The matches at Creedmoor generated huge interest. Invitations came to the Irish team from across the United States and Canada. They visited Niagara Falls, Montreal, New Orleans, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Chicago.

Chicago was memorable. The Irish stayed at the Palmer House, which Leech described as “the finest hotel in Chicago, and perhaps in America”—rooms cost $4 and meals were available at all hours. President Grant and his wife were also at the Palmer House for the marriage of their son. “The President having been informed that we were lodged under the same roof as himself, did us the honor of intimating his wish to receive us for the evening,” wrote Leech, adding, “The President gave us a most friendly reception, and conversed with us for some time, expressing his regret that he had been unable to be present on the great occasion at Creedmoor, and speaking of the performance of both teams in terms of the highest praise.”

A member of Leech’s party noted: “In the evening Major Leech spent some time with the President and Mrs. Grant, and afterwards introduced us to General Custer and others on the President’s staff. The general, who is an enthusiast about rifle shooting, here accepted a highly finished Rigby match rifle, the gift of Major Leech ... .”

In 1875 Custer and some of his staff posed for photographs at Ft. Lincoln, Dakota Territory. One photo, reproduced in John S. du Mont’s Custer Battle Guns, shows what appears to be the Rigby on a rack in Custer’s room. As the world knows, on June 25 and 26, 1876, Custer and his entire command died at the Little Big Horn River in the Montana Territory.

Custer’s wife Elizabeth—Libbie—lived until 1933. She gave at least two of her late husband’s firearms to their godson, George L. Yates, whose father died with Custer. One was a Webley .44-cal. revolver that Lord Berkley Paget had presented to Custer in 1869 in thanks for a Kansas buffalo hunt. The other gift was the Rigby, for which Yates thanked his godmother in a letter dated Sept. 5, 1913.

In her book Boots and Saddles, Libbie Custer describes her husband’s firearms as “a collection of pistols, hunting knives, Winchester and Springfield rifles, shotguns and carbines, and even an old flintlock musket.” Could the Rigby, with its tall hammer and fixed breech, have been the “flintlock?” Perhaps somewhere in America, forgotten in a gun safe, is the Rigby match rifle that Arthur Leech gave to George Custer as a result of the kindness shown to a group of visitors by President Ulysses Grant.

Arthur Leech retired from the Irish Rifle Ass’n in 1885. When he died, in 1892, The Irish Times wrote: “Every Irish rifleman who may enter into friendly competitions in England or America in the future will, like those in the past, have the best reason to cherish the memory of Major Leech.”

Today the Creedmoor Range is gone, swallowed up by the Borough of Queens, but the National Matches are still shot, now at Camp Perry in Ohio. The Leech Cup, the oldest target-shooting trophy in the United States, is hotly contested every year. The match now is fired at 1,000 yards, prone and unsupported, with iron sights, and its 20 shots are fired with bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles. But the change that would surprise Leech, Church and Rigby the most is the nature of the competitors. Those first shooters were a whiskered bunch. In 2011 the competitors included shooters named Maureen, Jennifer, Anette and Cindy.

As it did in 1874, victory in the 2011 Leech Cup hung on the last shot. Nancy Tompkins, of Prescott, Ariz., edged out the second-place finisher by one point. Since 1995 Tompkins has won the Leech Cup six times—and lost it once to her daughter, Michelle.