Home Forums Lever Action Central Lever Actions - General Why Is The Savage 99 So Popular?

"I now refer to them as the prettiest ugly rifle ever made".


Love it. Took me until my 60s to appreciate them.

At the same quality as of fifty years ago, that would be a bargain considering some of the offerings today. It’s always interesting to me that often guys who have a $60k+ truck, hesitate at a rifle or shotgun over $750 and make up the market for a “rough hewn” gun with a black stock.

The savage 99 was a low cost economical rifle that worked well. There are a lot of them in my area of Canada mainly for that reason. I still deer hunt with an EG in .300 savage today and have since the mid 1980’s. This rifle feels so good when I shoulder it, not really sure how to describe it. It is so well balanced. Dad was a lefty, like myself. He already had a Model E 300 savage and picked up a used EG in 300 savage that he gifted to me in the mid 80’s. You could get these rifles used in my area for next to nothing cost wise and they were readily available. That and being a lefty is what I believe got pops and thus now myself into them. I now have dads 300 savage model E in my collection and will gift it to my son when he’s a few years older. Here’s to ya pops.

Marlin and Winchester owned the lever action market so Savage needed to come up with a different lever gun. A plus was it could shoot pointed bullets and easy to mount a scope on it. I doubt the rifles were used past 150 yards very often so a flat nosed bullet would work ok, as would a receiver sight.

I still have my Fathers old 99 in 300 Savage that he used on deer and antelope out West before we moved to Alaska in 1965. It is taken out of the safe and wiped down a couple of times a year and still have the old Weaver 4x scope with the post reticle. Hope to load up some 150 grain Nosler Partitions for it and use it on what ever we point it at. I'm sure it will kill any thing up here if we do our part.

Ya, the trigger sucks, by todays standards and compared to the tuned triggers on my Mod. 70's, Tikka and tuned Winchester and Marlin lever gun triggers.

Marlin actually produced the first Savage model 1895 guns in 1894 for Savage. Arthur Savage didn’t have the manufacturing abilities to build the rifle and contracted that initially out to Marlin. The model 1895 transformed into the model 1899 in 1898 which transformed into the model 99 in 1923.

So true.