On October 2, 1989, a national accounts manager at Remington sat down and wrote a letter to a man at a competing company about a rifle his grandmother owned.
That is how nearly every provenance story starts and how almost all of them end: a family object, a half-remembered account, and no way to check it. What makes this one different is that Bedore happened to know exactly which door to knock on.
The Reply
The man Bedore wrote to was William S. Brophy — the author of Marlin Firearms: A History of the Guns and the Company That Made Them, the reference every article on this site leans on, and at the time Marlin’s senior technical manager.
Brophy’s answer, three months later, is about as unambiguous as authentication gets. He identified the rifle as “without a doubt the finest Model 38 extant,” attributed the engraving to Alden “George” Ulrich, and noted that the gold inlaid borders and special order checkering combined to make it a one-of-a-kind Marlin.
Then he added two pieces of context that no catalog could have supplied.
The first concerned the model itself. The Model 38 was designed and patented by C. G. “Gus” Swebilius, Marlin’s chief engineer — who had been the foremost aircraft machine gun designer of the First World War, and who left in 1926 to found the High Standard Manufacturing Company. The unremarkable little pump .22 in Bedore’s grandmother’s closet was drawn by one of the more consequential American gun designers of the century.
The second was a cross-reference. Brophy pointed out that the engraved Model 20 pump illustrated on page 444 of his own book carries the same animal design as this Model 38 — and that only two Model 20s are known so embellished. The pattern, in other words, exists on a handful of Marlins in total.
Squirrels and Rabbits
The engraving on SN 2605 is not the stag-in-a-circle vocabulary that runs through Marlin’s lever guns. It is quieter and, for a .22 pump, considerably more appropriate: a pair of squirrels on the left, a pair of rabbits on the right, each set into a flowing scrolled cartouche rather than a hard-bordered panel, with scrollwork and borders filling the rest of the frame.
Somebody thought about what this rifle was for. Deer belong on a .30-30. A .22 pump in the hands of a woman shooting exhibition targets got the game she would actually have hunted with it.
The gold work is restrained and the better for it: inlaid border lines at the front and rear of the frame, framing the engraved field rather than competing with it. The engraving runs forward onto the upper flats of the barrel behind the rear sight.
The wood matches the metal in ambition. The pistol grip stock and forearm carry fine checkering accented with oak leaf and acorn relief carving — not checkering pattern, but carved foliage standing proud of the surface, which is a different and considerably more expensive craft. And on the bottom of the grip is a silver plate inscribed with a name: NELVA BEDORE.
A Very Narrow Window
There is a genuine puzzle in the attribution, and Rock Island’s cataloguers surface it rather than smoothing it over.
The Model 38 was an inter-war development of the pre-war Model 32, produced circa 1920 to 1930 — a short run in small numbers, cut off at the knees by the Depression. But Winchester Collectors Association historian Bert Hartman places Alden Ulrich’s arrival at Winchester in April of 1920.
Set those two facts side by side and the window in which Alden Ulrich could have engraved a Model 38 at Marlin is a matter of months. Either the rifle is among the very earliest Model 38s built, engraved just before Ulrich walked out the door, or one of the two dates needs adjusting.
That the rifle uses the earlier squeeze latch rather than the later button latch supports the early-production reading. It does not prove it. But it is the kind of small mechanical detail that carries real evidentiary weight when the paperwork runs out, and it is why variation details are worth recording even when they seem trivial.
What the Paper Trail Became
Two letters exchanged between rival companies in 1989 and 1990 did what family stories almost never manage. They converted an anecdote into a record.
In 2007 the rifle appeared on the cover of the 28th edition of the Blue Book of Gun Values. In 2008 it was one of at most ten arms selected that year for the NRA’s Annual Meetings Exhibit Arms Award — recognition given to arms of outstanding historical value, beauty or rarity, drawn from the displays of the NRA’s affiliated collector organizations. It was shown by the Marlin Collectors Association. It went on to the cover of The Marlin Collector twice, in October 2010 and again in March 2016.
None of that would have happened without the letters. The rifle was every bit as fine in 1988 as it was in 2008, but in 1988 it was a nice old pump gun in a family that couldn’t get a straight answer about it. What changed was that somebody wrote the question down and somebody qualified wrote the answer down.
What the Market Said
SN 2605 sold through Rock Island Auction Company on May 5, 2019 for $19,550, against an estimate of $15,000 to $22,500. It graded very fine, retaining more than 85% of its original blue with all the gold inlay intact, crisp engraving, distinct checkering and carving, a chipped buttplate toe and mechanically excellent.
That is a strong result, and it is also a smaller number than a lot of people would guess for a rifle that is, by the best available evidence, unique.
Consider what engraved Marlin pumps have done at the same house. A factory engraved and gold inlaid Deluxe Model 20 brought $57,500. A factory engraved Model 20 takedown brought $51,750. An Ulrich engraved and inlaid Deluxe Model 20 brought $49,938. Further down: an engraved Model 20-S at $23,500, a deluxe 20-S at $20,700.
The only known engraved Model 38 sold for less than three engraved Model 20s.
This is one of the more counterintuitive facts about collecting, and it is worth stating plainly: uniqueness and value are not the same thing. A rifle’s price is set by how many people want it, not by how few exist. The Model 20 has a deep, established collector following built over decades. The Model 38 is a short-run inter-war model that most collectors could not describe. Being the only known engraved example of something obscure puts you at the top of a very small pond.
Whether that makes SN 2605 undervalued or correctly valued depends entirely on whether the Model 38 ever finds a wider audience — which is not a question anyone can answer, and certainly not one we intend to answer for you.
What We Don’t Know
The exhibition shoot is the weakest link in the chain, and it should be treated that way. Bedore reported it as family account — his grandmother’s own telling, decades after the fact — and it includes a further claim she was given at the time: that Marlin made one such rifle each year as a showcase of the custom work then available. No documentation for either statement accompanies the rifle. The shoot may have happened exactly as described. It is not established.
The Ulrich dating problem outlined above is unresolved, and honestly so. “Only known” is likewise a statement about the current state of knowledge rather than a fact about the world; a second engraved Model 38 could surface next year.
We do not know who commissioned the rifle or what became of it between the 1920s and 1989. Brophy’s letter authenticates the work; it does not trace the ownership.
And the silver plate is worth a closing caution. A name inscribed on a grip is powerful evidence of association and no evidence at all of the circumstances behind it. It tells us the rifle was Nelva Bedore’s. It does not tell us how it got to her.
Why This Rifle Deserves to Be Documented
Most of the rifles in this series are documented by inference. We read the steel, compare patterns, cite catalogs that postdate the gun, and say honestly where the evidence stops.
SN 2605 shows what happens when the evidence doesn’t stop. A grandson asks a question in writing. The one man in the country best placed to answer it answers in writing, on letterhead, with specifics. Twenty years later the rifle is on a book cover and wearing an NRA medal, and thirty years after that a cataloguer can describe it with a confidence that no amount of pattern-matching would have earned.
The lesson is not really about this rifle. It is that documentation is something you make, not something you inherit. If you own a gun with a story attached, the difference between provenance and folklore is whether somebody wrote it down while the people who knew were still around to ask. Nelva Bedore was in her mid-eighties when her grandson finally sent those photographs. He got the letter in time.
This article is based on the auction listing, accompanying documentation and photographs for Rock Island Auction Company Catalog 76, Lot 3088 (May 2019). Photographs are used with the permission of Rock Island Auction Company. The Bedore and Brophy letters, NRA award, publication history and condition details are as presented in Rock Island’s catalogue description; personal details in the correspondence have been redacted. Comparable sale figures are realized prices from Rock Island Auction Company for other engraved Marlin slide action rifles. The exhibition shoot account is family history and is not independently documented.
Learn more: Getting Started in Gun Collecting (Gun Digest)
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