Aficionado Sets His Sights on Old Guns--Bags a Museum

Ever since he was 12 years old and spied his first, rusted 1853 Colt pocket pistol hanging from a nail in a Santa Clara County junk shop, Greg Martin has been hooked on the hot-lead hardware of the Old West.

Just how hooked became apparent recently when the wealthy San Francisco gun fancier set his mind on buying three particularly fetching firearms.

The only catch: They were in a museum, and the museum would not sell them.

So he bought the museum.

Not just any museum, either, but the extensive Harrah’s Pony Express Museum in Reno.

But then, the guns Martin coveted are not just any guns.

They are the shotgun favored by Black Bart, poet laureate of stage robbers; a lever-action carbine given to a sympathetic lawman by legendary outlaw Billy the Kid, and an ornately engraved rifle owned by stagecoach czar Ben Holladay.

With these prizes in hand, along with a few selected Victorian dresses for his wife, Petra, and some old Wells Fargo strongboxes to decorate his house, Martin is auctioning off the rest of the museum--from a pair of stagecoaches to a convention of cigar-store Indians and hundreds of smaller items as well.

The auction is scheduled to last all day Tuesday at the Butterfield & Butterfield auction gallery here, and Martin said he is determined to see that every item is sold. “If somebody bids one dime, it’s gone,” he said.

For Martin, his latest three acquisitions were well worth the bother--and the $1 million or more he put up for the museum.

Had to Buy It All

“The only way I could get the three guns I wanted was to buy it all,” the retired real estate broker and developer said casually. “They were adamant. So was I.”

Martin is recognized as perhaps the country’s leading collector of historic Wild West weapons, from one of Sam Colt’s original revolvers to a set of three gold-plated, pearl-handled pistols given to Annie Oakley by her husband, Frank Butler.

“I was always fascinated with the Old West,” said Martin, who was raised on a ranch in rural San Martin. “When I was growing up, in the 1940s, there were all those old Western movies--Gene Autry and Hoppy (Hopalong Cassidy).

“As I knew more about the fictional West, I wanted to know more about the factual West.”

Indeed, Martin specializes in guns from historic Old West figures, such as Oakley’s Tiffany-engraved shotgun and a rifle given as a gift by Indian scout Texas Jack to the earl of Dunleavy, an Irish nobleman.

He also collects the weapons of famous personages from other periods, such as a pair of flintlock pistols owned by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s and a long gun used by Teddy Roosevelt on his 1909 African safari.

Then there are also those revolvers and repeaters once owned by a few less-than-famous people of somewhat arcane historical significance.

There is, for example, a gold-jacketed, jewel-encrusted, single-action six-gun owned by Jack Sinclair, leader of what was billed as the original cowboy band and composer of an actual Wild West opera, “The Cowboy’s Dream.”

Music and lyrics from that work are engraved on the matching solid gold and jewel-encrusted baton that Sinclair used to conduct his band in the early 1890s. He used the revolver as a .44-caliber percussion instrument, Martin said.

Martin’s home resembles a small museum itself. The walls of the first floor are covered by a library of books on Western lore and more than a dozen works by Western painter A.D.M. Cooper.

In the middle of one room rests a saddle made for William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody; nearby is displayed a business card for Wyatt Earp, from when the lawman ran a Tombstone, N.M., saloon before his dust-up with the Clanton brothers near the OK Corral.

Beside that is the gun belt of ornery Tombstone gunman Frank Leslie, called Buckskin Frank by his few friends and many victims; not far away is a leather-covered trunk that Holladay used while traveling on one of his Overland Stage Line coaches between Kansas and Utah.

Holladay Artifacts

Holladay is a particular favorite of Martin. Not only does he own the trunk and now the rifle of that early transportation pioneer, Martin also has a lamp that Holladay used on stage rides, a silver bowl given to him by an Eastern steamship baron, and Holladay’s engraved, gold-quartz inlaid walking stick.

The cane--on which an engraver misspelled Holladay’s name--was a personal gift from Louis McLane, architect of the Wells Fargo & Co. stagecoach empire. Holladay sold his Overland Stage Line Co. to Wells Fargo in 1866.

Missing from Martin’s house is most of his extensive collection of historic firearms. Most of the several hundred pieces in the collection are so valuable that he keeps all but a few of them in a bank vault--a Wells Fargo vault.

Wells Fargo items figure prominently among the warehouse of items that will be auctioned Tuesday, as do the 200 lesser guns from the Harrah’s collection.

The largest single category of items to be sold is undoubtedly women’s clothing--about 500 silk and lace Victorian and Edwardian items, including dresses, lingerie, hats and shoes.

Heart of the Sale

Those items form the core of the auction, along with the stagecoaches (one each from Wells Fargo and Overland Stage), a smart horse-drawn coupe, and the 125-year-old steam-operated, man-drawn, polished-brass Silsby fire engine.

Other items range from a complete cast-iron jail cell, purported to be the first jail in Southern California, to a cast-iron stove to a variety of cast-iron novelty toy banks.

Many Indian artifacts, from baskets to beaded vests, are included, as are clocks and phonographs and frontier jukeboxes, as well as wanted posters and other period papers.

Although he has gotten what he sought from the Harrah’s museum, Martin said he is still ambivalent about having to sell the rest of the collection.

“I wanted to keep it all, but I just can’t,” he said, surveying the stuff already cluttering a large part of his small house. “When you live in a city, there are not too many places to keep two stagecoaches and a fire truck.”