The tiny shotgun is an old .410 that belonged to an East Texas farm wife. She shot rattlesnakes with it at the woodpile of necessity, and almost certainly ate them in chili or fried in butter. She would go down to the creek ("crik") and shoot water moccasins "when she felt stressed." The state Constitution protected homesteaders, so few Texas farmers lost their farms during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, but times were hard. The same oral tradition that reports her creek forays also forbids counting how many biscuits someone else eats. I think she must have shot a lot of water moccasins.
The top photo shows it next to an older .12 gauge that belonged to a subsistence hunter, just for scale. The .410 weighs about half what the other shotgun weighs. The scrap quilt was made by the same woman in the 1950s from her and her husband's clothes, when she was old and her sight failing. The pattern, "Drunkard's Trail", was a symbol of the Temperance Movement and she had been a Temperance Marcher before Prohibition.
Two of her daughters were also good shots, the farming daughter with her mother's shotgun and the one who became a city-slicker with a Colt .45.
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