Where is the gun?

To the editor:
    A celebration is coming – Caribou is having its 150th birthday in 2009. I was a history buff and when I came to Caribou in 1960, I asked two questions: one, why the name Caribou and two, who was Lyndon?     In answer to the first question, several books at the Caribou Public library claim that the Cochran boys shot and killed a caribou on or by the stream we now call the Caribou Stream.
    Recently, I read what Nylander reported. Alex Cochran, hearing the boys chasing a caribou, got his shotgun and shot it, wounding the animal as it was going up the stream. Alex’s dogs finished off the wounded animal. Note that it was a shotgun.
    Some 20 years ago, a man came to the Caribou Historical Society building when “Civil War re-enactors” camped on the grounds. A man in the crowd of spectators came forward and showed us a gun. He said, “This is the gun that killed the caribou and that is why it’s called Caribou, right?”
    The society would like to display that shotgun during the Sesquicentennial. Both Avis Armstrong and I remember the gun, but not the man’s name. Please help us find him and the gun. We would like to know who has the gun that shot the caribou. That gun caused our city’s name to change from Lyndon to Caribou.
    That leads to the second question; who was Lyndon? I got on the internet and discovered a Lyndon in England, a very small town, one in Ontario, Canada, one in Vermont and one in Nebraska, plus others. Nebraska’s Lyndon was named after Lyndon, Vt. Then why was the town in Vermont named Lyndon?
    The answer is a Governor of Rhode Island. During the American Revolution, he was neither Tory nor Rebel, he was, however, concerned about the movement of the French into the Vermont area. He called a meeting and some of those, after hearing him out, volunteered to go settle in northern Vermont. The leader of the 53 settlers was Dr. Jonathan Arnold. It was reported they named the settlement in his son’s honor, Josias Lyndon Arnold.
    I’d like your comments.
Philip Turner
37 Elmwood Ave. Caribou
496-6461