I'm not a reloader. Yet. Working on that as well.
As for 45-70 nostalgia, there were still millions of Bison in the early to mid 1870s, and no doubt the 45-70 did its share of damage. The 50 caliber, breechloading Sharps and Springfields (50-79, 50-90, etc), as well as surplus rifle-muskets from the war (.58), just had a little head start on them. But Moose is corrext. There weren't any bison conservation laws in the 1870s (though Grant was generally more empathetic to Indian affairs than he gets credit... as opposed to Sheridan and company). The bison range shrinks and moves northwest over the course of the 1870s and early 1880s, from tens of millions to less than a million, but more recent studies (1980s forward)suggest the starting population was smaller than previously estimated and that Indians did more thinning than previously realized.
