<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr><strong>I didn't see your letter in the American Rifleman, but I've been contemplating cobbling-up a Whelen on a Win 70 (crf) action.</strong><hr></blockquote><p>Lest anyone think you've missed (in that letter) some kind of useful information on the .35 Whelen, here's the letter as I wrote it. (It may be a bit shorter in the magazine -- I haven't compared.) If you didn't see the letter there, you didn't miss much -- as you'll see.
___________________________________________<p>My friend Bryce Towsley ("From the Loading Bench," October 2001) is but the latest of a long line of fellows who've wondered whether James V Howe or Colonel Townsend Whelen developed the .35 Whelen. As well as I've been able to figure it, the question originated with some earlier writer's erroneous assumption that wildcats tagged with men's names always bear the names of the men who develop them, and the further assumption that the tag "Whelen" on this great cartridge indicates that the colonel designed it.
No less an authority on the .35 Whelen than Colonel Townsend Whelen himself settled the question many years ago. He wrote about it (page 185 in his book Why Not Load Your Own):<p>"This cartridge was developed by James V. Howe in 1922, and was named for the writer, the idea being a cartridge, more powerful than the .30-06, that could be used in any bolt action suitable for the latter cartridge without alteration."<p>The colonel also wrote essentially the same sentence in another place -- I don't remember where -- in a little more detail. The only Whelen sentence that I know of, that would seem to indicate otherwise, was a single phrase where the colonel rather casually referred to the .35 Whelen as [approximately] "this cartridge of mine" -- an allusion fully consistent with the fact that Howe had originated it and had named it for the colonel as a tribute and honor, not an indelible claim that he had developed it himself. I know of no such claim by Colonel Whelen.
_________________________________<p>I did notice that for some mysterious reason the Editor deleted "Director, International Cartridge Archives" from below my name when he printed my letter in the magazine.
