Putting notches on a weapon or a tool to tally achievements made with it seems like an obvious and long-standing image…
For a concrete cite, I remember visiting the Louisville Slugger Factory (the longtime major manufacturer of baseball bats) and seeing one one display that Babe Ruth used in his record-setting 1927 season when he hit 60 HRs, one notch per homer he hit with it. I even took a picture of it.
My grandfather was a country doctor in east Arkansas back when doctors made house calls and home deliveries. In the early 40’s he bought a new delivery table. It had six legs and folded up for portability. As it turned out, his first delivery on the table was his first grandchild. He was so pleased he cut a notch in one of the legs, and continued to do so for each delivery. When he retired, every available corner of the table had been notched, as well as a couple of three foot 1x1s. There were over 3,000 notches in all, and that doesn’t include the deliveries he made in the thirty some odd years of practice before he got the table. That’s a lot of babies.
So is it fair to say we’ve established a few things:
Does that sound right?
There are proven cases of people putting notches on guns as kill marks (Lawrence of Arabia’s rifle, for example), but they are very rare and are long after the cowboy trope was established.
There’s no definitive answer to whether people used notches on guns as kill marks prior to the old Wild West dime novels. There are plenty of old guns with notches, but those notches are not proven to be kill marks (none that I am aware of, at least).
There is no known case of a gunslinger actually doing it.
