What if I told you more white-tailed deer have been taken with an 1894 30-30 Winchester than all the other sundry deer hunting cartridges combined? What if I told you that you could hunt worldwide with a battery of only three rifles, a 22 Long Rifle from 1887, a 7 millimeter Mauser from 1892 and a 375 H&H Magnum Express from 1912?
Yep, everything from rabbits to Cape buffalo. I did it, living proof.
What if I told you that you could wingshoot from Argentina to Zambia with a 2 3/4-inch double barrel 16-gauge? And the 16 can throw buckshot should you get tangled up with a leopard in the Lower Lapunde or a with puma in Patagonia. What if I told you there is not a better man-stopper than the 1873 45 Colt, or the 1911 45 ACP if a man wants a semi-automatic platform? What if I told you there has not been a significant advance in firearms technology since Jack O’Connor started fooling around with the 270 Winchester back in the 1930s?
You’d call me a delusional Lead-Slinging Luddite, maybe a Lead-Slinging Lunatic, right? Editors might relegate me to the dustbin of Lead-Slinging Literary History and advertising sales reps, bless them, whose efforts keep us all in good whiskey, pay for these words I write and yea, even this very space in which they appear, might burn me at the stake. But what else can you expect from a man who won’t carry a smart phone, who shoots ducks with paper shells over decoys he has carved himself?
Speaking of truth, these things I tell you might stretch it, but they will never “rend it asunder,” which is Good Book lingo for “tore all to hell.” Yes, slugs have seen significant improvement, the A-Square partition immediately springs to mind, as does the Woodleigh solid. And optics? No finer scope around than the very affordable 1970s Leupold VX-II in 1-4x, unless it’s the not-so-affordable 2.5 Zeiss for dangerous game. But when your ass is on the line in Botswana, you don’t want to depend on a $100 Tasco, no matter how crisp the image on a sunny afternoon in Peoria.
But back to the truth. I knew a man who shot the bore out of a 264 Winchester Magnum, but few men will ever do that. And I’ve seen house guns in Argentina shot all to pieces where they think poorly of you if you don’t down 500 doves a day. And yes, I have seen military Colt 1911s shot loose as your grandpa’s knees after 40 years of service, but most guns will wear out their owners, not the other way round.
Think about it. A crackhead might break in and steal your guns, ditto some government bureaucrat run amuck. You might lose them to a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, a house fire, an ex-wife. You might drop one overboard. But you won’t likely wear one out.
So aside from supplying the clamoring demand for AR platform rifles and pocket pistols for the occasional Walmart parking lot shoot-out, what’s a gunmaker to do besides conjure up some new cartridges that are guaran-damn-teed to kill something deader than dead, at farther ranges than ever previously imagined? Or a scope that compensates for bullet drop in the dark?
Let’s obsess on the 6.5 millimeter a bit, a good lesson to be learned there. That’s .264 in inches. The first breech-loading cartridge guns came into limited use during the last half of the American Civil War in 1863 with the Henry lever-action 16-shot repeater, “that damned Yankee rifle you loaded on Sunday and shot all week.” Within 10 years, most of the world’s major powers were armed with cartridge guns, blackpowder, around 45 caliber or 11-point-something millimeter firing heavy lead bullets so slow troopers joked an Indian had time to duck once he saw that cloud of smoke as big as a cow. But all things cometh to those who wait.
Another 10 years, Alfred Nobel changed the world forever with his dynamite. Nobel had visions of blasting irrigation canals, shipping channels, railroad tunnels, to lay low the mountains and elevate the poor. But we got smokeless powder instead, 20 million dead in The Great War and a pestilence let loose upon the land. Nobel tried to make it right with coveted prizes still awarded annually in his name in the Arts and Sciences, but especially for peace.
But to the 6.5mm. There seemed little limit to what smokeless could do. How about a tiny bullet travelling at nearly twice the speed of blackpowder? Great idea, get on it Ludwig! As the metric world denotes cartridges by their bullet diameter and case length, we soon got the 6.5×58 Portuguese, the 6.5×54 Greek, the 65×55 Swede, the 6.5×52 Italian and even the 6.5×50.5 Japanese, among others. But of the whole lot of chamberings, there are two deserving further consideration, the Greek and the Swede.
6.5×54 MS Mannlicher-Schoenauer Model 1903 bolt action carbine with telescopic sight.
The 6.5 Greek also became the choice of the Austrians. Nothing special on paper, a 160-grain round-nose bullet loafing along at 2,400 feet per second but it was on the game-fields of Africa and in the mountains of Europe where it rose to international acclaim, largely due to the butter-slick Mannlicher-Schoenauer 1903 sporting carbine. Karamojo Bell shot 300 elephant with a 6.5×54, Admiral Byrd took several to the North Pole, both Hemingway and Ruark shot them on safari. Why? That long noodle of a bullet just wouldn’t slow down, either in thin air or through muscle and bone. With minimal recoil and muzzle-blast and whirling like a dervish from a 1:7-inch twist rate, the 6.5×54 tended to ignore sidewinds, inconvenient grass and twigs in its path, mighty handy in heavy cover.
The Swedes upped the ante a bit, driving the same bullet at 2,600 in their delightful little 1894 Mauser cavalry carbine and later in their 1896 infantry rifle. When the Great War shut off Mauser’s exports, the Swedes made their own, replacing the 160-grain round-nose with a 140-grain spitzer at 2,800—truly something magical. It won the Olympics twice and has been tipping over Swedish moose, boars and bears going on 100 years now. When the Swedes upgraded to a semi-automatic, still in 6.5mm, tens of thousands of bolt-action Mausers hit the surplus market. As the Swedes did not send their young men off to die in jungles, the rifles were in pristine condition. Used as is in the northern deer woods, cut down, or as the basis for high-dollar custom rifles, they acquitted themselves so well Winchester chambered a Model 70 in 6.5×55.
So now we got the 6.5 Creedmoor? Oh my aching ass! Run the numbers, y’all. It’s a Swede 110 years later. And it’s that way ever-which-away a man turns these days. The venerable 30-06 became the 308 Winchester, which is almost as good, as well as being identical to the 1892 30-40 Krag. The 44 Magnum in a lever gun wasn’t quite good enough so Marlin brought out the 444 Marlin, essentially an 1873 45-70. The much-revered 1892 7×57 Mauser was replaced in the popular imagination by the 7mm-08, which will not stabilize the heavy bullets that made the Mauser so famous.
But don’t mind me, I’m just an old man bitching.
I shot a Swede many years, bucks and boars and bears, though black, not brown. First with a M94 carbine with a Herter’s stock and Weaver 4x glass, later with an M38 Husqvarna, essentially a cut-down M96 infantry long rifle. After 40 Minnesota cornfield whitetail bucks, a dozen bears in both the U.S. and Canada, uncounted wild hogs in the Carolina swamps without losing a single critter or getting cut up by those long of tooth and bad humor, I am here to testify there is no finer medium game cartridge on earth than the 6.5 Swede.
And here are some other old cartridges worth a serious look before you rush out and buy some new whizz-banger that’s already been invented 100 or more years ago. The 35 Remington in a Marlin lever gun would be a prime choice for close-in woods work, ditto the 1884 38-55 in a Winchester M94 carbine or rifle. The 250 Savage, invented in 1915, was the first commercial round to crack 3,000 feet per second and was marketed as the 250-3000, though that was with a useless 87-grain bullet. The round really comes into its own with the 100-grain round-nose at 2,800, far superior to the much newer 243 Winchester that tends to get sketchy up against thick-skinned mature boars, often to a hunter’s dismay and peril. The aforementioned 45-70 Government from 1873 stuffed with smokeless and topped with jacketed soft points remains a great choice for boar, moose, bison and bear, both black and brown. Some hearties have even taken it to Africa as of late, but I’m not so sure about stopping an aggrieved Cape buffalo with that ol’ pumpkin slinger. Give me a 1912 375 H&H for that, with the best bullets you can buy, a soft point up front backed up by solids in case things get dicey, as they often do with the dagga boys.
The 7×57, or the 7mm Mauser, deserves special mention. It was the Spanish military cartridge in 1892 and proved itself vastly superior to the American 45-70 and the 30-40 Krag during the 1898 dust-up in Cuba. But like the 6.5 Swede, it rose to acclaim on international game-fields instead battlefields, though it got plenty of respect there as well. After he wearied of searching for ammo for his 6.5×54, Karamojo Bell switched to a 7×57 with military surplus solids, dispatching upward of 1,000 elephant with that old war-horse, though the anti-German prejudice of those times led him to call it by its English designation, the 275 Rigby. Both Ruger and Winchester went on to chamber rifles for it and Jack O’Connor even bought a 7x57mm Winchester for his wife, no faint praise there.
But there is a problem in this perfection. Most modern chamberings use the standard American twist rate of 1:10-inch, fine for 140-grain spire-points but inadequate to stabilize the old 175-grain round-nose that brought that caliber to fame. So a Lead-Slinging Luddite has three options, one unlikely, two expensive, but all fun. You might find a military Mauser with a clean bore and use it as a basis for your dream rifle. That’s unlikely but what I did with a 1908 DWM found at a gun show in Fargo, North Dakota, of all places. Bob the barrel, bend the bolt, fit a scope and full-length wood and book that flight to Jo-berg. Option Two is the proper twist barrel fitted to any standard-length Ruger or Winchester action. Option Three, the most expensive and fun of them all, is a vintage European rifle from those golden years between the Great War and the apocalypse of the Second when everything changed forever. These grand old rifles come up for sale on the internet more often than you might suspect. Hot property. Just don’t ponder too long lest some other Lead-Slinging Luddite snags it first.
Like me.
Straight shootin’, y’all.
Roger Pinckney is a native of the SC Lowcountry, a veteran of twenty-five Northwoods winters and is author of twenty-two books of fiction and non-fiction. He’s been Senior Editor of Sporting Classics for twenty-eight years and has hunted the alphabet, Argentina to Zambia. Many consider him among the greatest living Southern Writers.