TIFFIN - To the untrained eye, it is a twisted, corroded hunk of scrap metal - garbage really.
For gun guru Alan Gutchess, it is a tell-tale portal to human suffering on the battlefield.
“It's at full cock,” Mr. Gutchess said, his gaze on a rusted gun fragment under the magnifying lamp. “This guy lost the gun ready to fire. Chances are, he was a casualty.”
Carefully tagged and sealed in a plastic bag, this more than 200-year-old trigger lock is a piece of a long gun that decades ago was permanently preserved by rust in the cocked-and-ready-to-fire position.
It is just one of the 356 relics that scientists and volunteers unearthed this summer at the Battle of Fallen Timbers site near U.S. 24 and U.S. 23 and that are being painstakingly studied here in Heidelberg College's Center for Historic and Military History.
About a dozen of the metal relics, pieced together, make up the butt plate, lock, ram rod pipes, trigger guard, and frizzen of what is believed to be a surprisingly intact trade gun used by a Native American or a militia soldier in the battle.
Though not extraordinarily rare in themselves - “If you find these parts on eBay, they'd be $15 of dug-up junk,” Mr. Gutchess said. - they are invaluable to folks like him, a Van Buren, Ohio, expert in old firearms whose research has helped fill in the lost details of American history.
Over the years since the battle, in which Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne crushed a band of Native American fighters and helped open the west to white settlers, the specifics of the skirmish - from what soldiers carried or wore to the location of the skirmish lines - faded into often-misguided legend.
So these days, even the tiniest shred of tangible history from the battlefield is the stuff of an archaeologists' adrenaline rush.
“It looks like minutia,” said Dr. G. Michael Pratt, whose work over the years has pinpointed the location of the battle site.
But most of the area has been developed or “will be developed into oblivion,” he said. “We have to squeeze every bit of data out of the few things we have.”
Scientists are studying buttons, musket and rifle balls, and an axe or tomahawk head and may use “bead abrasion” to further study the artifacts. The technique is high-tech, highly refined sandblasting used to chip away at the rust.
The pieces eventually will be turned over to the Toledo Area Metroparks for use in a visitor's center at the battle site, which is to be developed into a park affiliate of the National Park Service.
First Published August 21, 2001, 3:10 p.m.
