Around 20 rifles at the Cody Firearms Museum came from Coors Brewing Company.
Curator Danny Michael said Coors used these firearms in the 1980’s to try and revive a target shooting festival that combined marksmanship with beer drinking.
“Coors holds a few of these events and they don’t really reignite the flame, so to speak. It’s kind of a neat event but doesn’t build up enough of a base to be sustainable,” he said.
Michael said German immigrants initially brought what’s known as Schuetzenfests to the United States.
“Of course, any good German along those lines also brings the beer drinking side of the festival with them, so there’s a component of the marksmanship and then the celebration of these festivals, and that gets imported to the U.S. and they become really, really prevalent for a time in the late 1800’s in the U.S.,” he said.
Michael says these festivals petered out with anti-German sentiment around the time of World War 1. These festivals are still held today in some parts of the U.S. and Europe.
