For the most part, though, I’m a practical kind of guy, and most of my rifles are hunting rifles. While plenty of folks love to play with custom calibers or line up to buy the first examples of the latest Eargesplitten Loudenboomer Magnum, I’m pretty content to stick with cartridges that have been around a while.

Now, admittedly, I’ve got quite a few more rifles than I need for just hunting North American big game, like buck mulies, big bull elk, or even the Great Land’s moose and grizzlies. I load for and shoot rifles in the .22 Hornet (developed in the 1920s and adopted by Winchester in 1930), the .45-70 (developed in 1873), the .338 Winchester Magnum (developed in 1958), and the .30 WCF (developed in 1895).

Availability and Popularity

Most of these cartridges are readily available in any large gun or sporting-goods store; hell, you can buy many of them in Wal-Mart, at least some kind of ammo to get you shooting. But when it comes to the availability of ammo, for most purposes, you still can’t really beat the grand old .30-06 Springfield. The ’06 may be 119 years old, but it’s still one of the best big-game rounds going; if I know someone interested in learning the ins and outs of hunting and shooting who wants to buy a single rifle for North American big game, I advise them to buy a .30-06. It will easily handle anything from antelope to moose, although it may be a bit on the light side for big Alaskan bears and the largest bull Alaska-Yukon moose. But the ’06 has a huge advantage for those packing one gun across long distances, perhaps in airline checked baggage: If you lose your ammo supply somewhere en route, you can walk into almost any gas station, bait shop, or general store (there are still some around) and buy at least some kind of ammo that you can re-zero and get to work with.

See Also: Sunday Gun Day X - The Grand Old .30-06

The only other rifle cartridge that you can say that about is perhaps the old .30 WCF (.30-30, for those not familiar with the original name) and the trienta-trienta cartridge is popular enough from the Yukon to the Canal Zone, but not quite up to game like elk or moose. It’s strictly a 150-200-yard cartridge for deer-sized game.

I reckon the .30-06 will be around at least as long as I am. Rifle and cartridge design haven’t changed all that much, overtly, in the last 100 years; most modern bolt-action rifles are adaptations of the 1898 Mauser, and scores of cartridges, wildcat and otherwise, are still based on the .30-06 case. What has advanced in the shooting world is metallurgy, ammunition propellants and projectiles, and optics. But a good case design is a good case design, which is why the .30-06 remains one old dog that’s learned lots of new tricks.

But then, there’s the oddity in the shooting sports called the “wildcatter.”

The Wildcatters

A “wildcat” cartridge is a rifle or handgun cartridge that has not been offered for commercial sale. These are typically hand-made, by altering existing cartridge cases by fire-forming, trimming, reducing neck sizes in the necked case (this is known as “necking up” or “necking down,” as it applies), and so on.

While the term brings up mental images of the aforementioned Eargesplitten Loudenboomer, wildcats run the gamut from large to small and everything in between. Some guns chambered for certain wildcats can still digest commercial ammo. For quite a few years, I thought about having my favorite .30-06 rechambered for the .30-06 Ackley Improved, cases for which are made from fire-forming standard .30-06 brass. This is done, in the case of these guns, by simply firing a standard .30-06 round in the Ackley Improved chamber; then the brass can be reloaded with the Ackley Improved dies, and the extra case capacity brings the improved round up to (more or less) .300 Holland & Holland Magnum ballistics.

Some wildcats eventually become legitimized when a big gun company or ammo manufacturer picks them up. Examples include the .22-250 Remington, the .25-06 Remington (originally the .25 Neidner), and the .300 Winchester Magnum, developed from the popular .30-.338 Win Mag wildcat, which was the .338 Win Mag necked down to take a .30 caliber pill.

Wildcatters can get downright creative, using minuscule bullet diameters down to .10” – a tenth of an inch. Several such rounds were brought out by one Bill Eichelberger. There is the .10 Eichelberger Long Rifle, based on necking down a .22 long rifle case to accept a .103 diameter 7.2 grain bullet, which it drives at a modest 2,160 fps. But then he has the .10 Eichelberger Pup, based on Cooper CCM brass that pushes that same diminutive pill at 3,600 fps, and the .10 Eichelberger Squirrel, based on .22 Hornet brass, pushing that bullet at over 4,000 fps.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a good purpose for these rounds.

Moving up the caliber scale, you’ve got to love a cartridge wonderfully named the .240 Page Sooper Pooper. Warren Page came up with this round while evaluating a predecessor of the .243 Winchester, but Page thought that the 6mm round would profit from a longer neck and a sharper shoulder. The new 6 mm-308, later called the 6mm Winchester, then finally the .243 Winchester, came in with a 17-degree shoulder and a short .241” neck, as opposed to the .240 PSP’s 28-degree shoulder and 5/16” neck. The .240 PSP would toss a pill at 150 to 200 fps faster than the new .243 – not an overwhelming advantage, but it’s there.

Then there are the big bruisers.

See Also: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. VII - Monster Handguns: Why?

The .585 Nyati may be the most powerful round ever produced for a shoulder-fired rifle – and bear in mind that includes the .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) round. The big .585 pushes a 750-grain Barnes solid at 2,525 fps for right around five tons of muzzle energy. If you wanted to go hunting a Tyrannosaurus rex, this would be the rifle for you. In fact, with this beast, in today’s world, you’d be overgunned for anything short of an armored personnel carrier.

But there may be one bigger. There are reports of a guy named Ed Hubel, who made a wildcat round based on the brass 12-gauge shotgun cartridge, lengthened; I won’t hazard a guess how the brass was produced. The round is called the “12 Gauge From Hell (GFH)” and there are ballistics available: A 600-grain slug launched at 3,400 fps, giving an earth-shaking 15,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy.

Thanks, but no. Recoil on that beast would be bone-cracking.

For a complete picture of all the oddball wildcats out there, along with every commercial and proprietary rifle, shotgun, and handgun cartridge ever made, anywhere, I recommend the book “Cartridges of the World,”  by Frank Barnes and W. Todd Woodard, which is updated (I think) annually. I keep an electronic copy for easy updating, and it’s an interesting work that includes not only standard American but also obsolete round, British, and European rounds, both current and obsolete, and of course, wildcats. While cartridge minutia is entertaining, the wonderful world of wildcats can consume hours, just getting a good bead on some of the odd stuff gun cranks come up with.

I’ve spent hours poring over that “Cartridges of the World,” but then, I’m into firearms history and minutia, which, I suppose, qualifies me to bring you these reports every Sunday.