quote:

Originally posted by Wayfaring Stranger:
None of them lost any sleep over ballistics anyway.

Okay, then why did the .various companies such as Sharps come out with bigger and longer cartridges than the .44-40 for the Buff hunters? Couldn't be the better ballistics?

For that matter, why did the .44-40 in the '73 Winchester replace the .44 Henry rimfire of the '66 Winchester??

Why did shooters demand the Model '76 Winchester and its "bigger-than-the-'73-Winchester" cartridges?

Why was the .30-30 such an instant success in the late 1890s?

Why did the .250-3000 Savage cartridge design make such a big hit with its 3,000 fps velocity about 10-15 years later?

How about the .375 H&H...why did it make such a big hit? (Puns intended.)

And so on, and so forth?

Very good posts AC!

As you say:

For three really good ones, maybe we should just "channel" Charlie Newton.

The man was way ahead of his time, and a ballistic genious. And his cartridges are modern even today, very well designed cases.

With the new Ruger brass it's easy to make cases for the Newtons. But I still use original brass in my .30 Newton:



When I get my .40 Newton together, I plan to use .375 Ruger basic brass.

Yes I would say they had a hard time But they were used to hunting that way. And There were All kinds game to hunt.

Great thread with some interesting information particularly about the Newton cartridges. Certainly a 30-06 and a 375H&H would fit in at without much comment at most hunting camps anywhere in the world today.

Game availability now vs. then varies with your area, in my grandfathers time even here in the mountains of Southern California you could usually bag a buck per man on a one day hunt with capable hunters - not the norm today. Free access to private land to hunt is drastically less than at the turn of the century but still lots of public (and public land hunters) available. Most folks hunted near where they lived, a short walk or ride to be in hunting or shooting country and that has changed quite a bit as well.

I've been lucky enough to see what a forest looks like with continuous logging and no clear cutting and it is beautiful all the time - not just 1/2 of the 80 year cycle, and isn't nearly as vulnerable to fire as well - but it isn't nearly as profitable.

I killed my first deer with a 30-30 winchester rifle made right around 1900 and it still works great today - wouldn't hesitate out to 200 yards and it works on deer size game a bit past that, but it can't compete with a modern scope and fast cartridge on long shots or just spot on accuracy.

quote:

Originally posted by specneeds:
I've been lucky enough to see what a forest looks like with continuous logging and no clear cutting and it is beautiful all the time - not just 1/2 of the 80 year cycle, and isn't nearly as vulnerable to fire as well - but it isn't nearly as profitable.

Interesting comment, but it doesn't address the need for vehicle infrastructure throughout the whole forest, if continuous logging is used in the whole forest....unless one "baloon logs", which is rarely employed by either type of forester. And, it forgets that when clear-cutting is done on a cyclical basis with very small areas being cleared (and replanted) each year, the bulk of the Forest is always either nearly mature, mature, or even over-mature.

Selective logging is also not nearly so helpful in maintaining forage for large numbers of desirable herbivorous wildlife on the land.

I too have lived in both selectively logged forests and cycled clear-cut forests, and run both as wood producers. Personally, I would rather have the very small clear cuts, to maximize not just profit, but herbivore carrying capacity as well. I don't want to create and maintain a private park for mexican spotted owls and big city visitors.

I have no problem with the federal and state Forest Services running our public woods the way the voting public prefers.

But I definitely think they have overstepped when they tell me I can log on MY land only in a manner which is politically correct in the eyes of people who wouldn't know timber farming from chroming an auto bumper.

I not only paid for the land to grow the trees on, and paid to plant the trees, and to protect each of them from fire and disease until they are 80 years old, but I pay taxes on every board foot of wood that grows and is harvested there.

Lastly, Your "beautiful all the time" comment shows not much understanding of what a properly cycled and logged clear-cut area even looks like. Do you honestly think one cleaned & replanted clear cut acre in each 100 acres is even visible most of the time? 15 years after replanting, on that one acre which was cut you are talking about trees from 20-40 feet tall depending on rainfall and soil. All the other less recently cut acres are covered with even taller trees.

You know, covering California with asphalt is more profitable too than leaving most of it as farm land, forests, and natural prairies. But leaving it in its natural state isn't what is happening there is it? Perhaps there is a legislative land use policy I could be a proponent of to solve that problem, but I betcha you might not like it any more than I like banning clear-cutting.

Anyway, no ill-will at all to you personally, but all Californians are living in a glass house when they start throwing rocks (even sand or pebbles) at other folks' care of their enivronments.

Best wishes,

AC

I couldn't agree more with the land you own being yours to manage as you see fit. Don't confuse me with the tree hugging group in our fair state. My Grandfather logged the mountain his Grandfather and uncle ran cattle on in the 1800's and for years leased from, the neighbors for the same purpose. He could tell you how many board feet were in a tree with one look and is who told and showed me how selective logging (with excellent road access as you indicated) kept the forest both productive and beautiful.

He has been gone a long time now and both the logging and grazing stopped because of said tree huggers - now after 7 fires in 10 years there isn't much left on over 1/2 the mountain - including our family hunting cabin. I still have never hunted with a better shot than that particular old timer....who hapend to kill one large buck at 500 yards with his 30-30.....did take 5 shots to put thhe buck down - he missed once.

Awesome thread
The 40 newton was a .408" diameter so will you make it a 410?

I read the biography of Frank Glasser one of Alaska's early pioneers and a commercial hunter.
He went to AK in 1924 I think with a 30-06 and open sights, he supplied the railroad camps with meat and the first biological surveys with
bear carcasses to study. The story was written from his own personal notes and one of the best books I ever read. O'l Frank sure did a lot with an -06 and open sights up there in Alaska.

quote:

Originally posted by Alberta Canuck:
It was intended to point out that the cartridges and ballistics of the day were much more advanced than many of today's shooters realize.

Were Newtons cartridges truly his own or did they have German predecessors themselves? 35Whelen for example isn't so special when you consider the 9x63 beat it by a few years at least.

Where Newtons ballistics realistic ... or guesstimates based on ballistic pendulums etc... ?
Cheers...
Con

There was nothing wrong with the cal.s they had at that time. The thing my dad talks about everytime we go hunting is that there was far more game when he was a boy and you could shoot what you wanted/needed. Elk and deer walked on the edge of town and if you went into the woods there was lots of moose. Anyone see Jim Shocky's "land of the giants". Go to places where very few people have ever been and you see game every where. You don't have to be a great hunter or need a big gun to take game in areas like this as, I've been told, it was everywhere back in the early 20s, 30s and 40s.

AC,
The old timers may have had great cartridges ... but whether they were available to all is another matter. The Newton cartridges may have been wizz-bangers but if you couldn't source them or rifles it makes it hard to be popular. A contemporary in modern times would I suppose be Lazzeroni. Only ever heard of one Lazzeroni rifle in Australia.

I believe we had every cartridge ever likely to be required by around 1920-1930 ... but that's not what a consumer society is about.
Cheers...
Con

I notice several comments here about falling game populations, and how old-timers didn't need better cartridges...etc.

That is sometime correct, sometimes not. For examples:

1. In the case of Grizzly Bears in the contiguous 48 U.S. states, for instance, it is certainly true that populations have fallen dramatically. Estimates are that in the mid-1,800s there were 120,000 grizzly bears in the land now divided among those 48 states. Now there are VERY few, mainly in Wyoming and Montana (Yellowstone Nat'l Park and Glacier Nat'l Park being the primary population density centers.)

Whether that means the old timers didn't need powerful cartridges for them, I think some might argue over.

2. When it comes to DEER, that supposed higher old-time population is certainly NOT true nationally.

One of the great reasons for the commencement of the whole conservation movement (game laws, licenses, seasons, etc.) in the U.S. was the LACK of deer in the U.S. by 1900. Unrestricted market hunting, and the use of paid hunters to feed the men working on virtually all major industrial projects such as the transcontinental railway, mining camps, etc., were the main cause of that paucity of numbers.

One way or the other, the number of deer remaining in the U.S. in the year 1900 is felt by scientests in the field of game management to have been from 300,000 to 500,000 in the whole United States.

Today, Texas alone has over 4,000,000 deer! Many other states EACH have 300,000 or more, in some cases many more. There are currently an estimated 27,000,000 deer in the U.S., or 54 times the highest number commonly accepted for the year 1900.

For more on game populations, try Googling:

Deer populations by year and state

Elk populations by year and state

Game populations by year and state



What IS worth consideration, which makes game seem more rare for many hunters today, are these variables:

1. There are many more hunters competing for the game these days, all now crammed into the same short seasons of their states.

2. Access to the game is different...not necessarily harder, just different. In the old days, the problem was transportation and an almost complete lack of roads other than wagon tracks in most of the U.S. When I was a very small boy, for instance, there was NOT EVEN ONE hard-surface paved road that ran completely across Arizona either east-to-west, or north-to-south.

Now the road infrastructure is incomparably improved, but that has in turn caused a proliferation of posted land. It has also led to the chopping of the land into many, many, much smaller parcels, which means more permissions have to be gotten to hunt widely there.

3. Game has become much more shy in some areas, because of the road access to the country in general and the constant pressure that puts on the animals. Game has also become much more nocturnal generally. By not walking about in the open, and moving much of its activity to nightime hours, naturally it appears more scarce.

Still and all, cartridges pretty much as good as those we use today were available to the old-timers (for this thread defined as those hunting from about 1900 to maybe 1940).

Many of the old-timers didn't want that power for a variety of reasons; cost, recoil, ignorance (NOT stupidity, but poorer communications), limited reliable distribution channels, etc. Carrying everything on foot or on horse everywhere probably didn't nudge people toward heavy weapons, either.

Even the more agricultural economy may have prevented many of the "modern" cartridges from catching on better. America was generally a land of some large cities, with subsistance farms and "truck gardens" spread widely and fairly evenly across much of the land.

One could argue that where you supplied your own milk, raised your own hog every year, had chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys all over the yard, a big garden, fruit & nut trees, etc., there wasn't too much need for a very powerful game rifle. And in the cities you had nothing to hunt very often anyway.

I think we'd all, at least me, trade all our modern choices for the type of hunting, lack of people, and other things that they did have going for them back then.

Red

AC
Other than deer, which you selectively chose, the numbers of other members of the deer family have fallen. Most of this is related to decrease in available land for them. Adding to this increasing restrictions on the game allowed to be taken and as you stated decrease in hunting areas. If your going to google try looking at success rates hunting Moose and Elk, this even with the so called advantages with modern equipment. In my area the success for moose hunting was 5% this year, in the 30s lot of folks would have gone hungery if this was the case then. As I stated earlier if you go to places where there is no people and lots of land the game is plentiful as it was way back when. Wonder if guys then sat around and marvelled at the skills the frotiers had taking game if muzzleloaders or natives with bows and spires. I'm sure they were very happy if their altra modern 30-06.

quote:

Originally posted by Dago Red:
I think we'd all, at least me, trade all our modern choices for the type of hunting, lack of people, and other things that they did have going for them back then.

Red

I sure can agree 100% with that, DR.

I know I started feeling real crowded when the U.S. hit 147,000,000 population many years ago. I also loved the independence of subsistance farming, even out in the desert where we seemed to have more predators than back in the Midwest and a LOT more water shortages.

Would sure be nice to be able to go back for our last years, wouldn't it?

BTW - Like your handle. You live in "Gallo Country", I see. The southern part of the San Juaquin was sure purdy back in the 1940's....
A gallon jug of DR and a skillet full of fried squid, a loaf of hot, fresh Italian bread, and we were in hog heaven. (I never heard anybody call it Calimari then).....

quote:

Originally posted by bc300winguy:
AC
Other than deer, which you selectively chose,

Yes, I did, just the same as I selectively chose grizzly. I chose deer because it was and still is the most hunted "big game" species in North America. I chose grizzly because it is one of the most diminished in numbers over the continent as a whole.

Doesn't make any difference either way.

The whole point of this thread was that the old-timers in that era had good stuff by way of cartridge designs available to them (under many names from many companies) and weren't as hard up as modern writers (and companies)like to suggest. Nor are we that much better off with all the new "wunder-cartridges". The Newtons listed were a few of many examples of old cartridges with pretty modern performance.

It is also probably worth noting that comparing Newton cartridge availability to the Lazzeroni (sp) cartridges is maybe not quite kosher.

Newton cartridges were commonly available, and there was no legal restriction on other gunmakers producing rifles for those cartridges. Unlike the Lazzeronis, I believe anyone was free to order and use a reamer for the Newtons.

If you know how, of course, you can do that with a Lazzeroni too. Just be sure you don't call it a Lazzeroni or sell it commercially as such.

Best wishes, y'all.


P.S.: For elk I'm sure the success rate has fallen in B.C. But in many parts of the U.S. it has improved since 1900. There are states having open elk hunting seasons now which had no huntable elk at all in the bulk of the era we're talking about.

When in high school in the mid-sixties I worked for farmers in eastern Nebraska during summers lifting hay bales. My favorite one was elderly but previously a hunter. He offered to take me to Wyoming deer and antelope hunting but my parents said "no". He had an old Model 70 in .270 with a Lyman 2.5X scope. He even handloaded cast lead bullets for target practice. He told me how he had coyote hunted in the past. He cruised the roads in the fall and winter and looked for coyotes bedded down in picked corn fields. He used binoculars. That would not be productive now and it was not productive in the 1960's, at least for me. However, he was using a .270 when others were using .30-30's without scopes. I suspect the coyotes may have felt safe bedding down in cornfields out of .30-30 range. Now when I see a bedded down coyote from a vehicle it is usually 600 yards away or more.

quote:

Originally posted by boom stick:
Awesome thread
The 40 newton was a .408" diameter so will you make it a 410?

I plan to use .411 diameter bullets.

quote:

Originally posted by Con:

Were Newtons cartridges truly his own or did they have German predecessors themselves? 35Whelen for example isn't so special when you consider the 9x63 beat it by a few years at least.

Where Newtons ballistics realistic ... or guesstimates based on ballistic pendulums etc... ?
Cheers...
Con

Newton developed his cartridges in cooperation with Fred Adolph. The .30 Newton or .30 Adolph was based on the 11.2x72 Schuler case. Their first developement was the .30 Adolph Express, then came the .30 Adolph and in the end the .30 Newton.

As for performance, I get 3200 fps with 71 grs
MRP and a 180 grs North Fork bullet. I could go higher, but this load is very accurate.

I have a friend who has got 3339 fps with a 180 grs Sierra bullet and 77,3 grs R22, 63900 psi. This in an original .30 Newton. Of course, this is a max load but the performance is there.

Some other Newton facts, his patents:

1913: A powder and propellant for use in a firearm
1914: A bullet, or projectile, with a steel wedge or nail in the point
1916: Projectile or partitioned bullet (Look at the year...)
1916: Newton loading tool
1917: Double-set trigger for the Model 1916 rifle
1920: Projectile or partitioned bullet
1924: Double-set trigger for the Model 1924 rifle