for her dad, saying he had cussed and then pulled one nurse’s hair and bit another, although he had no teeth.

She picked him up and questioned him about biting a nurse.

“He said, ‘It was in self-defense. She was pulling on me,’” Janet recalled with a laugh.

According to his obituary in the Daily Inter Lake, Austin parted company with his beloved Sharps rifles on June 3, 2005, after “a long, hard fight with old age.” After displaying them at the gun show, Janet has made arrangements with Three Rivers Bank on Meridian Road in Kalispell to exhibit the guns in custom cabinets.

“I think Three Rivers Bank will have some copies of the book when they put the guns up on the wall,” Janet said.

Along with the bank and gun show, people may purchase “Sharps Rifles of Montana: The Austin Monk Collection” at the Bookshelf, Scott Company Publishing or through Janet’s website, wwwsharpsriflesofmontana.com now under construction.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.