Canadian Sniders with their matching bayonet

Pelcat

Pelcat

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I'm curious if anyone here has been able to pair up a Canadian Militia Snider with it's matching bayonet?

I almost did, this scabbard, bayonet and 3-bander are all one rack number off from each other. They are from the 55th Megantic Battalion, headquartered in my home town. Rack number 49 for the rifle, 48 for the bayonet and 47 for the scabbard.

I got the bayonet and scabbard first from a friend's grandfather, also from my town. It was hidden away in his barn. According to him the bayonet belonged to his grandfather. It also has another ground off rack number on the socket, 55/205.

The rifle I came across at auction. It was a sporter, cut right in front of the rear band and crudely shaped to a point with a knife. It was missing a lot of small parts, all three bands, the lock screw for the action pin, cleaning rod, firing pin protector, rear sight slider, rear sight but the sight ladder was present and matching. The forend came from a rough stripped stock and was spliced onto the original stock. Bit of time and money expended but to me it was worth it to put them back together in their original configuration.

I know rifle 55/46 is out there as well, it sold in 2017 for a ridiculous amount of money at a non-firearms auction.

Also pictured some bullets and a tompion I found not 200 meters away from my family home.


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Very cool, a DC marked Snider is on my "wanted" list - I don't hold out a lot of hope of finding one with even a closely matched bayo tho!
Great job bringing that old gal back from the dead!
 
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Yes, good job saving another one. I'm in the middle of building a "parts" Snider from spares I had assembled over the years and it's proving surprisingly easy. There certainly was some "interchangeability" with these guns. Personally, I've never managed to find a matching bayonet, but I have managed to get three rifles marked to units that participated in the Riel Rebellion- another collecting direction for Canuck Sniders.

milsurpo
 
milsurpo said:
….., but I have managed to get three rifles marked to units that participated in the Riel Rebellion- another collecting direction for Canuck Sniders.

milsurpo
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This is what I would like to add to my collection as it was likely what my great,great (great?) would have carried when he served in the rebellion
 
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Incurable Collectoer said:
Nice find it's those small towns in Quebec and Ontario that seem to hide all kind of treasures. One of my Sniders is from the Montmagny and L'islet battalion but I had no luck and it came without a bayonet.
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There are so many things like this all over the place, they get stored in a barn, attic or in a shack and then the owners die and it's still there 100 years later.

I have another Snider from the 55th that I loaned for a local exhibit. A guy from my town saw it and came by to my place with a red box of Dominion Snider catridges to give me. He told me that he never knew what rifle they were for but when he saw my rifle it reminded him of them, they'd been sitting on his basement windowsill since he bought the place!

Another person decently close by apparently found a cache of all sorts of old rifles in a small cave on his land, all rusted out. I was told there were some Sniders in there but unfortunately, I was never able to see them before he moved away and did god knows what with them.

I wager a lot of interesting Sniders were probably left to sit and rot. They got surplussed in the early 1900s and only 20 years later a metric ton of much more modern Lee Enfields were hitting the market. I had to clean out mud dauber nests from the cleaning rod channel of the very rifle pictured here, clearly it had been sitting in a not too insulated place for a good while.
 
With your permission....
End of the 70's, I had a call at the house of an old lady and, on the wall, there was a rack with two Snider-Enfields, a 3 bands and a 2 bands , both BRAND NEW.
She told me they belonged to a member of the family that was at the battle of Batoche.
The wood was yellowish, with matching bayonets in their sheats.
On the sides, above the triggers, a name was inscribed, like with a hot branding iron : Capt W.Pearce.
There is a Capt W.Pearce who was a surveyor as per the note on Wikipedia :

William Pearce was not a combat captain in the Battle of Batoche (May 9–12, 1885), but rather a prominent Dominion Land Surveyor and federal public servant whose pre-war actions directly contributed to the tensions that caused the North-West Resistance. [1, 2, 3]

Was it him ? Probably.
Were the rifle a presentation to him ? also probably.
At those times, there was no Internet to make a research.
I asked the lady if, by any chance, the rifles might be for sale....guess the answer ?
 
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