21-1/2″ round barrel with small globe front sight, squirrel ear rear sight and a sporting tang sight with windage adjustable aperture. Mounted with uncheckered, straight grain, American walnut with brass barrel band and straight grip with brass patchbox & buttplate. Wood is high gloss varnish which may be original. Barrel is in its original brown with color case hardened receiver & blued lockplate. Accompanied by its original factory walnut casing with brass reinforced corners and swinging latches on the front and a mortised brass lock. A inlaid silver escutcheon on the lid is engraved Pierre Chouteau Jr. / St. Louis, 1853. The interior is green felt lined and compartmented in the bottom, French fitted for the rifle, a Sharps bullet mold in a covered compartment and an ebony handled turnscrew in another covered compartment. Both covers have ivory pulls. One open compartment contains a full tin of Maynard tape primers, still in their original paper wrapping. Also accompanying is a patch cutter and small nickeled brass oiler. Another compartment contains a German silver capping tool with screw lid marked with a seated fox over the word “FOX” and a “2” opposite on the lid. A long thin compartment in the front contains a brass tipped 1-piece hickory cleaning rod.

Morris Hallowell’s great, great, great grandfather, Pierre Chouteau, Jr. was born in 1789, the second son of Pierre Chouteau and the grandson of Pierre LaClede Liquest, who was one of the founding fathers of the city of St. Louis.  About 1810 Pierre, Jr. entered the fur trade business under the name of Berthold & Chouteau.  In the early 1830s he formed Pierre Chouteau, Jr. & Company when he bought out Sublet & Campbell.  He was subsequently hired by John Jacob Astor as the St. Louis manager of the Western Dept. of the American Fur Trading Company.  In 1934 Pierre took over that business and the next year reorganized it under the Pierre Chouteau, Jr, & Company banner.  In 1859 Pierre became blind but continued to run the business with his son, Charles, until the business closed in 1866.  The entire Chouteau family was active in the fur trading business and in one form or another remained in business well into the 1860s.  During the 1850s Pierre and his son Charles, although still trading furs from the Indians, shifted their primary activities to producing buffalo robes.  The 1860s, with Charles in charge, saw the company also transporting gold seekers to the Idaho & Montana gold fields as well as furnishing supplies to miners & military units out west. Pierre Chouteau brought the first steamboat to Montana, built Fort Union, Fort Benton, Montana and Fort Laramie, Wyoming and a score of others. He was the namesake of Fort Pierre and Pierre, South Dakota. The city of Choteau, and Chouteau County Montana are named for Pierre Chouteau, Jr. 

Historically this carbine was in the W.H. Everson Collection in the 1880s and went to a private collector in 1929. Only 1,857 of this model were manufactured in total, only a handful known to be cased, and this is likely the only example with definitive identification. This carbine is also pictured and described on pages 118 and 119 of Sharps Firearms Volume I by Marcot, Marron and Paxton, who also note 79 carbines in this configuration were probably made. This is a wonderful piece of American firearms history connected to a pioneering family whose exploits west of the Mississippi River advanced frontier society.