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My favorite Krag user (Read 3184 times)
reincarnated
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My favorite Krag user
Jun 29th, 2014 at 1:34am
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The woman is Martha Phillips Gilson (1896-1993).  This is a self-portrait, taken on her 21st birthday, 1917, in Svalbard.  The man is her husband Ken Gilson, a geologist specializing in arctic & antarctic coal deposits. Ken looks like the cat that swallowed the canary. No Krag in photo.  It was in the kitchen, loaded & right by the door. "always with the long round-nosed soft points, and always with a full magazine and one in the chamber"

Martha was a professional photographer, did her own developing, etc.  Sold photos to National Geographic in the 1920s.  She was also a great story teller.  My favorite began "A Krag will kill an attacking polar bear, but only just.  The one I shot fell dead at my feet".  She continued saying "My husband insisted that I carry my Krag everywhere I went on Svalbard, always loaded, but with the safety on.  We humans were not at the top of the food chain and polar bears were very stealthy & clever."  Martha once described her Krag to me.  I think it was one of the commercial Norwegian "Boy's Carbines".  It was a 6.5 mm.  In another of Martha's stories, she lost the Krag when she was captured by the Bolsheviks during the October 1917 revolution.  "Rumor had it that we women were to be rescued by the French Foreign Legion.  I figured I would be better off with the Bolsheviks. They were decent men, just wanted a fair deal." In the end, the women were rescued by Norwegian Marines (armed with Krags), but without a shot fired.
  
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Re: My favorite Krag user
Reply #1 - Jun 29th, 2014 at 3:00am
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Reincarnated:  Great info. about one interesting Lady.
  I will have to look in my storage for an old volume, I have had since my teens, called "A Thousand Days in the Arctic".
  It is about a British Expedition (Farnsworth), that in the 1890s spent three years living on Franz Joseph Island, north of Spitzbergen and above the Arctic Circle.  The men were armed mainly with .303 Lee-Metfords.  As I recall, half the book was about hunting and being hunted by Polar Bears, with many close calls.  Every bear they killed was autopsied in detail.
  
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