When I was a little kid in the late 1940s in Northern California about 65 miles north of SFO, everyone who was anyone had a Winchester 1894 or 94 in .30-30. Nothing else would kill deer. There were a few guys who hunted deer with surplus rifles from WWII like Japanese 7.7s rechambered to .30-06, a few Krags, and that was about it. I knew a "City Guy" who had brought 336 "Sporting Carbine" in .35 Rem out with him from New Jersey, but never killed anything with it. Probably couldn't find ammo.
And then there was the local "cattle baron" who actually made his living doing precision dirt surgery with a Cat, saved his money and bought land and breeding stock (he ended up one of the Board of Trustees of the California Land Bank) and an 81 in .300 Savage. He'd got used to autoloaders as a sergeant in a Combat Engineer Battalion w/Patton and could afford what he wanted. He took one day off every deer season, shot his blacktail, and went back to carving and buying dirt and putting cows on it. We all thought it was a Death Ray!
Aside from sporterized Krags and Arisakas, the only bolt action I ever saw in the field until I was a senior in high school was a guy I met on a trail so far back in the boonies behind Fort Hunter Liggett (anybody serve there?) that even the Army didn't know where he was. He had a Winchester Model 70 (SCOPED!) in .270 and a nice buck. I'd only thought that happened in Sports Afield.
99s only began to catch on up there in the late 1950s when ordinary country people got jobs "in town" and had enough extra to actually buy outdoor magazines and do what all the wonderful Savage ads were telling them to do!
