“Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?” asked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “Then I shall not go, somebody will be shot.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson was no marksman, but in July 1858, he bought a “rifle & gun” (a two-barreled rifle-shotgun combination) for twenty-five dollars, prompting his friend Henry David Thoreau to quip, “The story on the Mill Dam is that he has taken a gun which throws shot from one end and ball from the other.”1
