Over the weekend I’ve been watching a couple of old western movies, set in the late 1800s. In one of them, a 12 year old farm boy, growing up outside a typical western movie small town, has never handled a revolver.
Got me wondering. Would a farm of that era be likely to have a revolver around, a rifle or none of the above?
Shotgun, rifle or both. Pistols are in essence for shooting people.
Probably a rifle and/or a shotgun. Practical weapons primarily for hunting.
Most likely both.
Rifle for hunting, shotgun for vermin.
In that era a farmer’s weapon was usually a “long gun” - rifle or shotgun, intended for killing animals.
Gotta concur.
Remember, too, that one heck of a lot of those farmers in the 1880s would have been veterans of the Civil War and very used to rifles. Living out in the middle of nowhere encourages gun ownership, especially before modern communications.
Pistol or revolver, not as likely. They are expensive, and not very useful for the types of tasks necessary on a farm.
I would expect a farm to have a shotgun at the very least, and if it is in an area where bigger varmits or hunting are going concerns, to have a varied number of rifles as well.
A 12 year old would be very likely to be familiar with the shotgun, if there was hunting he’d be likely familiar with a rifle also, but a handgun of any sort I can see as a novelty.
My mother grew up on a farm in the 1930’s. Having at least a shotgun was pretty much essential, if only for the evenings when a coyote came for the chickens.
My relatives did have a pistol on their farm in Iowa. One of my ancestors served in the Civil War and brought his pistol home with him. They also had shotguns and rifles.
Nope, pistols are for target, and for having a weapon that is effective and easy to transport.
handguns are very useful for hunting too.
A pistol is what you carry when you do not “need” a gun - if you “need” a gun you carry a rifle.
The average midwest farmer had surplus civil war rifles and also had cheap shotguns, pistols were expensive and people could travel with a rifle/shotgun and it wouldn’t raise any red flags like it does today.
Also, movies are terrible when it comes to history.
Long gun? Certainly. Pistol? Not as much.
Grew up on a farm in the 1930’s. Single-shot .22, and several shotguns (one 12 and one 20 gage). No high powered rifles, though.
All the farmers I know down home in Ohio still have rifles or shotguns ready for killing vermin like raccoons or ground hogs. The rifles are generally small caliber as the larger ones are not legal for hunting there. It’s also sometime necessary to take down injured livestock or a horse. Farm kids I grew up with all had 22’s and single shot 410 shotguns by the age of 10. I imagine it was no different or even more prevalent back in the late 1800’s.
This might be a bit of a nitpick, but are you talking Western (as in, west of the 100th meridian or so) or Midwestern? In the late 1800’s, the Midwest was basically settled and would have looked more like a Norman Rockwell stereotypical small town than what you see in a typical Western. There were parts of the west, though, that were still frontier and where someone might have felt the need to have a gun around for reasons other than varmints.
Except that no mention or question of reason for gun ownership was mentioned in the OP. The question was merely if a farmer was likely to have a gun, and the answer is overwhelmingly YES.
Nothing says stay away from my daughters like the sound of a shotgun being pumped and a round being let off as you are running thru a cornfield at night. Worked in the 1800’s and works today. 
No, the question was whether a farmer in the Midwest would have had a revolver, a rifle or none of the above. The consensus is that in the Midwest, the farmer would have had a rifle for use around the farm, but not a revolver because that is pretty much exclusively a weapon for putting holes in people. I was pointing out that there is a difference between a Midwestern town and a Western town in the late 1800’s (which seems confused in the OP), and in the latter someone may have been somewhat more likely to have a gun for self-defense, which could include a revolver.
Pistols had, and still have limited utility. If you can throw a rock and hit the target, you can hit it with a pistol. I know this is not a universal truth, but it still applies to your average hand gun today.
The average farmer then would not spend the money for such a poor tool. A rifle or shotgun would be better. And a shotgun is also a close range weapon usually unsuitable for hunting over distances of more than 50 yards.
The farmer may have a heritage pistol that was handed down through the family, or brought home from the war, but it wouldn’t be a desirable thing to buy when you need other things.
I have a modern target pistol and if I handed it to the young man in the OP he probably couldn’t hit the proverbial broad side of a barn.
Oh, and all those old scenes from western movies where John Wayne pulls out his revolver and shoots the head off a rattle snake are pure fable. John would be sitting on that horse and reloading, and reloading, and eventually might hit the snake.
I thought the vast majority of civil war rifles were muzzle loaders. Wouldn’t most farmers by the 1930s have a metallic cartridge breech-loader?
They were. After the war, they had a huge surplus of muzzle loading muskets. Many were sold of as-is, or were shortened to make them more practical for civilian use. Many were also converted into breech loaders by basically swapping out the lock and modifying the breech to accept a new firing mechanism. These were called “Allin conversion” rifles or “trapdoor Springfields” (you can google either one of those for more details). Basically, the military could convert Civil War muzzle loading muskets into breech loading rifles for about $5 each, where buying all new breech loaders would cost them $20 each. So, you can see why they were eager to take the conversion route.
They produced trapdoor Springfields up until the 1890s, though they fiddled with the design quite a bit during that time and by the end of it they were producing all new rifles instead of just making conversions. In the 1890s they converted to Krag Jorgensen rifles, and all of the old trapdoors became obsolete, and surpluses of those were sold off to the civilian market.
Flintlocks were produced with very few changes for close to 200 years, up until about 1840 or so. From 1840 until the end of the 1800s weapons changed quite a bit. They went from flintlocks to caplocks to breech loaders with the changes happening in military weapons first and then making their way out to the civilian market. Just saying “late 1800s” doesn’t narrow things down enough. The rifles that were commonly available in 1870 were a lot different than the rifles that were commonly available in 1890.