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I’m a big fan of Ross Seyfried. That article read like a plagiarism hodgepodge of Seyfried articles. With the plagiarist being a little bit mentally retarded.

Actually no, both were based on the Swiss Rubin rounds. In the case of the .30-40 Frankford Arsenal received samples via the US military attache in Paris on 29 April 1890, and was asked to make 100,000 rounds based on these. There was a good deal of development and testing done by the US Ordnance too, and this included consideration of rimless designs including the 7.65 mm Mauser, before the .30 Ball service cartridge was adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.30-40_Krag

Though the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had adopted limited numbers of smokeless powder and bolt-action rifles, the .30-40 was the first cartridge adopted by the US Army that was designed from the outset for smokeless powder. It was patterned after .303 British, to which it is very similar geometrically.[7] After a brief experiment with a 230-grain bullet loading, the .30 Army loading was standardized in 1894 using a 220-grain (14 g) metal-jacketed round-nose bullet with 40 gr (2.6 g) of nitrocellulose powder. This loading developed a maximum velocity of 2,000 ft/s (610 m/s) in the 30-inch (760 mm) barrel of the Krag rifle,[8] and 1,960 ft/s (600 m/s) in the 22-inch (560 mm) barrel of the Krag carbine.

Wikipedia once again proves to be an unreliable source.

Removed from facts the article was enjoyed Pappy. Thanks for posting it.
And as for the rest of you who snapped us all back to reality that’s likely just as important.
There is plenty of new stuff that just works. It may not be rubbed with hand finish work or have the nostalgia of crispy cardboard boxes from the years of storage, but to the practical it serves the need.
It’s enjoyable to hear the back and forth after the third day of Turkey sandwiches, soup and mashed potatoes with gravy!

"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?"

Not important one way or another but just out of curiosity, is there anything to back this up? I remember reading this as a kid and thinking it was probably true at one time but may not be any more. Hard to imagine it would still be the case all these years later when lever gun and 30-30 ammo sales have been a small percentage of total sales for so long.

He is quite ignorant. What does he go by on the “fire”?

Nobody likes old guns and cartridges more than I. But his opening comment about killing everything with old cartridges, makes me pause to realize I could get to New York from Montana in a 1964 Corvair, but I would still rather do it in a 2023 Chevy Silverado…

The first commercial cartridge to exceed a MV of 3000 fps was the 280 Ross, not the 250-3000. Terry Wieland noted this in Handloader magazine of Oct-Nov 2020: "The .280 Ross saw the light of day around 1910, in England. It launched a 140-grain bullet at 3,047 feet per second, making it the first factory cartridge ever to do that. (Savage’s .250-3000, which came along five years later, was the first American factory cartridge to do so.)"
.
.A spark photo of a bullet at 3000 fps appears on page 215 of the book, The Ross Rifle Story by R. F. Phillips, et al, 1984.

--Bob

I have also doubted that statement, even when I started hunting big game in the mid-1960s. Even then lever-action .30-30s were disappearing--though I killed my first deer with one, my father's, but it was a Marlin, not a Winchester.

Have taken some deer since with the .30-30, but never with a Winchester 94. The last one taken with the .30-30 was with an outside-hammer drilling made by Sauer, with 12-gauge shotgun barrels. The original Charles Daly importing company commissioned Sauer to make them in several "American" combinations around 1900. Others I know for certain about were chambered in the .25-35 and .45-70, and if I recall correctly the .45-70 model had 10-gauge shotgun barrels.

Have, however, taken deer with Winchester 94s in .25-35 and .32 Special--but far more with other lever-actions, including Savage 99s (one a .30-30) and other Marlins.

So true, just in sheer numbers I would think the 243, 270, 308 and 30-06 might have all eclipsed the 30-30. I’ve bought a number of really fine conditioned 30-30s from the East that had been long stored away, replaced by a fancier cartridge years ago.

Hah! My grandparents and their two best friends made a cross-country odyssey from PA to CA and back in 1963, in a new Corvair. (You should've seen their faces when the "new Chevy" purchased by their buddy for the trip pulled into the driveway.) They lived to tell about it, and tell they did, and the trip went off without a hitch (albeit with many stops to utilize laundromats as luggage space was, er, minimal). The point is it's not the trip necessarily or how one does it (or the hunt and the equipment used, to keep it in context), rather the mindset - how open minded one is, how adaptable one is, and how much one is predisposed to adventure. Mind you, everyone involved in that escapade could've afforded a new Cadillac and done it in comfort and style but it wouldn't have made for a half as good story!

Thanks Pappy for sharing this whimsical thought provoking (pot stirring?) article. I proudly wear my Luddite badge* and can relate/agree with the points made - technical details be damned. I don't let individual trees spoil my view of the forest.

*All the guns currently in my "collection" (of more than 50 but less than 100 specimens in case the ATF is monitoring), with the exception of a couple recently built single shot repros of vintage design, can easily be covered by my C&R license. My mobile device has a multitude of apps that I'm aware of but have no clue how to employ, not to mention the apps available/hidden that I'm not even aware of let alone would know how to employ. I drive a 23 year old Saab as my daily driver (low mileage, manual transmission, spirited performance, excellent gas mileage) and a 53 year old car as my fun car (1970 MGBGT restored to near perfection) because, well, it's fun and reminds me of my mis-spent youth every time I get behind its wheel. I made/make my living building wooden sail boats and reproductions of archaic 19th century scientific apparatuses - mostly with hand tools and ancient machine tools. It's how I maintain my sanity in this nasty rat race we live in.

Mule Deer;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope that the Thanksgiving weekend has been going well for you and Eileen.

Thanks for your take on that statement, it's something I've wondered about more than once.

One reason I'm not entirely sure about that is my late father relating how rare a whitetail was in our area of Saskatchewan during his youth. To the best of my memory, he said until the late '50's or early '60's, seeing a deer was a rare sight.

That might have been due to a combination of a bunch of factors such as changing habitat, specifically more food and more bush growing in and hunting regulations being adhered to as rural people became somewhat less hand to mouth in their day to day lives.

While I do remember a fair pile of Winchester 94 carbines being for sale in the hardware stores, as well as seeing them along with various surplus .303 rifles in coat closets, etc., I'm not confident they killed a whole pile of deer.

We certainly never imagined having enough whitetail that some of the southern states do nowadays either.

As a final thought on the matter, if I was to make a guess, where I grew up was likely rolling prairie grass and sloughs before the land was settled and the prairie fires weren't an annual event.

Then after the bush was allowed to grow in, it took however many years for whitetails to move in, but I'm wondering if they were common back in the prairie grass era?

Perhaps, but perhaps not either.

My elder brother is still on the land where our late Dad grew up and he mentioned to me that he's been seeing the odd mule deer now in the past handful of years, which was something I never ever saw.

All the best to you and Eileen, thanks again for your thoughts and good hunting.

Dwayne

Whitetail deer populations have grown over the years across much of the country for a bunch of reasons, some of which include encroachment on mule deer territory, increases in farmland to provide more feed, and use of hunting seasons to keep killing in check during certain times of the year (i.e. not shooting does in the spring when they're pregnant or have young fawns which wouldn't yet survive on their own). There are something like an estimated 6 million whitetail killed in the US every year. So the 30-30 killing the most deer comment seems, at best, to be a far outdated truth.

prairie goat;
Good morning to you, I hope your part of Montana is getting seasonally tolerable weather and that the Thanksgiving holiday has been a good one for you.

Thanks for your thoughts on the whitetail topic, it mirrors what I've read on their populations and migrations as well.

Where we were in Saskatchewan on the east side just off the Yellowhead Highway so about a quarter of the way up the province more or less, the old timers talked about moose hunting near where we farmed. That would have been the very early 1900's time frame.

They never mentioned elk being there, but they could have been shot out by that time too.

We've been gone from there nearly 40 years and as mentioned there are now some mule deer showing up, as well as moose, black bears and the occasional elk.

I believe your thoughts on the farming making more feed is a big factor there. Likely there's a bit more large predator control down in the farm lands, but that's a guess on my part.

As an aside, when we were in the Yukon last summer, we saw a mulie buck just outside of Whitehorse and there's reports of them as far north as Stewart Crossing.

We've heard there are whitetail up in the southwest corner of the Yukon now too.

Thanks again and all the best.

Dwayne

The article has been nit-picked to death but my take on it is that it was entertaining, something that is rare with most hunting and firearms articles today.

I enjoyed it even though it was not factual. At least it was not another article about - "I grabbed my Remichester with my Leupell scope, read the wind velocity on my windgauge forwarded the info to my cell phone to compute, then dialed up 72 clicks and sent the shot".

Every outdoor writer I have read has complained about editor changes, technical errors, etc. For goodness sake sometimes its nice to read an article just to enjoy it.

drover

Perhaps one could say that the ubiquitous .30-30 (Winchester, Marlin, and Savage) was used during the first 100 years of its existence to effect the highest ratio of deer killed compared to other cartridges, and not the most deer killed to date. At the end of the day I gotta say that a hunter mooching around and loafing in the classic short range whitetail deer woods is still admirably armed with the venerable .30-30. Perhaps not in the wide open spaces so many here haunt (or that the wannabe's wish to haunt) rather the deep woods, tangled brush, mixed-use environments so common to we who live east of the Mississippi. Personally I choose other cartridge/rifle combos for this work, but invariably they are such that would fit nicely into the narrative of the author of the subject article. (To whit, .30-40 Krag, 6.5x55, .30-06, Savage .22 High Power and/or .303 Savage, and yes even a .30-30 occasionally in the form of a Winchester M54.) Again, it's about the adventure not the embracing of technology, IMO, and the technology that existed 90 years ago for these pursuits still works just fine leaving one free to pursue that adventure.

This Geezer/Boomer/Luddite enjoyed the article immensely - I often share much the same feelings.
I have wondered, for decades, when the 30-06 passed the 30-30 in kills, however. I'd bet it was a long time ago.

Dwayne,
Good morning to you as well. It's very interesting to hear about the changes in game dynamics in Saskatchewan. We used to fish up north of Prince Albert, so may have passed by your old stomping grounds!
My dad talks about when the first whitetail were seen around our ranch in SE Montana when he was young, believe it was sometime in the 1950s. Today the alfalfa fields are inundated with whitetail, and they're moving slowly further and further into the hills, into places which once held only mule deer. Elk are also encroaching into the area; more every year. We've even had a few moose sightings - a few years back a young bull moose trotted by the high school football field while the team was practicing! The closest viable moose population is in the Bighorn Mountains, around 100 miles away in straightline distance.
Your comment on predators brings up an interesting conundrum, as expansion of mountain lions, wolves, and bears in the hinterlands certainly provides changes in game habits and populations, and predator control methods are likely to take place closer to people and agriculture. Yet it wasn't terribly long ago that control methods like 1080 were used, which killed pretty much everything that came in contact with it. After the use of such compounds went away, as well as trapping becoming less of a pursuit and the elimination of predator bounties, predator populations in general expanded.
Billy

From the Ross Rifles brochure:

Its velocity is 3150 foot seconds with 150 grain bullet, or 3300 foot seconds if one desires to use a bullet as deficient in sectional density as our New 'Springfield.

At Bisley, 1908, 15 shots at 900 and 1000 yards, possible at 900, 72 out of 75 at 1000. Edge Match Rifle Competition, 15 shots at 1000 and 1100 yards. Ross won, score 73 and 73. User finally won the long range championship of England for 1908.

https://archive.org/details/rossrifles00ross/page/2/mode/2up