I posted this for jay in the post in Hunting Rifles forum and figured here might be appropriate

Thanks for posting. The 250-3000 is still my favourite SAVAGE cartridge and a versatile caliber in the field - an under rated slayer.

With modern monolithic bullets the 250 is a whole 'nother animal.

Well, a very nicely written article.

But what can the 250 do that the 22 HP can't do with a 70 grain bullet?

The 250 is a sexy little thing, but show me a 300 with a 150 or 180 grain bullet and I will show you meat....

The Thunder of the .300.

My favorite is the 180 grain silvertips. I have had very good luck from 15 to 230 yards.

Doesn't matter a helluva lot what you poke a deer with. Hit it right and it becomes meat. If I were starting out today I would be quite happy using my Browning Low Wall single shot .223 for deer and nothing else. Deer aren't mythical creatures with Kevlar hides and titanium bones. With each passing decade of my life I've gradually downsized the calibers I hunt with. Even stuff like the six or eight .30-06's I own rarely get shot with anything other than reduced cast bullet loads anymore. (The exception is the Garand, but that heavy beast with its wide butt plate and gas system makes a pussy cat out of the '06.)

I love the .250 for its efficiency all out of proportion to its size. I like the .22HP for its novelty. I dislike the .300 for its sharp bite in lightweight thin-stocked rifles. I'm forever thankful that Savage never found a way to shoehorn magnum cartridges into their delightful little rifles.

I related a couple anecdotes about the author of that story "The Spiteful Crack of the .250-3000" over in the hunting rifle forum. Jim Bashline was a heckuva guy.

Thanks for posting.....an enjoyable read.

Deer are easy to kill, but at least where I hunt them, they are not always easy to find. They don't always just tip over dead when the gun cracks even with a well placed shot.

The 300 makes that job a lot simpler.

Whatever gun I am using I prefer to have a bullet that will break shoulders. I don’t like to track. With today’s bullets a .223 is an excellent deer gun and I have had no problem breaking both shoulders with a TSX Barnes in it

i own a 250 Savage 99 great little rifle ! i built a new 257 Creedmoor and yes its accurate and has a 7 1/2 twist barrel and its part of the fade in cartridges but really its just a 250 Savage its so close in size and speed.

What model 99 is pictured in the article?

Late postmil 99A.

I agree with this statement. I've great respect for the .250-3000 and have taken several deer with it but, I noticed I wasn't getting the same results as when using my .300 on very similar shots so I retired it and went back to my .300. No rodeos since.
P.S. I even load my .308 and .30'06 to .300 Savage velocities because it just works!

Gotta admit, when I saw the title of the thread, I thought “stock crack”?

At the end of the day, they all work. It's human nature to have "brand loyalty" and to defend that loyalty. It's all good.

About the only thing I wouldn't tackle a deer with would be a .22 short, and a fellow Camper here routinely whacks Florida hogs in the head with .22 shorts and bang-flops them, so maybe that's a viable cartridge for deer too....

Head shots are pretty definitive. Heart/lung/spinal column are fairly debilitating too with a bullet that has the moxie to attain them, doesn't matter quite how big of a bullet that is either.

What I consider to be downright silly is guys taking to the woods with Weatherby magnums and the like.

Mind you I should clarify that I'm referring to typical Eastern woods/farm fields. Mayhaps our pardners who hunt in the high, wide, and lonesome have quite different ideas.

Good article. Couple things..

1) Creator of the 250-3000. We have a contemporary account from one of the early 1914 testers of the 250-3000 that it was Charles Newton who thought up the concept and created a long action prototype, and Savage engineer Charles Nelson who created the short action final version.

2) What the heck is this? "re-introduced straight-grip 99F which appeared briefly during the early 70's" ???. I presume he means the 99A? This is odd, considering the pictures all show a 99A, and all he had to do was read the model off the barrel.

Wonder if the rifle he viewed as a kid was like this? It's a 1941 99EG in 250-3000 with period Stith and Lyman Alaskan.. That'd be a good article to print out and save with this rifle.

303 range




284 (or Weatherby) range








Not all hunts are created equal therefore there are different cartridges for each. I wouldn't hunt brush with the 340, nor would I hunt across the canyon with the 30-30.

Bashline was born around 1930 (I remember he was about the same age as my Mom and Dad), so it would've been mid-late 1940's when he encountered the sport with the .250-3000.

Great article! I finally got a doe antelope tag for this season. I've killed an antelope or two with the 250-3000 and will use my bubbaed switch barrel 99G this year. This article fired me up to use it with the Westfield 250-3000 barrel, 1 in 10" twist and 100 grain bullet, probably a Nosler BT.

He says 1941 in the article. The week before Pearl Harbor.

I believe I have that magazine.

Looking forward to the pictures.

I love antelope venison.

I'll be in Wyoming again next year with a 250-3000.

Can't wait...

Took antelope with my father-in-law's 250-3000, would love to go out and get a couple more. We make fajitas out of the meat... oh my gosh, it's good stuff!

If you're dreaming about taking a 250-3000 chambered rifle hunting, try reading "Elk Tactics" by Don Laubach. As I recall, he starts it off with a description of how his dad shot a big elk with an 87 grain bullet from a 250-3000 Savage 99 at around 200 yards and dropped him with one shot.

My hunting mentor used a 25-35 exclusively when he started deer hunting, and never felt undergunned!

I haven't hunted elk yet with a 250-3k. Got two elk licenses this year. Might try the 250 after I fill the freezer with the first one.

As with any caliber of choice, it boils down to ethics. Knowing the capabilities (and deficiencies) of a cartridge/rifle combination is paramount - coupled with the rational ability to pass up shots that are dodgy.

Example: an animal 250 yards away that's impossible to approach any closer to and is not presenting a clean shot for a light caliber. Instead of trying to thread that bullet through a lot of meat, guts, and bone into a lethal spot simply because you have blood lust is unethical. It's the mature hunter that waves his hat at it and wish it good luck, and moves on to the next quarry. Sure, modern bullet technology mitigates many of our old concerns in that regard, but the chance for failure is still good because none of us can exactly predict the squirrely path a bullet takes when penetrating a large expanse of animal matter, or the bit of movement the animal might do during the time it takes for our synapses to start the process of sending the bullet on its flight. Is the answer to simply use a more powerful cartridge? Not necessarily - it'll likely make a bigger mess of things instead of just a regular mess of things.

Conclusion: Use the .250-3000 and 87gr bullets, or the .223 with 55gr TSX's, or the .30-30 with cast bullets, or the .22 Hornet* if you dare. Just be careful about it and don't let "trophy fever" or a hungry belly cloud your decision to pull/not pull the trigger.



* Don't laugh. An uncle of mine routinely filled his Pennsylvania tag every year with one, killing more deer with it in his hunting career than many can dream about. Long story short, he had ethics.

Back in my younger days I knew an older hunter who killed his 3 or 4 deer every year with a Winchester Model 70 in .22 Hornet. He let ‘em walk if the shot wasn’t there

Elk are big animals with thick hide, dense muscle and heavy bones.

I would not trust any 25 caliber jacketed bullet to get through the hide and even so much as a rib of an elk without breaking up.

If shooting at deer is like shooting at 7/16' plywood then shooting at elk is like shooting at cinder blocks.

Taking your 25 caliber deer rifle with deer loads in it and expecting it to humainly and constistantly take elk is pretty niave. The fact that somebody else has done it before doesn't make it a great idea.

So many better choices.

If Barnes could/would make a monometal TSX .25 bullet of a length to function in our slow twist Savage barrels it would negate that premise, I believe. I'm a Luddite in many ways but even I can understand the tremendous advances in modern bullet technology that have pretty much evaporated the wisdom of our fathers in such regards. A TSX out of a .223 will smash through both shoulders of a deer and cause mayhem in between (and I'm not advocating for .22's for elk mind you), so why wouldn't a larger one do the same in an elk?

I thought this was a political thread, saw "spiteful crack" and old dim brain flashed on image of Meghan McCain.

David has a Westfield 1-10” twist barrel on his 250-3000, so hunting with premium bullets is an option for him. I don’t know that an elk is so tough that it would be unethical to hunt it with a 100gr Partiition, for example.

I've used the 75 grain original Barnes X in 1-14" ROT barrels to shoot whitetails with rifles chambered in 250-3000 and 25 WSSM. I bought a couple hundred of them many years ago so that I could shoot deer with rifles that had been zeroed with 75 grain VMax without having to rezero them. Not the most accurate bullets in the World, but accurate enough for shooting medium game.

And still no one noticed the November 31, 1941 date.

Just because nobody mentiond it does NOT mean nobody noticed it.;

On the right track now.

In a 1-10 barrel the 120 grain partition would probably be a better choice than the 100.

If somebody had a bug up their butt to kill an elk with a 257, the 120 in the 25-06 makes a lot more sense to me.

People can do whatever they want.

JMO

David

I too have a 250 Savage with a Westfield barrel. It’s a 1956 model “F”that has a Westfield barrel. Must have been a leftover receiver they had after the move to Westfield. I have several loads that work well with 100 grain bullets. I use 100 grain Nosler Partitions for my hunting load and they’ve never failed me. The 1 in 10 twist gives you lots of options.

Joe

As far as 257 diameter bullets go, I shot an elk at over 300 yards with my 257 Weatherby. I used a 100 grain partition. The bullet went between two ribs and created a lot of mayhem to the lungs and heart. BANG, FLOP! The interesting thing is that it pealed some of the jacket off on the ribs. There was a small piece of jacket under the skin on each side of the ribs. Back then I normally hunted elk with the 300 Weatherby but I was celebrating the fact that I had owned the 257 for 40 years by hunting everything with it that year. That was 2008.
If I hunt elk with the 250-3K I won't take a shot at more than 150 Yards. I may have some 117 or 120 grain bullets. I'll try them at the range if I can find them. It shoots real good groups with the 100's.

As far as 257 diameter bullets go, I shot an elk at over 300 yards with my 257 Weatherby. I used a 100 grain partition. The bullet went between two ribs and created a lot of mayhem to the lungs and heart. BANG, FLOP! The interesting thing is that it pealed some of the jacket off on the ribs. There was a small piece of jacket under the skin on each side of the ribs. Back then I normally hunted elk with the 300 Weatherby but I was celebrating the fact that I had owned the 257 for 40 years by hunting everything with it that year. That was 2008.
If I hunt elk with the 250-3K I won't take a shot at more than 150 Yards. I may have some 117 or 120 grain bullets. I'll try them at the range if I can find them. It shoots real good groups with the 100's.

You can say that again!