Hunting Arms, was Lex Anteinternet: So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in general) during the Great War and there's talk of food conservation, and you are a hunter. . .), part Two. Rifles

Just the other day I ran this item:

Lex Anteinternet: So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in genera...: what would that have been like?

One of the things I did, when I did that, was to address rifles and shotguns, but only very briefly.  I did that in a super long footnote, at the end of the post.

Well, in thinking about it, that wasn't really fair, as that is one way that things have changed, sort of.  So here we take a little closer look at that topic.

Rifles are the thing most associated with big game hunting, although in recent years bows have really come in strong.  Bows were something that weren't allowed in my state when I was young and I've never personally adjusted to them.  I love hunting, but bows don't appeal to me.  Interestingly, at one point my daughter took up shooting bows, at a time in which we were also in 4H, but she wouldn't compete with them.  Go figure.  Maybe back in the Middle Ages our ancestors were victims of Welsh archers or something and we've never really gotten over it.

Anyhow, in North American most hunters use rifles.  Some use shotguns, usually with slugs but sometimes with huge shot.  Folks who use shotguns do so because the ranges they're shooting at are really close, and shotguns are pretty darned effective in those circumstances but, at the same time, have low danger of carry so there's low risk to other people.

Floridian hunters with shotguns in the early 20th Century.  I posted this photograph in our first thread on this topic.

Outside of shotgun territory people mostly use and used rifles.  So we should take a look at that.

And it'll be sort of a short look. The reason for that is that in 1918, and for that matter 1908, or 1898, the story is of the Winchester Model 1892 and the 1894.

That may sound simplistic, but it isn't. From the point of their introduction in 1892 and 1894 up well past World War One, and even to the present day the Model 1894, together with the 1892 simply defined the American hunting rifle.  It would take World War One to really change that, and even that didn't happen to rapidly.

Even if you know nothing at all about firearms, you would recognize the 1894  The 1894, in its carbine variant, came to so define the "cowboy" rifle that it's appeared in zillions of Westerns in the hands of cowboy actors, and in fact was very commonly used for a cowboy arm for movies set well before the 1894 was introduced. It shared that position with the 1892, which so closely resemble each other that I can't tell them apart in a photograph.

River crossing scene from The Searchers.  Every European American character in this scene, except for one, is using a Winchester Model 1892. The movie, however, is set vaguely after the Civil War, in what seems to be the 1870s.  In actual history, the Comanches were defeated and on reservations by 1875, interestingly placing their defeat one year before the most famous battle on the Northern Plains, Little Big Horn, which occurred in 1876.  

The Models 1892 and 1894 were the product of. . .yes you guessed it, the inventive mind of John Browning.  His first "Winchester" design had been a single shot rifle designed along with this brother Matthew Sandifer Browning.

Browning is, without question, the most prolific and greatest small arms designer of all time. Starting in the single shot era and working into the automatic weapons era, his arms designs were singularly great.

Browning was born in Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1855 to Johnathan Browning and Elizabeth Carline Clark.  He was one of nineteen children to his father, but not as many to his mother, as his father was a Mormon immigrant to Ogden at at a time when Mormons still practiced polygamy.  His father was a gun smith and the young Browning worked in his shop.  In 1878 he introduced what would later be known as the "High Wall" single shot rifle which he marketed in a firm started with his brother that was shortly known as the Browning Arms Company. The High Wall was a revolutionary design at a time at which the Sharps was regarded as the pinnacle of single action large bore rifles and it was soon noticed by Winchester which purchased the manufacturing rights to the rifle in 1885.

Patent drawings for the High Wall, arguably the greatest of the single shot rifles or at least a contender for the title.  High Walls remained in Winchester production well into the 20th Century and have been revived as a product line by the Browning Arms Company many times since then.  A small caliber version, the Low Wall, is also a legendary design.

This, we would note, is counter to one of the myths surrounding the Browning Arms Company, even though the founding story is well known.  It is sometimes said that it never manufactured its own arms.  It did.  It just didn't do so for very long. There actually are Ogden Utah made High Walls, although not many.  But those early rifles are Browning made arms, sold to hunters in the West in large calibers.

Advertisement for the Browning Brothers firm in the September 12, 1885 Uinta Chieftain. There's a widespread myth that Browning did not manufacture arms until after World War Two. This is simply incorrect.  They did very early on, and then ceased doing so for a long period of time after John Browning's designs took off. The firm itself, or a version of it, continued to exist however.

The second myth here is that Matthew Sandifer Browning dropped out of the picture at this point.  He didn't.  He did play a reduced and soon no role in designing firearms, but he remained in the company and was a significant businessman within it.  And that company would play a unique role in firearms design, with John Browning as its chief designer.  Matthew Browning, on the other hand, was the principal businessman in the firm. They both would live, it should be noted, for almost the exact same number of years, dying within a year of each other.

Soon after that Browning designed the High Wall he turned to other designs, with the Winchester Model 1886 being the next significant design.  Winchester had built its reputation on repeating arms, having taken over the original Henry repeating rifle line, but it had never been able to make a repeating rifle that fired a large cartridge.  Browning changed that, and when he did, the lever action became a much more serious rifle than it had been before.

After this a series of successful Browning arms followed of all types.  Significant for our story here, Winchester produced his Model 1887 lever action repeating shotgun starting in that year, introducing the concept of an effective repeating shotgun, which we'll discuss, maybe, later. That would yield ten years later to the Model 1897 pump shotgun which would remain a Winchester mainstay from that year until 1912, when it introduced the non Browning Model 1912 as its premier shotgun.  Nonetheless Model 1897s would remain in use and, as we've already seen, they became the US's official shotgun seeing use in World War One, World War Two and even as late as the Vietnam War.

Starting in the 1890s the Browning Arms Company began to branch out from their association with Winchester.  At first this was not due to any displeasure with the arrangement, but rather because Winchester did not always take up Browning designs.  Before that day came, however, Browning had altered his Model 1886 lever action to produce the Winchester Model 1892 lever action followed by the 1894.

Deer hunter in the Adirondacks carrying a Winchester 94.

The 1894 was unique as it was the first Winchester lever action to be designed for the new bottle necked cartridges that were coming into use.  The product of revolutionary cartridge design in Europe that saw high velocity smokeless powder cartridges the new Winchester cartridge that was designed took black powder at first as smokeless powder was a closely guarded secret in Europe that an American manufacturer had not been able to secure until the Dupont company introduced it in the U.S.  Winchester jumped the gun a bit by introducing a cartridge that would clearly accept smokeless powder before there was smokeless powder to use in the cartridge, but that development caught up so quickly with the design that its forgotten that it was ever manufactured in that form.  That new cartridge would be the .30-30.

Regarded as a hot revolutionary cartridge in that day the .30-30 took American game fields by storm.  The cartridge was so dominant that the introduction of the slightly faster .30-40 by the U.S Army for its new bolt action Krag rifle had no real impact on its popularity and the Army cartridge did not supplant it.  The Navy's 6mm Lee had no impact on it at all.  And the vast majority of .30-30s were Winchester Model 1894s.

Elk hunter in Wyoming armed with an improbable arm for today, a Winchester Model 1894.

Now it wouldn't be true to say that everyone was armed in the game fields with a 1894.  For one thing, Browning, before his association with Winchester ended, designed one final lever action, the Model 1895. After the 1895 Browning not only no longer contracted with Winchester, which wasn't taking all of his designs by that point, but he never again designed a lever action. There was frankly really no reason to improve on the designs as the 1895 was the logical final expression of them.  

The 95 was specifically designed to take large cartridges including the new military cartridges that were coming on line.  The ".30 U.S. Army" version took the .30-40 Krag and shortly after that, after the Army abandoned the Krag rifle following the Spanish American War, the 95 would be introduced in .30-06. That fact alone demonstrates the popularity of lever actions with Americans as the .30-06 in the M1903 Springfield was one of the stoutest military cartridges in the world at the time of its introduction and it was clearly designed to contemplate bolt action rifles, which as we will see were rapidly becoming the hunting arm of choice in Europe and elsewhere.

In addition to the Winchester offerings Marlin offered lever actions that were similar and had their own following.  And very serious riflemen continued to use single shots.  Browning's High Wall remained in production for serious marksmen for decades and Remington was a serious contender in that field with its Rolling Block rifle. All of these arms continued in use past World War One as common North American hunting arms.

Remington, lacking a repeating rifle, even if had a really good single shot, was the net to turn to Browning with a rifle we've already seen here, which was introduced to compete with the lever action. That was the John Browning designed Model 8, a semi automatic.  Semi automatics offered many of the same advantages to sportsmen that lever actions did in that they were rapidly reloading and had compact flat actions, suitable for scabbards when horses remained very common in many typical hunting conditions.  The Remington 8 achieved a following but it wasn't able to supplant the 94.  Nor was the Winchester Model 1907. Both rifles fired light cartridges by today's standards, even if Remington advertised their rifle as "Big enough for the biggest game", thereby hoping to draw hunters who might otherwise feel that they needed to go for a Winchester Model 95 or perhaps a large single shot.

What was lacking in the American game fields a century ago, however, were two things. One of those things was bolt action rifles.

Now, bolt action rifles existed.  And there were a few hunters out there using them.  But contrary to fin de siecle Westerns like Joe Kidd (set in the early 1900s) or Big Jake (set in 1909), a person was pretty unlikely to run into anyone with a bolt action rifle even if they were a pretty advanced shooter.  Some were around, however.

Actually, quite a few were around, but they were mostly in Europe.

Prolific German firearms designer Peter Paul Mauser, who can be credited with perfecting the bolt action rifle.

By the time we're discussing, the 1910s, Peter Paul Mauser had introduced his final bolt action design, the 1898 and was no longer working on new bolt actions just as John Browning was no longer working on lever actions. The prolific German designer had in fact perfected the bolt action after a rapid series of improvements on them after he first worked on a bolt action which featured the new bottle necked cartridges.

That first rifle wasn't really his design, purely, but the product of a commission to which he contributed, the 1888.  That G88 was adopted by a military arm by Germany but Peter Paul Mauser went in on the 1890s to introduce a series of designs that rapidly made it obsolete.  New designs came out in 1892, 1894, 1895, 1896 and finally in 1898.

The 1898 design was so advanced that its never been supplanted as a bolt action design, and it rapidly went into commercial production as a hunting rifle.  Indeed, that was true of the 1895 version which saw widespread global use as a military rifle but which was also produced in a hunting variant in the Mauser stable of cartridges.  1895s, 1896s and 1898s were well established as hunting rifles by the time World War One broke out and had become the standard by which other rifles were judged by that time in Europe. They were also already seeing use around the globe, particularly in European colonies in Africa.

The globe trotting firearms inventor James Paris Lee, whose life and inventions would take him around the world.  He was born in Scotland, came to Canada as a child, moved to the US, and then back to Great Britain.  His most famous design served the British Empire for well over half a century and no doubt remains in some use somewhere today.  It never took off as a hunting rifle, however.

Bolt actions were introduced to the United States by a series of famous rifle designers but none of them took off as sporting rifles for a variety of reasons. The U.S. Navy, for example, seriously experimented with an early version of the Lee design which would later be adopted by the British. The Navy version was in the US .45-70 black powder cartridge but the same basic design would achieve fame in .303 in British service.  Remington also introduced an early .45-70 that was experimented with by the Army, giving the Army the chance to contemplate keeping the .45-70 in a repeating rifle.  The new cartridges made that an unwise decision and the Army instead adopted a rifle designed by a Norwegian designer, the Krag. That same design would be adopted in different, no compatible, versions by the Danes and the Norwegians (and kept in production, in the Norwegian example, as late as World War Two by the Germans once they occupied Norway). At the same time, the Navy adopted a "straight pull" rifle, a version of the bolt action featuring a cam that turns the bolt rather than turning it manually, in 6mm. That choice of cartridge reflected a race towards smaller and smaller calibers that would then repeat it self after World War Two.*

Ole Herman Johannes Krag, one of the two men who invented the Krag Jorgensen rifle design.  It was the second of his designs to be adopted by his native country as a service rifle, the earlier one being a single shot rifle.

Erik Jorgensen, a gunsmith who worked with Krag on the rile that bears their collective names.

The Krag rifle and carbine and the Navy Lee were not successful weapons. The Lee proved too slow to reload and the .30-40 compared poorly against the Spanish 7x57.  The 6mm Navy cartridge proved too anemic.  Given that, even though most of the examples had been produced in 1898, the Army adopted a new cartridge in a new Mauser based rifle in 1903. When Mauser introduced the Spitzer pointed bullet after that, the Army had the cartridge redesigned and it became the legendary .30-06, one of the two most used American big game cartridges of all time (the other being the .30-30).  

Americans first started using bolt actions for hunting with surplus Krags, which started to be sold surplus after quantities of M1903 Springfield rifles had been produced in sufficient quantities.  But other than those surplus rifles, very few bolt actions were in sporting use prior to World War One except among target shooters.  Target shooters did purchase them directly from the government, along with a small number of sportsmen, but in the case of the former it was because they had to have them to compete in certain classes of competitive shooting.  Oddly, the bolt action did not take off in North America at this time.

The M1903 Springfield Rifle.  The 03 Springfield would become the inspiration for the Winchester Model 54, which actually wasn't as good as the 03, and in turn the Model 70, which achieved legendary status with Americans.  The 03 itself would go on to be a widely used sporting rifle both in "sporterizations" of military files and in the form of actions bought by Griffin & Howe and used directly for sporting rifle manufacture.  At least one hunting variant was made directly for Theodore Roosevelt and, given the era, it's probable that a handful of other such rifles were made.  The full service rifle could be ordered in conventional or target variants from Springfield Armory by civilians.

It did take off elsewhere, as noted, and even before World War One all kinds of new and very fast cartridges were being introduce by European manufacturers.  Holland and Holland, for example, introduced fast and large cartridges in 98s that it offered.  The Rigby company did the same.  In North America a designer called Ross attempted to do the same with a custom designed rifle and cartridge, which achieved some following, and which was purchased by his native country, Canada, as a military rifle, but even at that bolt actions retained a very small following in the U.S. and Canada.  Arguably the country in which they were most widespread in civilian hands in North America was Mexico, but that was due to the Mexican Revolution.

The other thing that was missing in the American game fields (remember, I said two things were missing) were scopes.

Scopes had come into use as early as the American Civil War but early optics were awkward and not all that great.  By the early 20th Century, however, this had begun to change, again in Europe, and more particularly in Germany. By the teens good hunting scopes were being made by German manufacturers.

Once scopes are considered bolt actions have an advantage over lever actions that can't be denied.  But scopes were extremely expensive and very rare.  It's no wonder that they didn't take off.

And then came World War One.

World War One trained millions of American men in shooting bolt actions. By the end of the war, men from all over the globe were undeniably familiar with them and their virtues, accuracy and good modern cartridges being two of those virtues.  When they came home, some of them came home with bolt actions rifles as well, those rifles being fine German 98s.

Additionally, Remington and Winchester had been fully engaged, along with the government arsenals, in making bolt actions, those being principally M1917 Enfields, another Mauser variant.  Winchester went right back to its civilian line following the war, but Remington was nearly bankrupted by the sudden cancellation of rifle contracts and was left with thousands of 1917 actions on hand.  Turning necessity into a virtue, it adopted those actions to a new civilian sporting rifle, the Remington Model 30.

Early Remington advertisement for their new Model 30.  Note how they leaned heavily on the association of the Model 30 with bolt actions of the recently concluded Great War, including noting that the Model 30 was chambered in the ".30 caliber Springfield 1906 cartridge" and that "Any cartridge listed for use in the U.S. Army Rifle, whether service, target, or sporting, will function satisfactorily in this arm".

Introduced first in 1921, the Model 30 was a rifle that was instantly familiar to servicemen and it essentially advertised itself.  This changed the playing field for hunting rifles instantly as Remington finally had a repeating rifle of a type that Winchester didn't.  Winchester responded in kind by modifying the M1903 Springfield design to introduce the Model 54, a rifle that couldn't help but recall the M1903 that those who had not carried the M1917 were familiar with.

Early Model 54 advertisement which interestingly shows this rifle outfitted, right from the start, with a precision Lyman No. 48 sight.  At first precision sights such as this were more popular with American hunters than scopes were.  Winchester was already advertising a wide range of cartridges for the Model 54 and noting its suitability for any place in North America.

Everything soon began to change. Bolt actions became increasingly the rifle of western hunters.  In 1936  Winchester improved the Model 54 and introduced the legendary Model 70, which became the American standard for decades.  Mauser 98s entered the American hunting scene, but oddly often as reconditioned prize rifles from World War One rather than as the very fine bolt actions they actually were.  Indeed, the 98 was better than any of the American commercial offerings, but its commonality as a prize rifle detracted from it being viewed that way.  One military rifle, however, that achieved legendary status following the Great War and which was used by Griffin & How for its commercial offerings was the M1903 Springfield.

In the same period Redfield and Lyman, manufacturers of sights, took advantage of the new more accurate rifles to introduce highly accurate receiver sights.  Unertl introduced high quality powerful scopes in 1934.  Lyman then introduced the smaller, and cheaper, Lyman Alaskan scope in 1938.  Optics had arrived.

This essentially takes us to the modern era, omitting the very modern era of post Vietnam War era rifles and the impact of the AR15.  While there were other developments, unless I wanted to do a directly post World War Two edition of this post, I'm not going to go into them as the post would become too lengthy and dull. Suffice it to say, the Winchester Model 1894 actually remains in production, as does the Model 95, but the bolt action, equipped with a scope, is the dominant big game hunting rifle today.  The AR, however, which I've discussed elsewhere, as certainly made an appearance, however.  But this takes us through an evolution that's significant.  Like the evolution of everything, it didn't happen instantly, but it's significant for the stories we've been telling here.

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*And which is now rebounding in the other direction as the Army has reintroduced the use of the 7.62 NATO from the depths which it had declined, introduced a 6.5 cartridges for its special forces, and just announced that it intended to go to a 6.8 cartridge, about .280 caliber, shortly.