1800's gun advertisements | AskHistorians Archive Observer

I would suggest some of the newspaper archives for period advertising. Also, the Cody Firearms Museum at the Center of the West has an incredible and vast firearms collection, and likely has resources pointing to exactly what you're asking.

That said, in my own research I uncovered an interesting bit of product placement that ties in to your Wild West theme.

In late 1872 Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro launched a stage play called The Scouts of the Prairie. They were already frontier celebrities, but over the last couple of years they had become famous as characters in dime novelist Ned Buntline's stories. Their stage play, which was also written by and costarred Buntline, was the first "western."

So anyway, every night these two western heroes performed on stages throughout the American northeast, showing on Broadway and in Boston and Baltimore and Washington DC. Someone from Remington had the bright idea to present them with ornate, heavily engraved and gold gilded rifles at one of the shows. They continued to use these weapons on stage night after night, which proved pretty good advertising as theater patrons witnessed the most famous scout and cowboy of the era brandishing Remington rifles in the face of every threat. They also posed with these weapons in pictures, including carte de visites that were mass-produced and handed out or sold as souvenirs at the shows. So the lasting memory of the two most famous western men at the time was of them holding Remington weapons.

So when that dramatic season was done, Elijah Greene, Philo Remington's son-in-law, went out west to go on a hunt with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, so of course those two showed their beautiful weaponry off to reporters. A typical bit of coverage is from the August 3rd Chicago Tribune:

"During [Texas] Jack's trip in the East he was presented with a $650 breech-loading gun by the Earl of Dunraven. He also has a splendid rifle, given to him by Remington, the great manufacturer. Buffalo Bill also had one given him by the same gentleman."

As other manufacturers picked up on this, they tried to curry favor with both men, and they were happy to comply. This wasn't paid advertising or sponsorship like we think of now, but these guys understood that if firearms manufacturers were pointing to them as experts, it helped the brand, as it were. A year or so later an actor who called himself "Kit Carson Jr." joined Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack on tour, and the Evans Rifle Company either got from him, or invented entirely (that wouldn't have been uncommon either) some copy from him and Texas Jack about their new 26-shot repeating rifle.

"The Evans has been my constant companion for two years. I have shot sixty buffaloes at a run, and pennies from between my wife's fingers at 40 paces." - Kit Carson Jr.

"It shoots like a house on fire! I can clean out a whole band of Indians alone with it. I shall recommend them wherever I go." - Texas Jack

https://i.imgur.com/NTL8OHw.png

As these guys used the weapons over time, they became linked to specific models. Texas Jack favored that first rifle, gifted from Remington during his first tour as an actor, for years. I have a piece he wrote about that gun here:

https://www.dimelibrary.com/post/lazy-kate

But in brief, he said:

“Lazy Kate” was the name I gave to one of my favorite old rifles; she was of Remington patent, Egyptian model, caliber, .43, and was presented to me by the Remington Gun Works, February, 1873. She was beautifully gold mounted, and at first I thought her too pretty to be of much real service, but I found my mistake in after years. I first used her on the stage; she made her debut at Niblo’s Garden, New York, and for several months after received her equal share of banging and pounding around behind the scenes, such as all articles have to receive in that part of the theater.

During the Summer I took her to Nebraska on a buffalo hunt, and Kate made her first appearance on the plains at Fort McPherson, Nebraska. There were several of us in the party, including Buffalo Bill, Dr. W. F. Carver, and some New York friends. Most of us had new rifles, and of course did some target practice before starting the hunt. I hit an oyster can, one hundred yards, two out of three. That was good enough, and it was right there and then that I went dead stuck on Kate, and christened her “Lazy Kate,” because I couldn’t work her quite so fast as some of the boys could their repeating rifles.

So with western men acting on stage, this opportunity for product placement took on a life of its own, as did short testimonials from these men as to the efficacy of various weapons.