Have you seen an Animal Trap Gun c1850 like this one?

[Shakethetrees]

When I was a kid my grandfather told me about this kind of trap. As he would have had to be a teenager or thereabouts, this would have been sometime in the first decade of the 20th century that he saw it being used.

The torch weld visible in the photos tells it is from no earlier than about the third quarter of the 19th.