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Why the 45-70?

CUZ IT WORKS. Especially insde of 150 yards where 90% of game is shot . . .. .

BMT

Hey
We are talking about the Harly Davidson of calibers. The mystique, the fact that you can load it up, or down,BP or smokless, WIDE range or bullet weight, Cast or conventional. What do you want to do??? it will do it. Kool aid or kool aid with good liquor for kick it will do it.
Bearbeater

There is just something about going out in the field with a lever action rifle shooting the same cartridge that Custer's men used at Little Big Horn that is intoxicating. At .45-70 velocities, esp. with hardcast, you can eat right up to the hole. You can shoot everything from nice, mild cowboy loads to T-Rex loads that will shoot plumb through griz from end to end. A big, heavy, flatnosed .45 caliber bullet will knock the dogsnot out of any mortal living thing it hits. Loaded down, it's just flat fun to shoot. The .45-70 can be tame and docile like the family dog, or turn wild and feral like Cujo on a bad day with an attitude! And when I take out my Shiloh Sharps, with it's 30" barrel and long range Sharps sights, a great historical cartridge meets a great historical rifle and life reaches critical mass, and something close to nirvana or satori is achieved!!! I'm telling you, brother, it's almost orgasmic! One more reason: I'm a stubborn, hard-headed old man who sometimes regurgitates the shoot-it-so-far-you-can- barely-see-it dogma for the get-close-enough-to-look-it-in-the-eye style of our early ancestors. I'm a hunter, not a sniper. I'm more like Natty Bumpo or Jeremiah Johnson or Ol' Scratch. I can pop them at godawful distances if I choose to, but I prefer to get up close and personal. It's the way God meant it to be done...in my humble opinion.

Why the .45-70? Clearly you are one of the uninitiated!

Got my Marlin 1895 SS in .45-70 in November of 2002, too lat for hunting that year. During the next two or three years the .45-70 was my most-shot rifle. I worked up light plinking loads for the girls (I love them, too), medium loads because I could, several full-power hunting loads using 350g bullets, and �Rhino Blaster� loads using 460g hardcast at shoulder-busting velocities. Even shot a few 500g Speer African Grand Slam Tungsten Solids. All told about 19 different loads using hardcast, jacketed, bonded and solids. The plinkers ran about $2.60 a box to build and only used 13.5g of powder, generating about half the recoil of a .30-30. It went up from there to 48 foot-pounds with the Rhino Blasters.

At the range I was shooting from 100 yards to 500, with most work being done at 200. In the field I took two animals, a buck mulie and a 6x6 bull elk, at 197 and 213 yards respectively. The .45-70 was authoritative in both instances. It hasn�t been hunting since because I�ve been playing with other toys, but it still goes to the range frequently and will definitely go hunting again.

My hunting buddy and I call it �lever action satisfaction�!

Total sold, 2.
Regrets, 0.

There is another point not covered yet, and that is that the humble .45/70 is often the introductory cartridge to big bore shooting for most hunters and secondly, it is often used on the same medium game animals mostly hunted by these same people.

I think that the introduction factor as well as the aplomb that the the field performance tends to impart a satisfaction level with most users.

Most .45/70 rifle are not overly expensive which opens this door to a greater market than the true African cartridges and the more expensive rifles they are chambered in.

I have owned and used a dozen or so since the early 70's and found it a cartridge I tended to come back to, especially for timber hunting. My current .45/70 Cowboy is a nice rifle that I have taken into the wilds with elk, deer and black bear tags in my pocket and it was perfectly suited for any of these.

I might prefer to have the barrel cropped to 23 or 24 inches to make the package a little neater and more balanced looking but as it comes, it does all it was intended to do.

I also own a .458 and .460 so fully understand the difference between them all, but there is more grey area perhaps, between the .45/70 and the .458 than from the step up to the .460 which is way above the .458 in power levels.

As a cartridge that satisfies its owner, the .45/70 is one of the best but once again, it is used more often on the same animals those same hunters would have used their .30/06's on so therein I think, lays the appeal, demonstrated by the effect that larger and heavier bullet makes.

JW

I had no idea that the 45/70 broke down that much and thought it to reliable until I read this.

had a bunch of them in all config's.. my all time favoritist was a cowboy w/26" oct. tube... that thing was balanced so perfectly it defied it's weight.. it felt like 6# and went much more by the scales.. what a dream. if you could not shoot that thing your helpless..... now i hope to stumble into a 1886 UL next time....

woofer