A rifle like Page's "Ol' Betsy" is the sort of rifle that I love and respect the most: The heavily-used, veteran rifle of many and varied hunting expeditions. And I'm sorry to say it, but that's the only sort of "field test" that means anything at all to me, and needless to say, such rifles are not exactly weekend-wunders.........
That's part of the reason why I loved to read Page's hunting stories, as well as the hunting stories of O'Connor, Jobson, and Carmichel. All of those guys hunted extensively with a comparatively small collection of solid, well-built, quality personal rifles, and those rifles were featured in hunting article after hunting article for many years.
Today, this practice is almost unheard of. Now it's the souless, classless "Rifle-of-The-Month-Club", one-hunt-field-test, appease-the-paid-advertisers, payback-the-freebie, I-never-met-a-rifle-I-didn't-love, 'Pimp My Ride' approach, which not only doesn't prove much, but it's stale, thin, and ultra-transparent.........
AD
