555 lines
114 KiB
Plaintext
555 lines
114 KiB
Plaintext
MASTERING THE ART OF
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LONG-RANGE SHOOTING
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WAYNE VAN ZWOLL
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Thank you for purchasing this Gun Digest eBook. Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to free content,
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GunDigestStore.com for signing up.
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or visit us online to sign up at http://gundigest.com/ebook-promo
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Special Offers Introduction: Close No More PART 1: Beyond Arm’s Reach
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Chapter One — A Feathered Shaft Chapter Two — Spark, Smoke, and a Speeding Ball Chapter Three — No More Ramrods! Chapter Four — Pioneering the Long Poke PART 2: Rifles, Optics, and Ammunition
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Chapter Five — Barrels and Rifling Chapter Six — Actions and Triggers Chapter Seven — Stocks Don’t Grow on Trees Chapter Eight — Optics with Reach Chapter Nine — Loads for the Long Poke Chapter Ten — Trajectory
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PART 3: Long Reach Applied Chapter Eleven — Mastering the Wind Chapter Twelve — Marksmanship Chapter Thirteen — Slings and Zeros Chapter Fourteen — Back to School Chapter Fifteen — Marksmen Most Feared Chapter Sixteen — Big Game at Distance Chapter Seventeen — An Ethical Limit
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Recommended Reading About the Author Acknowledgments Other Books by Wayne van Zwoll Copyright
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INTRODUCTION
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CLOSE NO MORE
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Beginning with the Norman invasion, in 1066, the bow and arrow shouldered its way into the culture of the British Isles. With it, kings defended the realm and extended its boundaries, routed much larger forces and, by threat of the “grey goose wing” alone, kept aggressors at bay. Royal edicts required able men to become proficient with the longbow. Edward IV ordered “Every Englishman or Irishman dwelling in England” to have his own bow “of his own height, made of yew, wych or hazel, ash, auburn, or any other reasonable timber.” Fines were levied on citizens who failed to hone their skills regularly — and at distance!
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The bow didn’t replace the spear, the pike, or the sword, it made them less relevant. An army that became bled out by arrows before it came within pike’s reach was unlikely to prevail. In 1542, an English Act dictated that no man of 24 years of age or more might shoot any mark at “less than 11 score distance”—that’s more than 200 meters, a long shot for many rifles!
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The lethality of arrows lay partly in their great numbers, partly in their mesmerizing arc. Loosed to fall accurately on a line of troops at a given distance, they skewered soldiers en masse. Their descent put them into unarmored shoulders and down onto the heads, backs, and rumps of cavalry horses. The steel bodkin, driven by a 100-pound bow, could penetrate mail and light plate. The longbow was truly a long-range weapon.
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The first firearms couldn’t match the bow for reliability or reach and, so, were slow to supplant it. But five centuries after the English had loosed a half-million shafts at Crecy, a young man working in his father’s forge, in upper New York State, fashioned a rifle. Eliphalet Remington’s muzzleloader had no unique features, but it was well built and accurate. On it, Remington founded a dynasty.
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During the rifle’s early growth, other American inventors (and their counterparts in Europe) developed stronger mechanisms of better steel. Sharps and Browning came up with falling-block actions that, with Remington’s Rolling Block, replaced the famed Hawken on the Great Plains and triumphed in shooting matches to 1,000 yards. The advent of smokeless powder, and then jacketed bullets, flattened trajectories. Refinement of optical sights further extended reach. Hunters and soldiers who make “the long shot” these days are hardly limited to 200 meters. Some hits have been verified beyond 2,000.
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As this is written, the current distance record for a shot made against an enemy soldier is held by an unknown Australian sniper, of the Delta Company, 2nd Commando Regiment. He made the killing hit, in 2012, during Operation Slipper, in Afghanistan. A GPS unit measured the range at 2,815 meters, or 3,079 yards. The shooter is unknown, because two fellow snipers fired at the Taliban commander simultaneously. One bullet struck.
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Having fired at targets a lasered mile away — a mere 1,760 yards off — I am awed by this shot. It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to land a bullet in a target, one perhaps 18 inches wide, at even a mile. You can barely afford a minute-of-angle error; make that half a minute at 3,000 yards. No matter how sleek or fast your bullet, its parabolic arc at such range is so steep, you must know the range precisely. Know, too, that that bullet will
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likely meet multiple air currents en route. The gentlest breeze, unnoticed or poorly judged, can move the missile many inches, even feet, off course.
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This book won’t ensure you’ll hit more often far away. But the rifles, ammunition, and techniques described here can help you do just that. Better hardware matters less than better marksmanship, so you’ll not buy your way to proficiency at distance. It’s the shooting that may get you there. Long shooting at steel plates in practice, and at paper in competition, is great fun. It gets you in touch with your bullet’s arc and confirms what you might already know about drop and drift. It tests your shooting positions and trigger control. Shooting at distance is valuable, because it makes short shots easier, too.
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As regards hunting, a close shot trumps a long one; your odds of missing and crippling increase with yardage. In my view, stalking closer not only adds excitement to the hunt and makes its conclusion more memorable, it is an imperative for any sportsman. When someone boasts of making a long shot on game, this consolation comes to mind: “Don’t be embarrassed. You’ll get closer next time.” Indeed, the long poke is often evidence you didn’t have the initiative or the skills to narrow the gap. Yes, you might also have run short of time or faced terrain that made an approach truly impossible. But, in my view, long shooting at game is properly a last resort and, likely as not, one to be declined. Until I’m 90-percent sure of a killing hit with the first bullet, there’s no shot.
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Except in war, shots so far as to be uncertain are best kept to targets that don’t bleed.
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—Wayne van Zwoll
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PART 1:
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BEYOND ARM’S REACH
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CHAPTER ONE
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—A FEATHERED SHAFT
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IT’S NOT INTUITIVE. PERHAPS THAT’S WHY THE BOW RANKS AMONG THE GREATEST HUMAN INVENTIONS!
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The longbow is still deadly, but today's hunters shoot short, not in volleys at distance.
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Ned Frost slept in a tent with a wrangler named Phonograph Jones. In the middle of the night, a grizzly entered their tent and stepped on Jones, peeling the skin off his face “by the rough pressure of his paw.” The man awoke with a yell, whereupon the bear broke his lower ribs with a swipe of its paw. Frost, unarmed, hurled his pillow at the beast. The grizzly bellowed and snatched up Frost, still in his sleeping bag, its great teeth piercing the man’s thighs.
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In a thicket of jack pines a hundred yards off, the bear shook his prey so violently, Frost's thigh muscles were torn out and he was hurled free. He landed, half-naked and badly crippled, in the undergrowth. Painfully he pulled himself up into the branches of a pine.
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• • •
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Saxton Pope and Art Young hunted game as big as grizzlies and lions with arrows.
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Ishi, of the Yana tribe, appeared in 1911, died in 1916. He taught Dr. Saxton Pope about the bow.
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The most memorable encounters afield are up close. Ned Frost had killed his first grizzly at age 14. By the time Saxton Pope and Art Young engaged him to guide their 1920 expedition into Yellowstone National Park, he’d reportedly taken 500 more. One, chased for miles by a pack of hounds, made its stand at the base of a cliff. There it dispatched all but two of the dogs; when Frost arrived, only one was ambulatory. Ned fired at the bear. It charged, covering the 40 steps between them as fast as Frost could lever five rounds through his rifle. Anchored by deep snow, he couldn’t dodge as the bear lunged — and collapsed dead on his chest.
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No one was better qualified than Ned Frost to guide hunters to a grizzly. But this would be no ordinary hunt. Museum permits from the California
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Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, would allow Dr. Pope and his colleague to shoot grizzlies inside the Park. And they would use only bows and arrows.
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Collecting bears for a diorama could have been done more certainly with bullets. But Pope was keen to use his homemade arrows. He was not a rifleman, or even, by upbringing, a hunter. Years earlier, as an instructor in surgery at the University of California, he’d tended a Yana (or Yaki) Indian found starving on the outskirts of Oroville. That encounter changed his life.
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Indians had been assumed gone from the Deer Creek drainage. Then, in 1908, linemen, surveying for a power dam, were suddenly confronted by a naked red man brandishing a spear. They fled. Next day they came looking for him. At the base of a rockslide, two arrows whistled past. Nothing more was seen or heard of this phantom warrior. Then, three years later and 32 miles away, a butcher’s boy followed his barking dog to an emaciated Indian huddled in the corner of a corral. An armed posse captured him.
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Locked up, the man cowered, refusing to eat or drink. He understood neither English nor Spanish — nor the dialects of Indians brought to visit him. T.T. Watterman, of the University’s Department of Anthropology, arrived. On a hunch, he tapped the wooden edge of the cot on which they sat and spoke one word in the lost Yana tongue: siwini. Pine. The wild man’s mouth twitched. Clothed and fed then taken to San Francisco, he said his name was Ishi—“strong, straight one.” Physically, he was well proportioned, with “beautiful hands and unspoiled feet.” He knew nothing of shoes, cloth, metal, horses, or roads.
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Quick to parlay Stone Age skills into the artful use of knife, axe, hammer, file, and saw, Ishi could not so readily adopt Caucasian immunities to disease. Dr. Pope became his physician. He found Ishi “kindly, honest, cleanly, and trustworthy”—and a superb hunter. Pope learned from him
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how to make and shoot the Yana bow and arrow. Ishi contracted tuberculosis and died in 1916. He left his friend Pope with the bow.
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These days, it’s commonly called a longbow. But Ishi’s man-nee was more properly a flatbow, fashioned from a broad stave of mountain juniper. At 42 inches, it was more maneuverable in cover than the English longbow. The limbs, 2½ inches wide near mid-point, had much in common with the osage flatbows of the plains Indians, who used these from horseback to kill bison. Ishi’s bow pulled about 45 pounds at his draw length of 26 inches (excluding the weighted fore-shaft). He insisted that no one step over it, no child handle it, and no woman touch it. Such actions would make a bow shoot crooked, he said.
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Witch hazel was Ishi’s first choice for arrow shafts, which he lopped to 32 inches and shaved to a diameter of about 3⁄8-inch. He straightened each over hot embers, stoned each to an even finish, then cut them to 26 inches. Binding one end of a shaft with a buckskin cord to prevent splitting, Ishi secured a sharp bone between his toes, then twirled the shaft on its point. The resulting hole received the spindle of the fore-shaft, a six-inch dowel of heavier wood glued in place and wrapped with sinew. With an obsidian shard, he notched both ends of the shaft to receive the obsidian head and the string. Feathers from turkeys or raptors were split, stripped of their pith, and bound with wet sinew to the shaft to serve as fletching.
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When Saxton Pope and Art Young hunted grizzlies in Yellowstone, their bows and arrows were little more advanced than Ishi’s, though their bows hewed to English design and pulled 75 pounds, and their 144 hand-finished shafts wore heads of tempered steel. It would be weeks before the archers found the bear to test that equipment.
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After a month afield, with arrows claiming two small bears, but Frost stopping one with his rifle, Pope and Young had their guide pack up “bed
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rolls, a tarpaulin, and a couple of boxes of provisions” to the head of Cascade Creek. They scouted in Dunraven Pass and found 11-inch tracks. Nearby, the bowmen “fashioned a shelter of young jack pines, constructed like a miniature corral, less than three by six feet in area.” They waited there all night, “permitting ourselves one blanket and a small piece of canvas.” Over the next days, rain pelted camp and blind.
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The great bear of Dunraven Pass showed up later that week, an hour after a frigid midnight. Four other grizzlies materialized, too. “I whispered to Young, ‘Shoot the big fellow.’ [Then] I drew an arrow to the head, and drove it at the oncoming female. It struck her full in the chest. She reared, threw herself sidewise, bellowed with rage, staggered and fell….” As for the big bear, “Young discharged three arrows at him. I shot two. We should have landed, he was so large. But he galloped off….”
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After skinning the female by flashlight, the hunters waited for dawn, then scoured the ground for arrows. One of Young’s was missing! They took the track of the big bear, but the spoor soon petered out.
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“We made wide circles…. We cross-cut every forest path and runway…. He was gone. For five hours we searched in vain, and at last, worn with disappointment and fatigue, we lay down and slept….”
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Near sundown they awoke, ate, and resumed the search, climbing to view the slope from above. Letting themselves down by hand- and toehold, they came upon a hidden ledge.
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“There lay the largest grizzly in Wyoming…. By flashlight, acetylene lamp, candle light, fire light and moonlight, we labored. We used up all our knives….”
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Pope weighed the body parts, which came to 916 pounds in sum. “We cleaned the pelts, packed them on our backs and, dripping with salt brine and bear grease, staggered to the nearest wagon trail.”
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• • •
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Arrowheads date back 50,000 years, well into the last glacial period. The earliest have been found in Tunisia and Algeria, and in Morocco. While no bows or arrows have survived that long, cave paintings from the Mesolithic Period (20,000 to 7,500 B.C.) show archers in action. Likenesses of their bows suggest some were of composite construction. Digs in the near and Far East have turned up bows with bellies of horn and backs of animal sinew — wood, after all, is not everywhere available.
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The bow is hardly an intuitive thing. If you’d been whelped in a cave and taught to kill with rocks and clubs, many moons might pass before you struck upon the idea of a stick, bent by a taut cord, hurling a shaft guided by feathers. Even if you’d been tutored by community geeks and abandoned the stone for the spear, the leap to arrows wouldn’t have come quickly. In treeless places, making a shaft was hard enough. Who would have conceived a bow stave? Bows from desert climes are indeed remarkable!
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By the second-century B.C., the Chinese had designed bows for mounted archers and charioteers. Homer’s Greeks lived by the bow, as did the fearsome Mongols. The Turkish recurve design may have resulted from efforts to put more power in limbs short enough for cavalry. These and other compact bows had flatter profiles than did the famous English longbow, its limbs D-shaped in cross-section and round at the belly. The term “longbow,” incidentally, derives not so much from stave length, but from the measure of draw. Early European archers drew to the breast. By the time English arrows skewered French troops at Crecy, the King’s archers anchored at the mouth, cheek, or ear. Longer bows permitted this shooting style with less stacking of pull weight. Of course, arrows also had to be longer than those drawn to the chest.
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Wayne’s laminated bamboo/fiberglass longbow, by John Schultz, is after a Hill design.
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Many types of wood have become bow staves. Late in Europe’s Stone Age, archers chose yew for its cast, though they’d evidently not learned to marry heartwood with sapwood. As English yew couldn’t match Spanish yew for purity and straightness, bowyers in the British Isles imported staves from southern Europe. Fearful that one day its army might feel the sting of
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English bodkins, Spain shut off the sale of yew. The English skirted this ban by demanding a bundle of staves with each shipment of Mediterranean wine!
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Roger Ascham, tutor to Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth I, wrote in his Toxophilus of the Saxons subduing Britons with “their bow and shaft.” At the Battle of Hastings, October 14, 1066, Norman archers played a major, if not a decisive role. William drew up his army in three ranks. Archers, crossbowmen, and probably slingers arrayed themselves ahead of the armored foot soldiers and mounted knights. King Harold, foiled by Norman scouts in his attempt to hurry south from Yorkshire and surprise the invaders, had set up a hasty but formidable defense. When the initial Norman assault faltered, the King’s troops counterattacked. It was a piecemeal response. In the midst of his fleeing army, William tore off his helmet. “Look at me!” he cried. “I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer!” His forces took heart, rallied, and drove Harold’s men back. Twice thereafter the Normans feigned a withdrawal, only to turn on their pursuers and mince their ranks before the English could retreat. Harold’s troops bled.
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According to Guy, Bishop of Ariens, arrows and bolts finished the Anglo-Saxon army. “The foot soldiers ran ahead to engage the enemy with arrows.… [T]he bands of archers attacked and from a distance transfixed bodies with their shafts, and the crossbowmen destroyed the shields as if by a hail-storm….” The Bayeux Tapestry, which illustrates the battle, shows many archers and Harold’s demise. “The whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold, and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye.”
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Archers had the luxury of loosing arrows repeatedly at joints in the metal armor of their enemies. On hot
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days, armor cooked its wearer — woe the knight who hoisted his helmet for a breath of air.
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For all the romance it shares in the legend of Robin Hood, the English longbow secured its place in history by killing people. In the centuries after the Norman invasion in 1066, the bow remained the preeminent weapon in the British Isles. Royal edicts required able men to practice archery, notably at what modern bowmen might consider extreme range. Arrows were shot nearly to the limit of the bow’s cast, so the troops could rain volleys, accurately, as far as possible. Shooting long bought the English more time before they had to enjoin hand combat. More time meant more arrows in the air, more enemy casualties.
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Even well-armored troops were vulnerable to the feathered shaft. Chain and steel plate impeded movement and throttled a soldier’s advance. Archers then had the luxury of loosing arrows repeatedly at joints in the metal of their slow-moving targets. On hot days, armor cooked its wearer — woe to the knight who hoisted his helmet for a breath of air.
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As the war bow evolved, England’s Edward I deemed it indispensable. He paid handsomely those archers in the King’s service. He even pardoned poachers who would wield bows in defense of the realm; this was no small concession, as the common penalty for poaching was prompt hanging with the offender’s own bowstring. Meanwhile, the King required much of his subjects to actually supply the army. For a royal expedition in 1359, “The Tower” exacted 20,000 bows, 50,000 bowstrings, and 850,000 arrows from the counties.
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No battle more clearly showed the longbow’s lethality than that waged near the French village of Crecy-en-Ponthieu, August 26, 1346. That Saturday morning, Edward stationed 12,000-odd men to defend the CrecyWadicourt ridge. Fewer than half were archers, drawn up in wedge-shaped formations that flanked staggered units of soldiers equipped for hand combat. The mile-long line faced King Philip’s French force of 36,000 to 40,000 — Philip’s cavalry by itself matched in number the entire English army!
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But nature took a hand. In mid-afternoon, a murder of crows, portent of bad weather, flew over the French ranks. Aware events would soon escape his control, Philip ordered his Genoese crossbowmen forward. Black clouds burst above them, as these troops scrambled to firing positions. Rain drenched their strings (which no doubt stretched, reducing cast); but the storm soon passed, and bright sunshine shot from behind English lines into the eyes of the Genoese. At this moment, Edward’s longbowmen, who’d kept their strings and bows under cloaks, loosed their first volley. So devastating was the swarm of arrows descending upon them, many of the French mercenaries cut their strings, dropped their crossbows, and fled back toward their army. About the same time, French knights keen to enter the fray gave their horses rein and charged. In heraldic splendor, they galloped over the Italians, now frantic to escape the English shafts relentlessly raining one barrage after another. In this melee, some knights fell to crossbow bolts.
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No one would have counted then, but a practiced archer in Edward’s army could send 10 shafts per minute to 240 yards with good accuracy. If heavy horses in battle trappings took 90 seconds to cover the 300 yards to the English front, they, and the troops astride, would have endured a hail of
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7,500 arrows from a wedge of 500 archers. The 5,000 bowmen in this epic brawl probably had on hand 100 shafts each.
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The French cavalry struggled up a slope bloodied with dead and writhing foot soldiers. They met an unimaginable rain of steel. Arrows skewered horses and perforated chain mail. Wrote longbow scholar Robert Hardy:
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The archers nocked and drew, closing their backs, opening their chests, pushing into their bows, anchoring… letting fly [and] grabbing the next arrow from ground or belt or quiver, to nock and draw and anchor and loose, in deadly unrelenting repetition.” French knights, unbelieving, came on, wave after wave. Men-at-arms followed; as many as 16 charges failed. Archers running low on arrows ran forward, pulled them from the ground and the dead. By moonlight, the battle raged. At sunup “the flower of the chivalry of France lay dead upon the field.
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Ten years later, on September 19, at Poitiers, more than 2,000 French soldiers died at the feet of English archers; still, the conflict most often cited as won by the bow is Agincourt.
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The battle of Agincourt followed the ascendancy of Prince Henry to the English throne. At age 25, he became Henry V and quickly revived hostilities with France. On August 15, 1415, he sailed south in the 500-ton Trinity Royal, leading an armada of 1,500 ships ferrying 10,000 men (8,000 of whom were archers!) and almost as many horses. Entering the Seine on the eighteenth, Henry’s fleet anchored near Harfleur. Unloading took days. The march north, ordered against the counsel of the Kings’ advisors, was as much for show as conquest. Pushing 15 miles a day in deteriorating weather, Henry’s forces lost their shine and enthusiasm.
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Meanwhile, the French were losing patience. At Maisoncelles, a swelling French force camped within a mile of Henry’s. Early on Friday, October 25,
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the armies arrayed themselves against each other on a plain called Agincourt. By this time, Henry counted only 6,000 combatants; le Dauphin boasted 10 times that many. The English advanced first, across muddy ground. They halted just within arrow range, bows braced.
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The French army’s response doomed both cavalry and infantry. Across plowed furrows they charged. But the poached ground bogged them down, pulling horses and men to its bosom as a hailstorm of English arrows arced into them. The very size of the French force now worked against it. A tide of men piled forward against the stalled advance, while Henry’s archers poured death into their ranks. Two woods funneled the French into a front just 900 yards wide. There, slain soldiers fell in heaps high as a saddle. In three hours, 10,000 men—“half the nobility of France”—died. Henry ordered the prisoners killed.
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The family who owned and farmed the Agincourt plain five and a half centuries later wrote to a student of the battle:
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Don Ward fashioned his own modern longbow and took this Colorado elk at nine yards.
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We defended our fields in 1415 and in 1915, in 1939 again, and often in between.
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• • •
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Across the Atlantic, during this same time, native hunters had adopted the bow. Almost surely it came with the migration of people from Asia across the Bering-Chukchi Isthmus. The diaspora refined bow design to suit local materials and conditions. Arrowheads fit the quarry. Contrary to common assumption, big heads were used on small game. They required less chipping and didn’t slide easily under grass. Losses during knapping were less than with smaller heads, which became more fragile with each flake. Smaller heads made sense for big game, as they penetrated hide and
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muscle more easily. Their thin edges cut with less drag; the keen blades of steel heads have nothing on the edges of well-knapped obsidian, essentially volcanic glass. Doctor Saxton Pope shot steel and obsidian heads through cow’s liver contained in a box wrapped in deer skin. The steel-tipped shaft drove 22 inches past entry, the obsidian point 30 inches!
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For decades after firearms became available on our frontier, many American Indians stuck with the bow. It was lighter in hand and could be repaired, replaced in the field. Arrows could be made from natural materials. The bow was lightweight, quiet, reliable. Plains Indians could shoot arrows more accurately than bullets, from a galloping horse. The bowman pushed as he pulled, easily maintaining his balance. Most mounted Indians drew to the chest, shy of the arrowhead. A 24-inch arrow pulled 20 inches, stacked enough thrust from a stout bow to drive through bison. Raised nocks helped the horseman ready arrows without looking; he could loose several during the time needed to charge a muzzleloader once. Texas Ranger “Bigfoot” Walker observed, “[Indians] can shoot their arrows faster than you can fire a revolver, and almost with the accuracy of a rifle at… fifty or sixty yards.” Even Sharps rifles, deadly at long range, often lay untouched behind Indian raids. Reason: the cartridges were hard to find! Carbines in .45-70 and .44-40 had more appeal, because ammunition was more common and likely to turn up in plunder.
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The rattlesnake skin here is decorative, but a backing of sinew has long been used to enhance the cast of wood-core longbows.
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The evolution of North American bows and arrows may owe something to Europeans. During the reign of Henry II, Welsh bowmen pestered England’s monarchy. Around 1170, a group of Welsh, under Prince Madoc, is said to have sailed for the Americas. Traces of their language and culture — even their physical appearance — carried into the nineteenth century, until smallpox decimated the Mandan people on the upper Mississippi. The bow didn’t formally arrive on our Eastern seaboard until hundreds of years later, when firearms controlled battlefronts and had begun to empty game fields worldwide.
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Saxton Pope undertook flight tests of various North American bows, tapping the Department of Anthropology at the University of California for examples from 17 native tribes. He used a 30-inch, 310-grain bamboo
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arrow for each trial. Pope’s friend Will Compton — bowyer, hunter, and “a very powerful man”—shot each bow at least six times, loosing the arrows at 45 degrees. Pope recorded distance. “We spared no bows because of their age, and consequently broke two….”
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A 65-pound English flight bow of yew hurled an arrow 300 yards, in Saxton’s trials. A longbow of some age and 75 pounds draw sent it 250 — quite remarkable, as wood limbs lose cast over time. Pope was surprised at the anemic performance of a heavy Tartar bow from China. Composite Turkish bows shot farthest, but only with lightweight arrows. Pope tested the cycling rate of his longbow by flinging arrows skyward. He was able to put seven arrows aloft before the first touched the ground.
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Bow origin
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Draw weight, pounds Flight distance, yards
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Alaskan
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80
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180
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Apache
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28
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120
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Blackfoot
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45
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145
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Cheyenne
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65
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156
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Cree
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38
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150
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Esquimaux (Eskimo) 80
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200
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Hupa
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40
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148
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Luiseno
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48
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125
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Navajo
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45
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150
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Mojave
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40
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110
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Osage
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40
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92
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Sioux
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45
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165
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Tomawata
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40
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48
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Yaki
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70
|
||
|
||
210
|
||
|
||
Yana
|
||
|
||
48
|
||
|
||
205
|
||
|
||
Yukon
|
||
|
||
60
|
||
|
||
125
|
||
|
||
Yurok
|
||
|
||
30
|
||
|
||
140
|
||
|
||
Leaning again on the good graces of colleagues, Pope borrowed a shirt of chain armor from the University’s museum, to test arrow penetration. A curious attendant offered to don the 25 pounds of steel and stand for a shot from Pope’s longbow. The good doctor demurred and put the armor on a wooden box padded with burlap to simulate the human form. From seven yards he loosed a bodkin-tipped shaft of the type used by English archers against the French. The steel point penetrated the thickest part of the back armor, drove through an inch of wood, and bulged the chain on the breast side. The attendant turned green.
|
||
In those halcyon days, when you could hunt grizzlies in Wyoming, and test bows from museums, Pope had no access to the electronics and highspeed photography of now that measure and show projectile flight. He timed arrow speed by stopwatch (150 feet per second for a lightweight shaft from his 75-pound yew bow). He determined striking energy by comparing arrow penetration in paraffin with that caused by falling weights (25 footpounds at 10 yards). He determined rotation of arrows in flight by nocking two at once on a bow, the shafts connected by fine silk thread. In flight, one arrow paid out thread as the other spooled it up! He found his fletching rotated an arrow six times every 20 yards, about 15 times a second.
|
||
Pope investigated the properties of sapwood and heartwood, noting that England’s longbow, in its most advanced form, incorporated both. He found sapwood (outside, white) excelled in tensile strength, but heartwood (center, red) trumped it in compression strength and resiliency. A longbow with a belly of heartwood and a back of sapwood best combined the properties of both.
|
||
Afield, Pope and Young are best known for big-game hunts, but they shot small game to test their skills.
|
||
|
||
“I recall one day when Young and I got 24 squirrels with the bow…. Young by himself secured 17 in one morning; the last five were killed with five successive arrows.”
|
||
These early archers didn’t dote on the kill. They seemed beguiled by the bow, as had been their predecessors, Will and Maurice Thompson.
|
||
“So long as the new moon returns in heaven a bent, beautiful bow, so long will the fascination of archery keep hold of the hearts of men.”
|
||
Maurice Thompson, born in 1844, grew up hunting with brother Will, five years his junior. Civil war drew the Thompson brothers to the front lines. They returned to the Cherokee Valley to find the family home destroyed by Sherman’s march through Georgia. Though Will had dodged injury, Maurice suffered from a chest wound inflicted at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Penniless, weakened by their long walk, and denied firearms, both young men faced a grim future. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter.
|
||
The Thompsons began hunting with handmade bows and arrows. Maurice started to write:
|
||
The humanities grew out from Archery as a flower from a seed. No sooner did the soft sweet note of the bow-string charm the ear of genius than music was born….
|
||
His words found a market — oddly enough, on the eve of smokeless powder. Repeating rifles had already, it seemed, made bows and arrows obsolete. Perhaps the prose took readers from war’s pain and loss, still keenly felt. Maurice deftly attached the bow to the romance of storybook times and made the simple act of drawing a bowstring a lyrical event.
|
||
During the next decade, after a move to Crawfordsville, Indiana, Maurice wrote in earnest about nature and about hunting with the bow. His essays
|
||
|
||
appeared in prestigious magazines, beginning with Harper’s, in 1877. Archery offered the Thompson brothers both purpose and income.
|
||
Though deadly at distance, the Thompsons insisted that “point-blank range at an absolute center is what calls out the bowman’s finest powers.” Wrote Maurice:
|
||
I have, with my hunting arrows, broken 37 of 50 Bogardus glass balls (the predecessor to clay shotgun targets) thrown into the air toward me at 12 yards.
|
||
He recounted hitting a pencil five times in succession at 10 yards. In 1879, Maurice Thompson was chosen president of the just-formed American National Archery Association. Thompson’s The Witchery of Archery, published 1877, became a classic book on the bow. Will, himself a gifted poet, became an attorney. He outlived Maurice, later politely declining an invitation to hunt with Saxton Pope, Art Young, and Will Compton:
|
||
No one can know how I have loved the woods, the streams, the trails…. How often the fierce arrow hissed its threat close by the wide ears! How often the puff of lifted feathers has marked the innocuous passage of my very best arrow!
|
||
The longbow’s romance — and its effective reach — came vividly to life again in post-Depression America, when a young archer named Howard Hill mesmerized audiences with exhibition shooting and hunting films. Born November 23, 1899, in Wilsonville, Arkansas, Hill first picked up a bow at age four. Uncommonly athletic, he grew to excel in other sports, too. At Auburn, he played golf, baseball, football, and basketball. Maurice
|
||
|
||
Thompson’s writings fanned his passion for the bow; he began making his own longbows and winning tournaments.
|
||
In 1928, in Miami, he set a flight record of over 391 yards. Then Hill brought his skill to Hollywood, where he shot for Errol Flynn in the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood. He produced 23 reels on archery for Warner Brothers. In my youth, television matinees featured Hill shooting coins out of the air. His shafts arced into targets so distant as to challenge riflemen. Hill’s bow was so powerful that four comely lasses in tandem were unable to budge the string, yet he pulled it with seeming ease. Hill adored the smooth draw and powerful cast of the English longbow, though he found it less maneuverable and more sensitive to shooting stance than the flatbow of the plains Indian. He settled on a hybrid design most like the English bow, but slightly shorter, with slightly broader limbs.
|
||
Howard Hill became the first white man on record to kill an elephant with a bow. The ponderous shafts measured over a yard, and the bow pulled 172 pounds. Hill added Cape buffalo, lion, and crocodile to a long list of lesser species. In his book Hunting The Hard Way, he described shooting bison from a galloping pony. Hill hunted in Wyoming, with Ned Frost, near the hills that gave Saxton Pope and Art Young their grizzly bears. Candid about his shooting, Hill admitted to missing game; he also wrote of arrowing a pronghorn on the run at 70 yards. Once, he hunted several days for elk above the Shoshone River. The last evening, he and his guide spotted a bull. They ran out of cover at 185 yards, “entirely too far for any degree of accuracy with the bow.” But, after some palaver, Hill loosed a shaft. It flew high. The next struck low. The elk didn’t move. Carefully, Hill shot one more arrow. “We both knew my aim had been good….” The broadhead struck the elk high in the chest “and buried itself to the feathers.”
|
||
|
||
Hurling arrows at speeding pronghorns or launching them in five-second arcs to distant elk, any archer will miss many animals and likely cripple more than he kills. He’ll burn through hunting partners, squandering chances to close on game. But we all adopt the thinking of our times. Howard Hill was not only gifted, he lived in another day; a generation earlier, Saxton Pope had shot eagles.
|
||
Budding archers brought up on Howard Hill’s hunting exploits learned to shoot with Ben Pearson bows. Born a year before Hill, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Ben Pearson also fashioned his own longbows and used them in competition. Winning the 1927 Arkansas State Championship helped him peddle his arrows. In 1939, he added bows to the Ben Pearson catalog. His became the first U.S. company to mass-produce archery gear. By 1963, the firm was selling hundreds of bows — a day. Affordable, solid-fiberglass models came in kits, with arrows, and targets like the leopard I perforated in my backyard. Ben Pearson died March 2, 1971. Howard Hill followed February 4, 1975.
|
||
While Fred Bear’s birth antedated those of Hill and Pearson by only a couple years, his interest in the bow came late, after he’d moved from his native Pennsylvania, to Michigan. At Detroit’s Adams Theatre, he saw Art Young’s film, Alaskan Adventure. Fred had found work in the auto industry, when, at age 29, he hunted deer with a bow he’d fashioned from an $8 osage stave. Six years later, he arrowed his first whitetail.
|
||
Practice at targets paid off, when Fred won State archery championships in 1934, 1937, and 1943. In 1947, he moved his nascent bow business to Grayling, gateway to Michigan’s North Woods. Five years thereafter, he cataloged his first mass-produced bow, the Grizzly. By the time Fred sold controlling interest in Bear Archery, in 1968, his recurve bows were wildly
|
||
|
||
popular — and his exploits had inspired a new generation of bowhunters. The film of Fred shooting a brown bear at 15 steps certainly inspired me!
|
||
Howard Hill used a longbow on elephants, shot for Errol Flynn in Hollywood's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
|
||
Best known for his hunts on the Little Delta and other storied places in Canada, Alaska, and the Yukon, Fred Bear arrowed a tiger in India, a lion in Moçambique. Twice he failed to kill a polar bear; hit with arrows, the beasts had to be stopped with a rifle. Then, in 1966, after 25 days of unseemly weather, in temperatures to 30-below, Fred killed a fine bear. It was the only one he’d seen in six weeks on the ice.
|
||
|
||
Wayne draws a cedar shaft. Arguably, the longbow was so named for the draw, not limb length.
|
||
Meanwhile, another archer was making history shooting at very long distance. In fact, the sport of flight shooting rewards only distance. Bowmen launch arrows from powerful bows with the sole purpose of shooting farther than anyone else. Some of the bows are so powerful, they feature stirrups for the feet so that, from a sitting position, the archer can brace the bow with his legs and draw with both arms.
|
||
The man who all but defined modern flight shooting was Harry Drake, born in 1915. Drake not only competed, he built the winning bows. In 1947, a Drake bow became the first to launch a shaft over 600 yards (it landed 603 yards away). For the next 29 years straight, Harry Drake’s flight bows held the men’s national flight records! In 1971, Harry used a bow of his
|
||
|
||
design and manufacture (circa 1964) during the National Archery Association’s Flight Championships at Ivanpah Dry Lake, California. The arrow flew 1,077 yards! That year he became the first person to cast an arrow over one mile — 1,760 yards! Shooting his own footbow, he would later shatter that record with a shot of 2,028 yards.
|
||
Well before Fred Bear’s passing, in 1988, and the motorcycle accident that put Harry Drake on his deathbed, in 1997, bowhunters began to jettison longbows and recurves in favor of compound bows. Now, traditionalists pay handsomely for longbows and recurves that would make Saxton Pope swoon (to say nothing of those peasant bowmen holding the ridge at Crecy). Skilled longbowmen are not a lost clan. When Hill was at his peak, some thought his shooting would never be equaled. But Bob Swinehart used a longbow to take Africa’s big five. And Byron Ferguson is a wizard with a modern longbow, one who can thread a wedding ring at 30 feet and hit airborne tennis balls!
|
||
Like the stirrup, the longbow is simple of form; its lethality was largely lost on men brought up with early cartridge rifles. Still, its effect on history can hardly be overstated. For thousands of years before the advent of gunpowder, arrows fed humankind and protected their dwellings. Feathered shafts have felled more adversaries than have bullets from automatic rifles. The wink of steel in steep arc once paralyzed armored troops. Hunters and soldiers now are generations removed from archers whose bodies showed the strain of daily practice with 100-pound longbows — men who, at Crecy alone, loosed half a million arrows to change history — and for those born after the seventeenth century, gunpowder and conical bullets would redefine the long shot.
|
||
BOWS OF THE MARY ROSE
|
||
|
||
Howard Hill became the first white man on record to kill an elephant with a bow. The ponderous shafts measured over a yard, and the bow pulled 172 pounds! He later added Cape buffalo, lion, and crocodile to a long list of lesser species.
|
||
Unlike the firearms that began to nudge bows off the battlefield in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English longbow had no champions to save it. Rifles and muskets found their way into collections and museums, though there are specimens, owned by royalty, that survive in almost-new condition. But bows were implements of the commoner and much more easily made than early firearms. Their value lay only in utility. Broken in battle or having lost cast over time, bows became firewood. Suddenly, it seemed, all that remained of the English longbow was its image in woodcuts and tapestries.
|
||
Then, divers discovered the Mary Rose. The great ship sank in the Solent, battling a French fleet, in 1545, during the reign of Henry VIII. Salvage began in the 1830s. The recovered manifest listed guns, and 250 yew longbows with arrows. It wasn't until a later effort did the bows surface in quantity. In 1979, a diver brought up a pole, black with marine accretions. Massive and “knobbly,” it was nonetheless recognizably a bow, or at least the beginnings of one. Its thickness suggested a draw force of 100 pounds or more. Salvagers concluded this and other staves were unfinished. But evidence of tillering after manufacture (trimming the ends to speed limb action), and the fitting of horn nocks showed the bows ready for service. Also, in wartime, it would have made no sense to fill a ship with rough staves.
|
||
|
||
By 1981, the last bows from the Mary Rose had been recovered. The fine-grained yew had almost surely grown in a Mediterranean climate. Burial in silt under cold saltwater had preserved it. Cleaned, the bows revealed sapwood over a belly of heartwood. In cross-section, most limbs were D-shaped and deep, or “stacked.” Unlike modern longbows, the salvaged bows lacked a central riser, that is, they were built to arc “full compass,” working every inch. Tudor bowyers with access to good yew could choose staves that were straight or slightly reflexed, the limbs naturally inclining toward the back when unstrung. They heaved arrows faster than staves with deflexed limbs. Only a handful of Mary Rose bows showed marked deflex.
|
||
|
||
Utah bowman Aram Barsch built this osage longbow and shoots it well!
|
||
• • •
|
||
Silent as shadow, the limbs arch, the bowman’s power braking a taut string. Release! The shaft flicks forward like a fly on light line. Hiss; it’s
|
||
|
||
away! A bent bow calls to primal man and poet and flings the spirit high on a grey goose wing.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER TWO
|
||
|
||
—SPARK, SMOKE, AND A SPEEDING BALL
|
||
THE FIRST GUNS COULDN’T MATCH THE EFFECTIVE RANGE OF ARROWS. THAT WOULD CHANGE, BUT SLOWLY!
|
||
While the origins of gunpowder remain obscure, explosive “Chinese snow” appeared in fireworks a couple centuries before the English friar Roger Bacon described gunpowder, in 1249. Berthold Schwarz further investigated possibilities in gas propulsion, setting the stage for the first firearms, which appeared around the start of the fourteenth century. Guns accompanied Edward II during his 1327 invasion of Scotland.
|
||
In the U.S., a powder mill was erected at Milton, Massachusetts (near Boston), before any firearms factory appeared in the area. By the start of the Revolution, colonists had manufactured or stolen 40 tons of blackpowder! Half was wasted at Cambridge. In no time, the Continental Army had no powder. But George Washington made powder production a priority. By 1800, mills were shipping 750 tons annually!
|
||
Igniting this sulfurous fuel was easy in the open air. Setting it afire in a chamber to launch a ball challenged gun designers. The first firearms, developed in Europe a century and a half before Columbus sailed for the New World, were heavy tubes that required two attendants. The Swiss called these weapons culverins. The culveriner steadied the tube, while the
|
||
|
||
gougat applied a priming charge, then lit it with a smoldering stick or rope. Mechanical rests supported infantry guns; so did forks in the saddles of mounted warriors. Clumsy and inaccurate (and because they often misfired, barrels were often fitted with ax heads), culverins produced noise and smoke that unnerved enemies armed with pikes or even bows.
|
||
Fuses were developed for stationary cannon, whose muzzles could be aimed at a parapet or gun emplacement. Timing mattered little, because such
|
||
targets did not move.
|
||
Handmade locks could as easily be fashioned for southpaws. Note the set trigger, iron fittings.
|
||
This Hawken-style rifle shows the iron furniture and half-stock typical of other plains rifles.
|
||
|
||
Fuses were developed for stationary cannon, whose muzzles could be aimed at a parapet or a gun emplacement. Timing mattered little, because such targets did not move. But advancing gunners couldn’t wait while an assistant caught up with a burning wick, nor could they maintain aim while the fuse burned. When the enemy charged or swept by on horses, the fire in a fuse usually found the powder too late.
|
||
As guns were trimmed so one man could easily carry and aim them (and torch the charge), faster ignition became imperative. The first "lock," or firing mechanism, was a crude lever by which a smoldering wick was lowered to a touch-hole in the barrel. The wick was later replaced by a match assisted by a cord or a long wick kept smoldering atop the barrel. The shooter eased the serpentine clamp holding the match into the wick until the match caught fire. Then he moved the match to the side and lowered it to the touch-hole. Later, a spring kept the match from the touchhole until needed; a trigger adapted from crossbows added control. Such a mechanism was called a “matchlock,” a label also applied to guns fired that way. The Spanish arquebus was one. Arquebusiers carried smoldering wicks in metal boxes on their belts.
|
||
In the sixteenth century, German inventors eliminated the unreliable wick with the “monk’s gun.” A spring-loaded jaw held a piece of pyrite (flint) against a serrated bar. The shooter pulled a ring at the rear of the bar, scooting it across the pyrite to produce sparks, which showered a pan containing a trail of fine gunpowder that led into the touch-hole in the barrel. A more sophisticated version called the “wheellock” appeared around 1515, in Nuremberg. It featured a spring-loaded sprocket wound with a spanner wrench and latched under tension. Pulling the trigger released the wheel to spin against a shard of pyrite held by spring tension against the wheel’s teeth. Sparks flew.
|
||
|
||
In the lock a la miquelet, the roles of pyrite and steel were reversed. Probably a Dutch design, it was named after Spanish miquelitos (marauders) operating in the Pyrenees. Later, it would be modified to incorporate a spring-loaded cock that held a piece of flint and swung in an arc when released. At the end of its travel, the flint in the jaws of the cock struck a pan cover or hammer, kicking it back to expose the primed pan. Sparks landed in the pan, igniting a priming charge of powder that burned through the touch-hole in the barrel to the main charge. The cock eventually became known as the “hammer,” the hammer a “frizzen.” The mechanism was called a “flintlock.” It was less costly than the wheellock and more reliable. By this time, guns were commonly known by the names of their firing mechanisms.
|
||
Matchlock, wheellock, and flintlock mechanisms had a common weakness: exposed priming. Wet weather could render them all useless. Producing a spark inside a barrel made no sense until early in the eighteenth century, with the discovery of fulminates (shock-sensitive salts of fulminic acid, an isomer of cyanic acid). In 1774, a physician to Louis XV wrote on the explosive nature of mercury fulminate. Englishman E.C. Howard discovered, in 1799, that adding saltpeter to fulminates produced explosives that could be set off by a jarring action, but could generally be carried safely.
|
||
“Howard’s powder” may have influenced the work of Scotch clergyman Alexander John Forsythe. In 1806, Forsythe demonstrated internal ignition. Two years later, Swiss gun maker Johannes Pauly designed a breechloading percussion gun that employed a cartridge with a paper percussion cap. A spring-loaded needle pierced the cap, detonating the fulminate.
|
||
Powder fired by a spark in the chamber marked a watershed in firearms development. New types of ammunition and the guns to fire them came
|
||
|
||
pell-mell. In 1818, Englishman Joseph Manton built a gun with a springloaded catch that held a tiny tube of fulminate against the side of the barrel, over the touch-hole. The hammer crushed the fulminate, and breech pressure blew the tube away. The Merrill gun, 14,500 of which were bought by the British government, employed this mechanism.
|
||
In 1821, the British gun maker Westley Richards employed fulminate primers in a flintlock-style pan. The falling hammer opened the pan cover, exposing a cup containing fulminate. Two years later, American physician Dr. Samuel Guthrie found a way to produce fulminate pellets, a convenient alternative to loose fulminate and paper caps.
|
||
Flint in the hammer jaws strikes the frizzen, igniting pan powder, then the rifle’s main charge.
|
||
|
||
The metallic primer, credited to Joshua Shaw’s work from 1814 to 1822, changed rifle design.
|
||
Many inventors claimed credit for inventing the copper percussion cap, but sea captain Joshua Shaw, of Philadelphia, evidently deserves the honor. In 1814, the British-born Shaw was denied a patent for a steel cap, because he was not yet a U.S. citizen. He persevered with a disposable pewter cap, then one of copper. Between 1812 and 1825, the U.S. Patent Office issued 72 patents for percussion caps. Only a few proved out. Some caps fragmented, spattering the shooter. Others had so little priming mix, they failed to ignite the main charge — or so much they started the ball before the burning powder built useful pressure. In 1822, Shaw patented his own lock. By that time, it was clear a percussion cap on a hollow nipple had a bright future. In 1846, Congress awarded the 70-year-old Shaw an honorarium.
|
||
|
||
Despite the obvious advantages of a closed passage to funnel sparks directly to the powder charge, percussion rifles and shotguns were slow to catch on. In the early nineteenth century, chemicals like fulminates were still widely viewed with suspicion. Also, the first caps were not consistent. Wary of new inventions, governments resisted replacing pyrite with primers. Shooters who stood by the flintlock spread rumors denigrating cap-
|
||
lock ignition. Percussion shotguns were said to kick harder, but deliver less punch. Even Britain’s Colonel Hawker, a firearms authority, embraced the fiction:
|
||
The Kentucky rifle proved superior to the Brown Bess musket of the British troops. Our Colonists trounced other troops who had to load their rifles
|
||
with tight-fitting balls.
|
||
For killing single shots at wildfowl rapidly flying… there is not a question in favour of the detonating system, as its trifling inferiority to the flint gun is tenfold repaid by the wonderful accuracy it gives in so readily obeying the eye. But in firing a heavy charge among a large flock of birds the flint has the decided advantage.
|
||
Eventually, the convenient, weatherproof percussion cap would win out. Meanwhile, firearms were becoming shorter and slimmer, with smaller bores and more sensitive triggers. The cumbersome firearms that had come from Europe with the Pilgrims in the early seventeenth century were typically .75-caliber smoothbore flintlocks six feet long. Though rifled barrels had shown a decided edge in accuracy and reach (dating to matches in Leipzig, as early as 1498, and Zurich, in 1504), rifles were costly to make and slow to load. Firearms of that day were judged mainly on their
|
||
|
||
military merits. Warfare did not require fine accuracy; more important was prompt reloading by green recruits.
|
||
The New World presented different challenges, even in battle. The enemy did not fight in close ranks, rather, he was a lone wraith, partly hidden behind vegetation. Accuracy mattered there and on the hunt. Long, careful shots were often pivotal. Americans favored the French-style flintlock popular in Europe early in the eighteenth century. The jaeger (hunter) rifle that evolved from it on the Ohio frontier had a 24- to 30-inch barrel of .65to .70-caliber, with seven to nine deep, slow-twist grooves. Most jaegers had a rectangular patch-box and a wide, flat buttplate. Double set triggers were common. To conserve lead, rifle makers built jaegers with .50-, .45-, even .40-caliber bores; a pound of lead yields 70 .40-caliber balls, but only 15 of .70-inch diameter. At the same time, the makers lengthened the barrel, replaced the sliding patch-box cover with a hinged lid, and installed a crescent butt to fit the shooter’s upper arm. These changes were wrought in Pennsylvania by German gunsmiths, but the redesigned jaeger became known as the Kentucky rifle.
|
||
In guerilla conflict, this accurate, distinctively American rifle proved superior to the Brown Bess musket issued to British troops. Militiamen in the ragtag Revolutionary Army had found that pounding home full-diameter balls against the rifling in a reload was slow and difficult and made noise that divulged the shooter’s position. So they cast undersized balls and swathed them in greased linen patches that engaged the rifling. The Colonists trounced other troops — even crack mercenaries — who loaded their rifles with tight-fitting balls. The patched ball also cleaned the bore and softened fouling. It quickly gained favor with hunters. Animal fat was commonly used to grease the patch but, in a pinch, a shooter could use saliva.
|
||
|
||
By the close of the eighteenth century, hunters on the American frontier had, arguably, the best rifles in the world, renowned for their accuracy and reach. Still, building a rifle was an individual project. For rifles (and repairs), pioneers threading the Alleghenies depended on the resourcefulness of backwoods gunsmiths. It would be decades before Eli Whitney and others successfully employed mass production.
|
||
Beyond the forests of the East, hunters found smallbore Kentucky rifles inadequate for grizzlies and bison. The Kentucky’s long barrel proved awkward to carry on horseback, and its slender stock often failed to survive the rigors of life in the saddle. Even before the plains rifle achieved iconic status, flintlocks of late eighteenth-century settlers and frontiersmen were changing. Iron hardware replaced brass, beefier stocks cradled shorter barrels with bigger bores. The “mountain” or “Tennessee” rifle resulted.
|
||
|
||
Patched balls eased loading, kept fouling at bay. Rifling spun the patch that gripped the ball.
|
||
In the early nineteenth century, there could have been 60 million bison afoot on the prairies of North America. Or not. Nobody counted until the beasts had been shot to near-extinction. But astute visitors saw the numbers slipping. In 1843, John James Audubon observed that “There is a
|
||
|
||
perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared….”
|
||
Reproductions like this T/C caplock “Hawken” are affordable, accurate, and quite authentic.
|
||
During the summer of 1846, Francis Parkman traveled throughout the West. He was 23 and had just graduated from Harvard Law School. “With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California,” he observed, “The buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering [Indian] communities who depend on them for support must be broken and scattered.”
|
||
Parkman was fascinated by plains tribes and their ties to the great herds. In his 1849 book, The California and Oregon Trail, he described the “running” of buffalo:
|
||
|
||
[The hunter] dashes forward in utter recklessness and selfabandonment…. In the midst of the flying herd, where the uproar and the dust are thickest, it never wavers for a moment; he drops the rein and abandons his horse to his furious career; he levels his gun, the report sounds faint amid the thunder of the buffalo; and when his wounded enemy leaps in vain fury upon him, his heart thrills with a feeling like the fierce delight of the battlefield….
|
||
Permitting Parkman some license for hyperbole, historians find his observations ring true. Those stirring words, like Frederic Remington’s oils, resonated with readers who’d not experienced firsthand the perils and grinding deprivations of the frontier, who saw in it more romance than hardship. Novels soon made legends of misfits. Manifest Destiny became at once a national mission and an excuse.
|
||
Parkman was also analytical. In his 1849 book he wrote:
|
||
The chief difficulty in running buffalo, it seems to me is that of loading the gun or pistol at full gallop. Many hunters for convenience’s sake carry three or four bullets in the mouth; the powder is poured down the muzzle… the bullet dropped in after it, the stock struck hard upon the pommel of the saddle, and the work is done. [However], should the blow on the pommel fail to send the bullet home, or should the latter, in the act of aiming, start from its place and roll toward the muzzle, the gun would probably burst in discharging…. [To securely seat their bullets], some hunters make use of a ramrod, usually hung by a string from the neck, but this materially increases the difficulty of loading.
|
||
Not long after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, in 1805, General W.H. Ashley, of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, promoted the Rendezvous as a way to gather furs from trappers probing far-flung places.
|
||
|
||
Subsequently, tons of pelts funneled from frontier outposts to St. Louis, which became a gateway to the West, as well as its supply hub. Easterners of various trades relocated there. Among them was gun maker Jacob Hawkins. Born in 1786, he moved to Missouri as a young man and, in 1818, entered into partnership with local gunsmith James Lakenan. In 1821, Jake’s father died. Shortly thereafter, his younger brother Samuel (born 1792) lost his wife and closed his gun shop in Xenia, Ohio, to join Jake. Following James Lakenan’s death, in 1825, the Hawkins brothers became partners and changed their surname to the original Dutch “Hawken,” a name that would come to define the rifle for their times.
|
||
Building their first rifles, the Hawkens borrowed heavily from the design of a North Carolinian named Youmans, a preeminent maker of Tennessee rifles. These muscular but beautiful firearms were still fashioned one at a time, and so varied widely in detail. The Hawken brothers added refinements of their own. A typical Hawken rifle featured a relatively short, stiff barrel and weighed about 10 pounds. Its half-stock, secured by two keys, was generally of maple (in 1845, rough-cut sugar maple cost $2 per hundred board feet). The patch-boxes of Kentucky and Tennessee rifles seldom appeared on Hawkens. Flint was the standard type of ignition, until about 1840. The Hawken brothers used Ashmore locks, as well as their own. Many Hawken rifles boasted double set triggers. During the brief era of the Rendezvous — perhaps two decades — the Hawken established itself as the quintessential plains rifle (though Henry Lehman and James Henry and George Tryon built similar, equally serviceable firearms).
|
||
Demand for Hawken rifles grew with their reputation for accuracy and reach. While other rifles in skilled hands might match the performance of a Hawken, men with their lives on the line learned by word of mouth to trust the Hawken name.
|
||
|
||
Hawken rifles delivered great precision at distance. Francis Parkman told of killing a pronghorn at 204 paces and watching another hunter drop a bison at
|
||
nearly 300!
|
||
Such faith rested on more than myth and fireside tale. A Hawken’s octagonal barrel, typically of .50-caliber and 38 inches long, was made of soft iron and had a slow rifling twist to stabilize the patched round ball still in common use. The iron barrel was easier to load, too, and proved less susceptible to fouling than the quick-twist, hard-steel bores of contemporary English rifles built only for conical bullets. (The soft barrel better retained traces of bullet lube.)
|
||
Hawken rifles delivered great precision at distance. Francis Parkman told of killing a pronghorn at 204 paces and of watching another hunter drop a bison at nearly 300! While charge weights for big game typically ran 150 to 215 grains of powder, Hawken rifles were known for their ability to handle a wide range of loads. Bore size increased as lead became easier to get and buffalo more valuable at market. In an article for the Saturday Evening Post (February 21, 1920 as cited by Hanson in The Plains Rifle), Horace Kephart wrote of one new Hawken rifle:
|
||
It would shoot straight with any powder charge [and] equal weights of powder and ball. With a round ball of pure lead weighing 217 grains, patched with fine linen so that it fitted tight, and 205 grains of powder, it gave very flat trajectory… and yet the recoil was no more severe than that of a .45 caliber breech loader charged with seventy grains of powder and a 500-grain service bullet….
|
||
|
||
Wayne killed this Utah buck at 90 yards, with an iron-sighted blackpowder rifle firing a MaxiBall.
|
||
The growing popularity of Hawken rifles on the frontier kept Sam and Jake busy building them. But the brothers repaired firearms, too. On December 26, 1825, the Hawkens billed the Indian Department, through its agent Richard Graham, $1.25 for “Cutting Barrel & new birch” and 50
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||
|
||
cents for “Repairing Rifle.” For “Repairing Lock, bullet molds, ram rod, & hind sight” a bill totaled $2. The Hawkens charged 50 cents for shoeing a horse and 18 cents for fixing spurs. They made iron hatchets, and even arrowheads.
|
||
When California’s gold fields drew hordes of fortune-seekers, in 1849, a basic Hawken rifle cost $22.50 — a substantial price, but one willingly paid by men whose future might hang on one accurate shot. That year, Jake Hawken died of cholera. Sam kept the business alive, turning it over to his son, William, who had earlier ridden with Kit Carson’s mounted rifles. (On September 23, 1847, during the Battle of Monterey, William and a group of 42 frontiersmen fought to secure a bridge over San Juan Creek. Vastly outnumbered, the Americans emerged with only nine ambulatory men. William was among the injured.) In 1855, William partnered at the St. Louis shop with Tristam Campbell. This alliance soon failed, though, leaving William in charge. In 1859, Samuel Hawken made his first pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains, where frontiersmen had carried Hawken rifles. Sam worked in Colorado mines a week, then headed home. Upon his return, he declared, “And here I am once more at my old trade, putting guns and pistols in order ... .”
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||
|
||
Jim Bridger was typical of mountain men at General Ashley’s Rendezvous, circa 1820s.
|
||
|
||
Frontier Scout Kit Carson lived in the days of Hawken rifles, which were birthed in St. Louis, in 1825.
|
||
William Hawken’s tenure at the shop introduced him to other men who had endured the rigors of the American West, and who appreciated accurate
|
||
|
||
rifles. He received this note dated November 27, 1858:
|
||
Mr. Wm. Hawkins
|
||
Sir, I have waited with patience for my gun, I am in almost in a hurry 2 weeks was out last Monday. I will wait a short time for it and if it don’t come I will either go or send. If you are still waiting to make me a good one it is all right. Please send as soon as possible. Game is plenty and I have no gun.
|
||
Yours a friend. Daniel W. Boon
|
||
William traveled west again, after his father relieved him in St. Louis. Then he disappeared. Some years later, a .56-caliber muzzleloader bearing William’s name was found under a pile of rocks in Querino Canyon, Arizona. The man’s fate remains a mystery.
|
||
As civil war shook the Union, Sam Hawken hired a helper. Immigrant J.P. Gemmer had arrived in the U.S., from Germany, in 1838. He proved capable and industrious. In 1862, he bought the Hawken business. Gemmer may have used the “S. Hawken” stamp on some rifles, but marked most “J.P. Gemmer, St. Louis.” As cartridge rifles (the Sharps 1874 and the Remington Rolling Block) sealed the bison’s demise, Gemmer offered smaller bores and target options in Hawken rifles.
|
||
Sam Hawken continued to visit the shop in retirement. He outlived Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and other mountain men who had depended on Hawken rifles. When Sam died on May 9, 1884, at age 92, the establishment was still open for business. It had changed locations within St. Louis in 1870, 1876, and 1880. A final move followed, in 1912, but the doors closed in 1915. J.P. Gemmer died four years later. The Hawken rifle
|
||
|
||
faded, as settlers with cartridge repeaters funneled west on trails blazed by mountain men.
|
||
A FRONTIER RIFLE OF NOTE
|
||
When it had cooled, Eliphalet Remington II would have checked his barrel for straightness and
|
||
hammered out irregularities. He'd grind and file eight flats to make the tube octagonal, then travel to Utica to pay a gunsmith the equivalent of a dollar to
|
||
cut the rifling.
|
||
America’s oldest gun maker, Remington, got its start, in 1816, when Eliphalet "Lite" Remington II put his hand to his father’s forge in Litchfield, four miles from New York’s Mohawk River. Lite was 22, living with his wife, Abigail, in his father’s stone house on Staley (or Steele) Creek. Having learned from his father how to work iron, Lite would have made the barrel by pumping bellows to heat an iron rod or flat skelp cherryred. This iron would have been wound about a mandrel slightly smaller than the finished bore. Heating the tube white-hot, Lite might have sprinkled it with Borax and sand, held one end in his tongs, then pounded the other on the forge’s stone floor to seat the coils. He may also have used a hammer or water-powered trip-hammer to pound heated sections of the tube into a solid tube. When it had cooled, Lite would have checked his barrel for straightness and hammered out irregularities. He'd grind and file eight flats to make the tube octagonal, then travel to Utica to pay a gunsmith the equivalent of a dollar to cut the rifling.
|
||
|
||
Accounts vary as to whether Remington finished the rifle himself. Making lock and stock both required skills probably rare among young frontier lads. But both would have been handmade and finished with files. He may well have used uric acid and iron oxide to finish the steel a hazel brown, then smoothed the wood with sandstone, sealing it with beeswax. Hand-wrought screws and pins fastened the parts. Legend has it that Lite christened his rifle at a local shooting match, placing second and prompting the winner to order a rifle just like it! Remington is said to have charged $10 and finished the rifle in 10 days!
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER THREE
|
||
|
||
—NO MORE RAMRODS!
|
||
WITH METALLIC CARTRIDGES, HUNTERS, SETTLERS, AND SOLDIERS BOOSTED BOTH THEIR REACH AND FIREPOWER.
|
||
Loading from the breech had been a dream long before the advent of the percussion cap. Guns with a hinged breech date to at least 1537! A seventeenth-century French musket had a cylindrical breech plug that dropped when the guard was rotated. A rifle developed in 1776 by British Major Patrick Ferguson featured a threaded breech plug, retracted by rotating the threaded guard. Alas, raising the block back into battery sometimes pinched the powder and caused premature firing.
|
||
At the close of the eighteenth century, Americans Eli Whitney and Simeon North, working independently, came up with machines that manufactured uniform parts. They each won a government contract for firearms. Sixteen years later, in 1813, North got the first contract for guns with interchangeable components. However, a rifle needed more than close-fitting parts to function as a breechloader. Captain John H. Hall, of Maine, designed one of the first successful breechloaders in the U.S. This crude flintlock was issued in limited numbers to U.S. soldiers in 1817, six years after its debut. It earned little praise.
|
||
|
||
Montana-based Shiloh Sharps makes beautiful rifles faithful to the legendary 1874 Sharps. This one has more embellishment than buffalo hunters would have ordered!
|
||
Breechloading was a lot more feasible with cartridges than with loose powder and ball. The first cartridges (assembled in 1586!) were of paper and loaded from the muzzle. Biting or ripping off the base of the husk exposed the powder. The husk burned to ashes upon firing. Replacing pyrite with a percussion cap did away with the biting and tearing, because the cap’s more powerful spark penetrated the thin paper.
|
||
Across the Atlantic, Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse was among the first inventors to install a primer in a cartridge. His paper hull clasped a bullet with a pellet of fulminate at its base. A long striker punched through paper and powder to smash the pellet. Roughly 300,000 von Dreyse “needle guns” were built for the Prussian army, between 1835 and 1865. Incidentally, the needle gun referenced by post-Civil War writers was not the European Dreyse, but rather the .50-70 Springfield that sired, in 1873, the .45-70 trap-door rifle used in the last Indian wars. Its long breech block required a long firing pin.
|
||
Stateside, Stephen Taylor patented a hollow-based bullet with an internal powder charge held in place by a perforated heel cap that admitted sparks from an external primer. A year later, in 1848, New York inventor Walter Hunt devised a similar bullet. This one had a cork cap covered with paper. Primer sparks shot through the paper. To fire this “rocket ball,” Hunt developed a repeating rifle with a pillbox mechanism to advance metallic primers. Its tubular magazine was a brilliant feature, but the lever-action
|
||
|
||
was prone to malfunction. Lacking the money to refine or promote his “Volitional” rifle, Hunt sold patent rights to fellow New Yorker George Arrowsmith. Lewis Jennings, a gifted engineer in Arrowsmith’s shop, improved the Hunt repeater. After receiving patents for Jennings’ work, Arrowsmith sold the Hunt rifle for $100,000 to railroad magnate and New York hardware merchant Courtland Palmer.
|
||
Meanwhile, Palmer’s financial backing helped gun designers Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson develop a metallic cartridge like that patented, in 1846 and 1849, by the Frenchman Flobert. Smith and Wesson modified a rocket ball to include a copper base that held fulminate priming. In 1854, Courtland Palmer joined his designers in a limited partnership, putting up $10,000 for tooling in a firm to become known as "Smith and Wesson." A year later, a group of 40 New York and New Haven investors bought out Smith, Wesson, and Palmer to establish the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company. The investors chose as company director Oliver F. Winchester, a shirt merchant. Winchester moved the company from Norwich to New Haven. Slow sales of Volcanic guns sent it into receivership, in 1857, but Winchester reorganized, after buying all assets for $40,000.
|
||
The New Haven Arms Company hired Benjamin Tyler Henry to fix the Hunt design. In 1860, Henry received a patent for a 15-shot repeating rifle chambered for .44 rimfire cartridges. The Henry lacked the reach and punch of front-loaders like the Hawken. Nonetheless, it was coveted by soldiers, because it could be recharged from the shoulder with a flick of the hand.
|
||
As legions of mechanics struggled with this and other repeating actions, Christian Sharps built a stronger breechloading single-shot. The New Jersey native had apprenticed under John Hall at Harpers Ferry Arsenal. In 1848, he received his first patent, for a sliding breech block. The tight breeching
|
||
|
||
held promise for hunters, because it could handle cartridges that would hit hard at long range.
|
||
SHARPS: BUFFALO RIFLE!
|
||
Sharps rifles played a signal role in the act of clearing the plains of large animals. It was a period of shameless killing and insatiable appetites. The U.S. Army turned a blind eye to the slaughter, as it advanced its own aim to bring recalcitrant plains Indians to heel. Starving tribes capitulated.
|
||
In a 1930 edition of the Kansas City Star, hunter George Reighard explained how he shot bison:
|
||
In 1872 I organized my own outfit and went south from Fort Dodge to shoot buffaloes for their hides. I furnished the team and wagon and did the killing. [My partners] furnished the supplies and the skinning, stretching and cooking. They got half the hides…. I had two big .50 Sharps rifles….
|
||
Usually I went to the top of some rise to spy out the herd, [then I’d] sneak up to within good ranges. Between 200 and 350 yards was all right…. I carried a gun rest made from a tree crotch….
|
||
The time I made my biggest kill I lay on a slight ridge behind a tuft of weeds l00 yards from a bunch of 1,000 buffaloes…. After I had killed about 25 my gun barrel became hot and began to expand. A bullet from an overheated gun does not go straight, it wobbles, so I put that gun aside and took the other. By the time that became hot the other had cooled, but then the powder smoke in front of me was so thick I could not see through it; there was not a breath of wind to carry it away, and I had to crawl backward, dragging my two guns, and work around to another position on the ridge, from which I killed 54 more. In 11⁄2 hours I had fired 91 shots, as
|
||
|
||
a count of the empty shells showed afterwards, and had killed 79 buffaloes, and we figured that they all lay within an area of about 2 acres of ground. My right hand and arm were so sore from working the gun that I was not sorry to see the remaining buffaloes start off on a brisk run….
|
||
That expedition yielded “a few more than 1,000 buffaloes in one month.” The last half of the nineteenth century was the most productive period in firearms history, albeit progress came in fits and starts. Christian Sharps fielded several forgettable rifles before his company came up with its powerful, long-range “buffalo rifles.” The first patent model Sharps was an 1841 Mississippi rifle with a new breech that featured a vertical sliding block operated by a guard-bow finger lever. A Sharps rifle operated as easily as a Hall, but sealed the barrel more effectively. Like many inventors, Christian Sharps knew little about marketing. He did know he wanted an Army contract. He was almost broke when, in February 1849, he met Pennsylvania gunsmith Albert S. Nippes. The two men committed to building rifles, sharing labor and tooling costs. Though Sharps spent more of his time designing new mechanisms than he did helping Nippes, the pair soon cofounded another gun-making enterprise.
|
||
|
||
Photos courtesy Philip Schreier/NRA National Firearms Museum A vintage Civil War-era Sharps rifle, such as might have been used by a sniper of the time.
|
||
|
||
Chasing his dream of a government contract, Christian Sharps formed his own company shortly after his 1849 contract with Nippes expired. Early in 1851, entrepreneur George H. Penfield hired Christian Sharps for “making models and making improvements,” if Sharps would grant him ninesixteenths of the patent rights. Clearing interests by Nippes and Maynard (Sharps’ partner, briefly), Penfield bought up remaining Sharps stock. All told, he paid $22,853 for the rights to Sharps rifles. Penfield contracted with Robbins & Lawrence for 5,000 Sharps rifles, then spent $100,000 to capitalize the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company, incorporating it October 8, 1851. Robbins & Lawrence folded in 1856, the Sharps corporation foreclosing on its mortgage.
|
||
To this time, six rifles had been produced under the Sharps name: Models 1849, 1850, 185l, 1852, 1853, and 1855. The last four were “slant-breech” rifles, the breechblock operating at a 112-degree angle to the bore. Some military versions had a “coffee mill” in the buttstock (most soldiers of the day used it to grind grain). During the late’50s, Sharps rifles were shipped by abolitionists to Kansas “Free Staters,” to get votes against slavery. A shipment of 200 carbines got to John Brown. In the West, the Sharps rifle became known as “Beecher’s Bible,” after a news item described abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher’s observation that, “You might as well read the Bible to buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic [of] Sharps rifles.” When the Civil War broke, the Sharps enterprise was producing 30,000 guns annually in a factory driven by a 250-horsepower, singlecylinder Corliss steam engine.
|
||
The Model 1859 was followed by New Models 1859, 1863, and 1865. The strength, accuracy, and potent chamberings of Sharps rifles would endear them to hunters. The Civil War put them into the hands of Colonel
|
||
|
||
Hiram Berdan’s Sharpshooters. Initially, these troops were equipped with muzzleloaders, and Berdan’s request for breechloaders brought only surplus Colt’s revolving rifles. These he refused, and his men threatened mutiny! They finally got Sharps, though these lacked the double set triggers Berdan had ordered. At Gettysburg, 100 Sharpshooters and 200 Maine regulars held Little Round Top against 30,000 Confederates. They fired nearly 10,000 rounds in 20 minutes!
|
||
As government contracts dried up after the war, the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company shifted its focus to sportsmen. The New Model 1869 was the first cartridge Sharps with no provision for outside priming. It came in .40-50, .40-70, .44-77, .45-70, and .50-70. Only 650 were produced before the Model 1874, announced in 1870, replaced it. The 1874 in myriad forms would remain popular for 12 years. Christian Sharps died of tuberculosis, in 1874, but the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company, built on patents Sharps had bargained away to Penfield, chugged along.
|
||
The Model 1875 Sharps rifle incorporated patents by Rollin White and Nelson King. A Long-Range version shown at the Philadelphia Exposition was bought there for $300 by Colonel John Bodine. It remains the only surviving specimen, as no other 1875s were made. But Charles Overbaugh and A.O. Zischang, who had helped design the rifle, delivered a replacement. The Model 1877 had a leaner, rounder action. Locks and barrel blanks came from Webley, of England. Like the Model 1874 Creedmoor that would hand Americans their victory over the Irish in the first Creedmoor match, it excelled at distance. Fewer than 300 Model 1877s were built, in three grades priced at $75, $100, and $125. Overbaugh made 73 into scheutzen rifles. Denver dealer J.P. Lower sold 75 as “special Model 1874s.” These became known as “Lower Sharps” rifles.
|
||
|
||
The Sharps rifle most celebrated is the Model 1874, which, if you’d bought one with double set triggers in 1878, would have cost you $44. Today’s very fine
|
||
replicas can bring a hundred times that much.
|
||
Hugo Borchardt joined Sharps soon after the Model 1875’s debut. Like Nelson King of Winchester fame, who became plant superintendent at Sharps, Hugo Borchardt turned his hand to rifle design at the firm. He earned $1,855 for his first rifle, the Sharps Model 1878. The first 300 Borchardt rifles went to the Chinese government, in 1877. Its action also showed up in hunting and target guns priced as low as $18. In May 1879, Hugo Borchardt sailed to Europe seeking military contracts. He got none. Sharps’ efforts to field a repeating rifle came to naught, and the company scrambled. Retailers were given huge markdowns on re-barreled Sharps rifles. Carlos Grove & Son, of Denver, took 270 Model 1874s at $15 to $17 each! It was the beginning of the end. The Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company vanished from Connecticut records, in 1905.
|
||
The Sharps rifle most celebrated is the 1874, which, if you’d bought one with double set triggers in 1878, would have cost $44. Replicas can bring a hundred times as much now. The movie Quigley Down Under introduced the Sharps to people who’d never heard the name. Following the film, in which its star, Tom Selleck, drills a bucket far away, the Quigley Match emerged, in Forsyth, Montana. A bucket-shaped target, 44 inches wide at the top, is 1,000 yards off — a long shot for a scoped bolt rifle. For a blackpowder Sharps, iron sights, and round-nose bullets at 1,400 fps, it is indeed a challenge! Still, many shooters hit that bucket regularly!
|
||
Surely the best known — and most debated — of Sharps feats occurred at the frontier town of Adobe Walls, in the north Texas panhandle. Buffalo
|
||
|
||
hunter Billy Dixon was one of just 28 men sleeping in the tiny settlement on June 26, 1874. At dawn, a swarm of Comanche warriors thundered in at full gallop. The 700 braves, led by chief Quanah Parker, killed three whites before the remaining defenders barricaded themselves in buildings. Most were hunters, well armed. They repulsed the charge with withering rifle fire, but they were badly outnumbered, and many of the Comanches had repeating rifles. The battle wasn’t over.
|
||
|
||
Prairies where bison fell to blackpowder and ball now yield mule deer to scoped bolt rifles.
|
||
|
||
This lovely Italian Sharps reproduction for Lyman shoots mild Black Hills ammo well!
|
||
Two days later, some warriors still lurked, like circling wolves, on the perimeter of Adobe Walls. As legend has it, about 15 appeared on a bluff nearly a mile off. Billy Dixon, renowned for his marksmanship, was urged to take a shot with the local saloon owner’s .50-bore 1874 Sharps. Dixon had used this rifle during the initial attack, so, when he took aim, there was more than hope at play. Still, onlookers were astonished, when, seconds after the blast, one of the Indians fell off his horse. The distance was later surveyed at 1,538 yards. Possible? Yes. Probable? Certainly not. Wind drift aside, that bullet would have been descending so sharply that a range estimation error of just 50 yards would have caused a miss. Whether or not you believe Billy Dixon hit a Comanche at more than 1,500 yards with a blackpowder Sharps, you’ll have plenty of company!
|
||
|
||
The Sharps 1874 has come to rival the Winchester 1873 as a signature rifle of the post-Civil War West. Shiloh Sharps, a Montana company that now builds Sharps rifles after their original design, put an 1877 Sharps on its list, in 2013. Given the quality and attention to detail lavished on its 1874s, from Old Faithful hunting rifles to Creedmoor target versions — and the strong demand for them — the 1877 likely will build a list of backorders. Mike Venturino, in his book Shooting Buffalo Rifles of the Old West, confirms you don’t have to kill buffalo to appreciate a Sharps:
|
||
Some of my most enjoyable long-range shooting has been done with a Shiloh Model 1874 Quigley in .45-110 [and using a tang sight on] a lifesize metal silhouette of a buffalo at a surveyed 956 yards.
|
||
Remington’s Rolling Block served buffalo hunters and target shooters at extreme range.
|
||
THE ROLLING BLOCK
|
||
Among the few rifles that gave the Sharps 1874 serious competition, Remington’s Rolling Block distinguished itself both on the prairie and at long-range matches. It came by that versatility naturally. The first rifle with that name, hand-built in 1816 by Eliphalet (“Lite”) Remington, performed so well at a local shooting match, it drew an order for a duplicate from the match winner! During the summer of 1817, Lite, his wife, Abigail, and young son, Philo, shared a new home with rifle customers. The gun maker scoured the countryside for plowshares, horseshoes — anything that could
|
||
|
||
be smelted down. During his fourth year in business, Lite sold more than 200 barrels and rifles. Iron barrels cost $3, steel barrels $6.
|
||
Completion of the Erie Canal, on October 26, 1825, cut the cost of shipping a ton of goods from New York to Buffalo from $100 to $12. For family reasons, Lite delayed a move until January 1828, when he bought 100 acres on the Mohawk River, for $28 an acre. Remington Arms still occupies this land, in Ilion.
|
||
Remington’s first foundry and factory ran seasonally, until winter ice stopped water-powered equipment. Then, workers assembled guns full time, wrapped them in bundles and, as long as the Canal stayed open, carted them to a bridge. There the bundles were tossed atop the cabins of passing freighters! Lite traveled to seek new markets, logging many miles along the Canal. Pulled by relays of horses, Canal packets took passengers from Buffalo to Albany, a 300-mile trip, for $14.33, meals included.
|
||
With progress came tragedy. On June 22, 1828, Lite’s father was hauling timber from where he’d once surveyed land on Staley Creek, when he was thrown from a loaded wagon on a steep grade. An iron wheel crushed his chest. Five days later he died. Then, on August 12, 1841, Abigail and her daughter Maria hitched a spirited horse to her carriage for a drive to their old house. On the road that had claimed Lite’s father, Maria opened her parasol. It popped like a pistol shot. The startled horse lunged across a stream, smashing the carriage to pieces against a great oak. Abigail died instantly.
|
||
The accident devastated Lite Remington; still, his company prospered. Philo joined it and added his ideas. Instead of straightening barrels with the traditional plumb line, he used the shadow of a window bar in the bore — a superior method — and he put steel facings on trip hammers to trim tolerances. Remington bought the N.P. Ames Company, with the services of
|
||
|
||
Welsh designer William Jenks, who’d fashioned a breechloading carbine. Submitting his carbine for military trials, Jenks had become disheartened when, in one 1,500-round test, a nipple broke after 1,400 shots. Jenks turned to France and England, where his designs earned praise. When, at last, the U.S. government came to its senses, Jenks returned at its bequest, offering a new carbine, in 1858. It reliably fed cardboard cartridges coated with tallow and beeswax.
|
||
A year later, William Jenks fell from a hay wagon on his farm. He did not survive his injuries.
|
||
Lite Remington died during the Civil War. After the funeral, the Remington factory resumed full-throttle production under Philo, Samuel, and Eliphalet III. Then, suddenly, the war — and demand for rifles — came to a halt. In April 1865, employees at Ilion watched parades, as their heavily mortgaged machines sat silent.
|
||
Remington mitigated the effect of cancelled military contracts with a breechloading rifle. But Joseph Rider’s improvements on Leonard Geiger’s split-breech mechanism had been rushed, and the rifle fared poorly in Army trials against the Henry, Peabody, and Sharps. By early 1866, Rider had corrected the flaws, and Remington trotted out its new Rolling Block Rifle.
|
||
Strong and simple, the Rolling Block had a hinged breech block. To load, you drew the hammer to full cock, then rolled back the breech block by thumbing its right-hand tab. After inserting a round, you pushed the breech block forward, aimed, and fired. Breech block and hammer were of hightensile steel and interlocked upon firing. The mechanism was so quick to load, a practiced shooter could fire 20 rounds a minute! It was strong, too. In one test, a Rolling Block .50 was loaded with 40 balls and 750 grains of powder, the charge filling 36 inches of a 40-inch barrel! Firing the rifle produced no untoward results.
|
||
|
||
The Farquharson, designed by a Scot in 1872, was, like John Browning’s single-shot, a defining rifle of its time.
|
||
Designed, as were most rifles then, with an eye to military service, as well as to sport and market hunting, the Rolling Block got a baptism of fire, in 1866. A band of 30 cowboys, led by Nelson Story, were herding 3,000 cattle through Wyoming, when Indians attacked them near Fort Laramie. They repulsed the hostiles with Rolling Blocks they’d just bought. Forbidden to proceed beyond Fort Kearney, Story waited two weeks, then lost patience and moved his herd north on October 22. Sioux warriors led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse swooped from the hills upon the drive. The barrels of their Rolling Blocks became so hot, the cowboys cooled them with water from their canteens. The Indians expected a pause in the deadly fire, but none came. Retreating, they paused to look back, and promptly found those Remingtons had extraordinary reach! Story’s cowboys twice more blunted Indian attacks during that drive, but, in sum, they lost just one man.
|
||
|
||
That year, Samuel Remington replaced Philo as company president. Sam sold the Rolling Block rifle to several European heads of state who enjoyed hunting. In Prussia, alas, amid great pomp, the man who would soon become Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany pulled the trigger on a dud cartridge. Angrily he rode off. But such failures didn’t stem demand. By 1870, Remington Arms occupied 15 acres of floor space and its monthly payroll totaled $140,000 — this when dinner at a good restaurant cost 25 cents. Fulfilling a French contract, production peaked at 1,530 rifles a day.
|
||
Though Remington cataloged several sporting rifles at this time (one for $8!), the Rolling Block dominated sales. It met a different need than did the popular Winchester Model 1873 lever-action, which, in .44-40, offered more power than its predecessor, the 1866. But the 1873 couldn’t fire truly potent rounds like the .45-70. The Rolling Block did, and with greater accuracy. Following a hunting expedition, in 1873, George Armstrong Custer enthused, “With your rifle I killed far more game than any other… at longer range.” Ironically, on the Little Big Horn, in 1876, Custer’s troops carried converted Springfields, while attacking Sioux used rifles by Sharps, Winchester, and Remington.
|
||
The reach and accuracy of Rolling Block rifles led to their use as longrange target guns. In 1874, Remington engineer L.L. Hepburn began work on a match rifle like those used by the Irish in their recent victory at Wimbledon. The Irish had subsequently challenged the Americans to a long-range team event. Each team would comprise six men, firing at three distances — 800, 900, and 1,000 yards — 15 shots each. A newly formed National Rifle Association and the cities of New York and Brooklyn put up $5,000 apiece to build a range for the match on Long Island’s Creed’s Farm, provided by the State of New York.
|
||
|
||
In March 1874, Remington unveiled a new target rifle, a .44-90 hurling 550-grain conical bullets. In September, a favored Irish team firing muzzleloaders bowed to the Americans and their Remington and Sharps breechloaders. The score was 934 to 931, with one Irish crossfire. Matches held in 1875 and 1876 were won decisively by the U.S. team, with Remington’s “Creedmoor” rifles posting the highest scores.
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Meanwhile, on the prairies, buffalo hunters cashed in with their Rolling Blocks. During the 1870s and early 1880s, buffalo hides brought up to $50; skilled hunters could earn $10,000 a year. Brazos Bob McRae once killed 54 buffalo with as many shots at a single stand, using a scoped .44-90-400 Remington.
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The Rolling Block also appeared in military form, with banded fulllength stock and bayonet. Off-shore military sales began to absorb most Rolling Block production. Thousands of rifles were barreled to .43 Egyptian and .43 Spanish. The U.S. Army stuck with the 1873 Springfield.
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In 1878, military Rolling Blocks listed for $16.50, a standard Sporting version for $30. You could order rifles “as light as 81⁄2 pounds and as heavy as 15,” says Mike Venturino. “Standard barrel length was 26 inches, but you could specify any length to 34 inches, for 50 cents an inch. The single set trigger cost $2.50.” Rifles built for competitive shooting, with heavy barrel, tang sight, set trigger, and checkered stock, were expensive; 130 years ago, Creedmoor-type Rolling Block rifles started at $100!
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WINCHESTER’S 1885 HIGHWALL
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While Remington’s Rolling Block made the transition to smokeless powder and the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company struggled to keep its rifles relevant, a young inventor on the hem of the Great Salt Lake was designing
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his own single-shot. John Moses Browning was born in frontier Utah, but his family hailed from Brushy Fork, Sumner County, Tennessee. There, 13year-old Jonathan Browning was given a broken flintlock rifle as payment for labor on a nearby homestead. A blacksmith helped him fix it. Jonathan sold the rifle for $4 — to its original owner!
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In November 1826, Jonathan turned 21 and married Elizabeth Stalcup. Eight years later, after his father died, Jonathan moved his family 400 miles to Quincy, Illinois. By age 35, he’d turned his hand to gun design. Recent invention of the percussion cap had spawned the revolving cylinder. But boring and indexing cylinders was expensive, so Jonathan adopted a simpler mechanism. His “slide gun” featured a rectangular bar that moved side to side through a slot. The bar had five chambers, indexed and sealed by a thumb lever. The guard doubled as a mainspring. The hammer lay underneath and swung up.
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In 1842, the Brownings moved to Nauvoo, founded three years earlier by Mormons under Joseph Smith. Jonathan joined them and set up a gun shop. Then, on June 25, 1844, a mob killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, in Carthage. The same pressure forced Brigham Young and his band of Mormons on a hard exodus across river ice, in February 1846. Asked by Young to supply rifles to other refugees on the trail, Jonathan Browning opened shop in what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa. Slide guns that held up to 25 shots were ponderous, but deadly against Indians who drew fire, then attacked while settlers reloaded.
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Thinned by time and hardship to 143 people, Brigham Young’s band reached Salt Lake City, July 24, 1847. Five years later, Jonathan Browning brought his family to Ogden (named for Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Peter Skene Ogden). With $600 hidden in the floor of one of his six
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wagons, he built a house. Jonathan had 11 children. He’d take a second wife and father 11 more, one of them John Moses.
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John Moses Browning, here with a .22 auto-loader, developed what would become Winchester’s Model 1885 single-shot.
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In 1862, John was seven years old and riding the horse that plodded in circles to run machinery in his father’s tannery. His mother insisted he attend school. John did, until age l5. The schoolmaster then told him forthrightly, “No sense continuing. You know as much as I do.”
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Intellectually gifted, John had an uncommon knack with things mechanical. As a 10-year-old, he built his first gun, a flintlock made from a scrapped musket barrel and a board shaped with a hatchet. John fashioned a crude pan and screwed it to the board, which he wired to the barrel. He stuffed the barrel with powder and rough shot, then heated a batch of coke on the forge. He dumped it into a perforated can and gave that to young brother Matt, who swung the can on a string to pump air to the coke. On a sage flat, the boys found dusting prairie chickens. John aimed as Matt stuck a glowing splinter through the touch-hole. The blast put John on the ground. It also claimed two birds.
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Jonathan Browning listened to the tale. “Can’t you make a better gun than that?” he chided.
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He could. And he did. Growing up at one of the great crossroads of the West, John M. Browning was perfectly placed to design firearms. In 1869, two railways were joined at Promontory Point, only 50 miles from Ogden. Nine years later, when John turned 23, he built a single-shot action, handforging the parts. A foot lathe Jonathan had brought by ox-cart from Missouri helped. John filed for his first patent May 12, 1879.
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As he awaited action on the filing, Jonathan Browning died. Now head of two households, John needed to build and sell guns. Brothers Matt, Ed, Sam, and George assisted, with a 25x50 shop on a 30-foot lot at the edge of Ogden’s business district. To turn it into a factory, the Brownings ordered power equipment. By great good luck, Frank Rushton, an English gun maker on a tour of the West, wandered in to help install it and instruct the
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lads on its use. Ed ran the mill, Sam and George rough-filed receivers, John finished the filing, and Matt made stocks.
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John Browning priced his single-shot rifle at $25. Just a week after opening a retail counter at the shop, the young men had sold all the rifles they’d finished in three months! Buoyed by this success, John ordered materials for more rifles. Alas, the factory and Matt’s newly stocked retail counter were promptly burglarized. Everything of value vanished — including the prototype of John’s rifle.
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Shortly, John made Matt a partner. While the other Brownings repaired guns and built as many as three rifles a day, John designed new models. Even before he’d received a patent for his first single-shot, he had came up with another dropping-block action. By 1882, he’d sketched and built a repeater, then tackled another, completing it the same year, all while managing a factory and earning patents for his designs!
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In 1883, Winchester salesman Andrew McAusland came across a used Browning single-shot rifle and delivered it to Winchester president Thomas G. Bennett. At that time, Winchester had a strangle-hold on the lever-rifle market, but its lever-actions wouldn’t handle the powerful, popular .45-70 round. This Browning would. Bennett had never heard of John Browning, but he lost no time traveling to Ogden and what was billed as “the biggest gun store between Omaha and the Pacific.” He found half a dozen striplings, barely out of their teens, tinkering in a shop smaller than a livery. But Bennett was no fool. He found John and came straight to the point.
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“How much for your rifle?” One rifle? No, the rifle. All rights. “Ten thousand dollars,” replied John, as if pawning a saddle.
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In 1883, that was a fortune! Bennett bought the rifle for $8,000 and paid $1,000 up front. Hours later, he was aboard a train for the six-day ride back to New Haven. When, later, the promised $7,000 arrived, Bennett had to remind Browning his rifle was now a Winchester product. Red-faced, John stopped building it.
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The rifle appeared in Winchester’s 1885 catalog and was named for that year. A “high-wall” version, after the original Browning design, had the strength for long-range cartridges. A trim “low-wall” offered easier loading access for smaller rounds. Like the Sharps 1874 and Remington’s Rolling Block, the Winchester 1885 High Wall was equipped with folding tang sights for precise aim at distant targets.
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Ruger’s fine No. 1 borrows from the Farquharson action, but has sleeker lines and costs much less!
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During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, John Browning worked almost without pause in his Utah shop, designing 40 firearms for Winchester. Bennett bought them all, to ensure Browning would sell nothing to the competition, and Winchester built a lever-action dynasty on
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the Models 1886, 1892, and 1894, while its Model 1890 .22 rifle and 1897 shotgun laid the foundation for the slide-action firearms to follow.
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Because Browning’s rifles were strong, the change from black- to smokeless powder was often as easy as switching to barrels of high-tensile steel. The famous Model 1894, originally bored to .32-40 and .38-55, accommodated the “high-velocity” smokeless .30-30 with no redesign. As bullets went faster and flatter and hunters turned to optical sights, Browning rifles kept up with the trend to longer shots.
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By November 1890, John Browning had filed for a patent on an “Automatic Machine Gun.” He asked Colt’s to consider it, as Colt’s had built all U.S. Gatling guns since 1866. The hardware John and Matt unwrapped in Colt’s Hartford shooting range was homely, but, when John pressed the trigger, 200 bullets sped away in seconds. A Gatling could be fired faster, but Browning’s machine gun needed only one pull of the trigger, not continuous cranking. At 40 pounds, it also weighed half as much as the Gatling. In an 1,800-round test (canvas cartridge loops all hand-stitched), the Browning spewed a burst that heated the barrel red. The last bullets melted in passage, but the gun cycled seamlessly.
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John Browning was the toast of Hartford. By 1910, he had designed a water-cooled machine gun. America’s entry into the war hurried testing. After 20,000 rounds, John rattled off 20,000 more! Not one hiccup. The audience stood spellbound, as he loaded a second gun to prove the first had no special tuning. Browning held the trigger for 48 minutes and 12 seconds, while his invention roared nonstop!
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The Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) came next, providing “walking fire” for infantry. Its cyclic rate of 480 .30-06 rounds per minute emptied its 20-shot magazine in three seconds. John got $750,000 from the U.S. government for manufacturing rights to his machine gun, the BAR, and a
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pistol he designed for Colt’s — the 1911. He could have sold them privately for $12 million.
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From 1914 through the Korean War ending in 1952, every U.S. machine gun would borrow from a Browning patent. The .50 Browning Machine Gun round that dismayed the Luftwaffe now serves U.S. snipers and longrange competitive shooters.
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John Moses Browning died, in 1926, at age 71, while checking production of his firearms on his sixty-first visit to Belgium’s FN plant. During a half-century of designing firearms, John had garnered 128 patents. No one in the shooting industry has yet matched his genius. As prolific and practical as he was brilliant, John M. Browning extended the reach and increased the effectiveness of the American rifleman.
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Born poor in Ohio, in 1860, on the eve of cartridge rifles, Annie Oakley excelled with them!
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CHAPTER FOUR
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—PIONEERING THE LONG POKE
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WITH HIGH-OCTANE CARTRIDGES, ACCURATE RIFLES, AND PROGRAMMED SIGHTS, THESE PIONEERS HELP YOU HIT!
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CHARLES NEWTON
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Like many rifle makers of his day, Charles Newton hailed from the nineteenth century, but embraced the perquisites and promises of the twentieth. Born in Delavan, New York, January 8, 1870, Charles worked on his father’s farm, until finishing school at age 16. He taught school for two years, then applied his quick mind to the study of law and was admitted to the state bar. But his heart was not in courtrooms. After a six-year stint in the New York National Guard, Newton devoted his life to firearms and to frisky cartridges using then-new smokeless powders. Early association with Fred Adolph fed this addiction.
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An accomplished German riflesmith, Adolph immigrated to the U.S., in 1908, and established a gun shop in Genoa, New York. By 1914, he had published a catalog of rifles, shotguns, and combination guns. Some were imported, others he built. Adolph distinguished his business by chambering powerful, high-velocity cartridges, among them at least 10 designed by Charles Newton. The smallest, but perhaps best known, was the .22 High-
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Power. A 1905 development on the .25-35 case, it pushed 70-grain .228 bullets at 2,800 fps. The “Imp” built a bigger-than-life reputation on game as formidable as tigers. More realistically, it proved a stellar match for whitetail deer. It inspired shooters to think of reaching beyond the traditional ranges imposed by iron sights and flat-nosed bullets.
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Charles Newton developed the .250-3000 for Savage. Wayne fired this group with a Cooper M54.
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In 1912, the talented Newton necked the .30-06 down to .257. He called it the .25 Newton Special. Another of his cartridges, the 7mm Special, foreshadowed the .280 Remington by half a century (as did the 7x64 Brenneke, developed across the Atlantic about the same time). Also in 1912, Newton delivered to Savage the short, rimless, .250-3000. It followed the .22 High-Power as a new chambering for the Model 99 lever rifle.
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Savage noted in ads that it launched an 87-grain bullet at 3,000 fps — a rocket in those days.
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Newton came up with a .22 Long Range pistol cartridge by shortening and necking down the .28-30 Stevens. The bullet was the same .228 jacketed spitzer loaded in the .22 High-Power. He fashioned his .22 Newton from the 7x57 hull, driving a 90-grain bullet at 3,100 fps from a barrel with fast 1:8 twist. The .22 Special, on .30-40 Krag brass, launched a 68-grain bullet at nearly 3,300.
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Feeding a passion for single-shot rifles, Charles Newton experimented with big, rimmed cases like the .405 Winchester, necking it to 7mm, even .25-caliber. He designed .30, 8mm, and .35 Express rounds from the 31⁄4inch Sharps. His rimless .30 Newton had the profile of modern belted short magnums. It delivered more punch than hunters of the day considered necessary for most North American game. The .35 Newton and other rimless and rebated cartridges inspired by the .404 Jeffery appeared around 1910.
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Significant among Newton’s early efforts was the .256 Newton. Ballistically similar to the .257 Roberts Improved, it fired a .264 bullet, not a .257. Charles preferred it to the .25-06 for two reasons. First, .25-06 chambers of that time varied in dimensions. Tight chambers hike pressures, and Newton did not want to be linked to rifles that fell apart. Second, though no U.S. ammunition then featured 6.5mm bullets, Mauser produced 6.5mm barrels.
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Charles Newton may have wildcatted the .25-06 (gone commercial in 1969), before anyone else.
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Early in his cartridge-designing days, Newton dreamed of producing his own rifles. In 1914, he formed the Newton Arms Company, in Buffalo, New York. With a factory under construction there, he traveled to Germany, to seek a supply of rifles from Mauser and J.P. Sauer & Sohn, intending to
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restock them and rebarrel to .256 Newton and .30 Adolph Express. A flier advertised .256 Newton barrels “of the best Krupp steel,” with raised, matted ribs and sight slots — for $17. In March 1915, the first Newton rifles appeared in a catalog. Their 98 Mauser actions were barreled to .256, .30, and .35 Newton. Hunting-style stocks by Fred Adolph and California gunsmith Ludwig Wundhammer (namesake of the “Wundhammer swell” on grips), gave them a sporting look. They came in three grades, priced from $42.50 to $80.
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The rifles had a lot going for them, but Charles Newton’s timing could hardly have been worse! The first two-dozen Mauser rifles were to arrive August 15, 1914. Germany had gone to war the day before.
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When the Great War choked off his promised supply of Mauser rifles, Charles Newton turned to the Marlin Firearms Company for barrels in .256 Newton and threaded for 1903 Springfields. He planned to sell them for $12.50 as replacements to hunters who wanted something other than a .3006. He would fit them with Springfield sporter stocks. But rifles and components were in short supply during the war, and all plants capable of rifle production were up to their chins in lucrative government contracts.
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Though Charles Newton had to sit on his hands, he hadn't stopped thinking. By 1916, he’d incorporated desirable features of the Mauser and Springfield designs into a rifle whose only non-original part was the mainspring. He hired legendary barrel maker Harry Pope to oversee barrel production and claimed that Pope had helped him develop segmented rifling in Newton barrels.
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The first of Newton’s new rifles went on sale January 1, 1917. They got favorable press. But, once again, the timing was wrong. The U.S. entered the war on April 6, and the government took control of all ammunition production. Though Newton loaded his own cartridges, he depended on
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Remington for cases. Early in 1918, ammo was coming off the line, but the banks supporting the firm sent it into receivership. By year’s end, the Newton Arms Company was no more. About 2,400 rifles had been built. Another 1,600 were completed by Bert Holmes, who acquired all assets. Holmes sold more than 1,000 rifles for $5 each, before giving up trying to run the plant himself.
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In April 1919, New York machinery dealers Lamberg, Schwartz and Land formed the Newton Arms Corporation. Their plan was to market as genuine Newtons several bin-loads of poor-quality rifles they had bought from Bert Holmes. Charles Newton filed suit and won a delayed settlement. Marshaling assets, he launched the Chas. Newton Rifle Corporation on April 19, 1919, planning to equip a new factory with surplus tooling from Eddystone Arsenal.
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An attorney by training, Newton gained fame designing rifles and flat-shooting cartridges.
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Nothing came of the Eddystone deal. The only rifles sold by the Chas. Newton Rifle Corporation were commercial Mausers. They had butter-knife bolt handles, double set triggers, triple leaf sights. Some had parabolic rifling, some a cloverleaf of muzzle grooves to vent gas evenly and prevent bullet tipping. Newton stocks added appeal. About 1,000 orders came in.
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Alas, Germany’s overheated post-war economy could not supply that many rifles under the terms of the contract. About 100 arrived in the States. Ever optimistic, Charles Newton began anew, in 1923, with Arthur Dayton and Dayton Evans, who had helped him bankroll his 1919 venture. The Buffalo Newton Rifle Corporation, established in Buffalo, moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where the first “Buffalo Newton” rifles shipped, in 1924. They had four-groove nickel-steel barrels in .30-06 and four Newton chamberings, .256, .280, .30, and .35. Interrupted-thread locking lugs were distinctive. Walnut stocks featured a crossbolt behind the magazine well — but lacked a receiver lug to absorb recoil! Many stocks split. Western Cartridge Company, which had begun supplying Newton rounds in 1921, listed Buffalo Newton ammunition.
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Newton (1870-1932) developed several rifles. Alas, none became commercial successes.
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Money had again become scarce for Charles Newton. After borrowing on his life insurance, he pleaded with Marlin to build his rifles under contract.
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Marlin’s Frank Kenna demurred, despite Newton’s insistence that his company was on the brink of success and that, at a rate of 1,000 rifles a month, it could build rifles for $8 each. Buffalo Newtons then retailed for $60.
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The Buffalo Newton Rifle Corporation folded, in 1929, after producing around 1,500 rifles. With characteristic zeal, Charles Newton applied himself to another action design and came up with the New Newton Straight Pull Rifle. Its two-lug bolt and Springfield cocking piece suggested bolt-rifle ancestry, but Newton had also borrowed from the straight-pull Lee Navy and Winchester lever-action designs. In fact, Newton renamed the rifle the “Leverbolt.” Again he approached Frank Kenna. If Marlin produced the rifle, said Newton, he’d split profits down the middle. The shrewd Kenna required proof of demand, so Newton published a flyer soliciting a $25 down-payment for each Leverbolt rifle. The remaining $35 would be due when the rifle was delivered. Sadly, even this offer failed to bring the necessary 500 orders.
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The .270 (here in a modern Sako with an impala), came a decade after Newton’s speedy .250.
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In October, Wall Street collapsed, dashing Newton’s dreams. Even his irrepressible spirit could not surmount the Depression. He died at home, in New Haven, March 9, 1932, at age 62.
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Charles Newton’s work with high-performance cartridges set the stage for the post-WWII debut of short belted magnums. While the .25-06 is generally credited to Neidner, it may well have appeared on Newton’s bench first. A generation before Roy Weatherby, Newton had game bullets clocking over 3,000 fps. He developed bolt rifles able to bottle pressures from potent, long-range cartridges. His interrupted-thread locking lugs predated the Weatherby Mark V bolt by 30 years. His three-position safety appeared 20 years before Winchester’s. This lawyer-turned-inventor also fashioned a partition-style bullet, in 1915.
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Alas, Charles Newton’s brilliance as an architect of rifles and cartridges, and his perseverance in bringing them to riflemen, earned him few rewards. Luck does not always favor the most deserving.
|
||
ROY WEATHERBY
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Good fortune, and much better timing, smiled on Roy Weatherby. The Kansas farm boy was 15, in 1925, when the .270 Winchester and .300 Holland & Holland Magnum appeared. Thanks largely to Jack O’Connor’s high praise, the .270 would become a quick and enduring success. The .300 H&H got nowhere near the plaudits, in part because its long, tapered hull and belted base required a leggy action and a more open bolt face. Winchester’s Model 54 adopted the .270 right away. Not until the Model 70 appeared, 12 years later, would a commercial U.S. rifle be offered in .300 H&H. Besides, hunters of that day were still in awe of the tremendous blow delivered by the .30-06. It had more than enough punch for any North American game. They didn’t need a magnum that whacked clavicles.
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||
Twenty years later, however, hunters began to reconsider. Some became persuaded that bullets faster than the’06’s and heavier than the .270’s made sense. The prophet to preach that gospel and sell long-range rifles as a path to redemption afield was California insurance salesman Roy Weatherby.
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||
Since his boyhood days trapping 'possums, Roy had indulged an interest in the outdoors. But his prospects for success in the shooting industry no doubt seemed bleak early on. One of 10 children, he’d later recall walking behind an aging plow horse, watching enviously as a neighbor pulled five bottoms three times as fast with a Fordson tractor. Roy’s family had no automobile, no electrical service or indoor plumbing. In 1923, his father, George, opened a one-pump filling station, in Salina. A move to Florida put
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||
“nine of us in a four-passenger Dodge, camping in a tent along the way.” George laid bricks, while Roy hauled mortar. Growing up, Roy would clerk in a music store, sell washing machines, and drive a bread truck. Enrolled at the University of Wichita, he met Camilla Jackson. They married, in 1936, and Roy got work at Southwestern Bell Telephone. Then the couple headed west, settling in San Diego. Employed by a local utility, then the Automobile Club of Southern California, Roy was soon earning $200 a month.
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Radiused shoulders mark Weatherby cartridges, here a .257 Magnum. Norma loads Weatherby ammo.
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While insurance sales paid the bills, Weatherby moonlighted in his basement shop, building rifles on surplus military actions. His shop birthed a series of wildcat rounds based on the .300 H&H Magnum. He reduced its body taper and gave it a “double-radius” shoulder. The full-length version
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||
became the .300 Weatherby, but his first magnums were necked to .257, .277, and .284, the hulls trimmed to 21⁄2 inches so loaded cartridges would fit .30-06-length magazines.
|
||
While there’s no question the subsequent success of Weatherby rifles and cartridges resulted mainly from Roy’s hard work and brilliant salesmanship, his early magnums owe much to fellow Californian and wildcatter R.W. Miller. In 1940, Miller was loading the .300 Hoffman, dropped from the Western Cartridge Company line seven years earlier. Western claimed the steep Hoffman shoulder hiked pressures and, loaded to acceptable pressures, wouldn’t exceed the velocity of the .300 Holland from which it derived. Miller reasoned that, if he replaced the angular juncture at case neck and shoulder with one that was rounded or radiused, he’d enable powder gas to flow more smoothly, directing more of its energy at the bullet base. This done, he lengthened the barrel’s throat to reduce pressures as the bullet accelerated from the case.
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Accurate, flat-shooting rifles have made the Weatherby name popular with sheep hunters.
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