A Neat Piece of History
This is the story of the largest American black-powder cartridge ever imagined in the 19th century, and one of the biggest ever. And it all started with a publicity stunt.
Starting with the advent of brass-cased, self-contained cartridges, some manufacturers started producing something called a “cartridge board,” a board that could be hung on the wall with (presumably inert) examples of every cartridge for which they produced a rifle, handgun, or shotgun. Winchester, among other companies, produced these boards, and in the late 19th century, someone at Winchester got the bright idea that, in these promotions, Winchester should show that they were the biggest and the baddest. So someone got ahold of a brass 12-gauge shotgun hull, necked it down slightly, and stuck a big cast lead bullet on the end. Bear in mind that brass shotgun hulls were in common use in those days, as paper cartridges weren’t always resistant to damp, and plastic cartridges wouldn’t be available for several decades yet.
Thus was born the .70-150 Winchester. But remember when I described it as the largest ever imagined? Here’s why.
The Cartridge
In 1888, black powder was still the only game in town, and with the limited velocities obtainable with black powder, more power meant heavier, larger-caliber bullets; in fact, if you want a perfect illustration of the difference between black-powder cartridges and the comparatively modern first and second generation smokeless-powder, high-velocity cartridges, just set a .45-70 Government and a .30-06 Springfield cartridges side by side.
But back in the black powder days, size did matter, and bigger was indeed better. That led Winchester, in that fateful year of 1888, to put out the mythical .70-150 on their cartridge boards, so they could brag about having the biggest and the baddest. There was just one problem: You couldn’t buy one.
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The cartridge, though, was a whopper – or, at least, it would have been. With a .705 caliber, 900-grain bullet over 150 grains of black powder, the claimed velocity of 1,500 feet per second would give you muzzle energy of 3,800 foot-pounds. That’s probably overkill for a bison. Most of the examples of the cartridge one can find, though, are clearly dummy rounds, with no primer and holes drilled in the case. This was indeed a whopper of an attention-getter, and for the most part, that’s all it was.
The Rifle
Most reports claim only two rifles were ever produced for this stomper of a cartridge, and of course, the gun was – indirectly – once more a product of the Leonardo DaVinci of firearms, John Browning. The company, or somebody associated with Winchester, took two Browning-designed 1887 lever-action shotguns in 12 gauge and stuck a new barrel on them. The barrels were 24 inches long by most reports, and were only rifled for about the last six inches of the bore.
From what I was able to learn about this gun, from John Maddis’s excellent The Winchester Book and a few other sources, one of these guns was test-fired at the Winchester plant, and it exploded. With that lesson learned, nobody wanted to try firing the intact gun. Nowadays, both the detonated gun and the intact one were, at last report, at the Cody Firearms Museum.
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But shooters being what and who they are, the story doesn’t end there.
The Replicas
As it happens, the replica company Chiappa makes an excellent, modern, manufactured replica of the Winchester 1887 lever-action shotgun. There are other replicas of this unique arm, including some made in China; the ones I’ve handled from China would make excellent fenceposts, but as firearms, I can’t recommend them, as they were of such poor workmanship that I wouldn’t want to try firing one. Some of these guns have been converted to the whopping .70-150 rounds.
One outfit, the Wyoming Armory, lists one of these guns for sale for $3,500. One can dump a lot more than that into a unique, one-of-a-kind shooting iron, but one doesn’t come along a bruiser like the lever-action .70-150 every day. But it gets better; for that price, you also get the original 12-gauge shotgun barrel and magazine, so you get two guns for the (high) price of one. This monster weighs in at about eight and a half pounds, with a 22-inch rifle barrel and a 28-inch shotgun barrel.
Shooting this thing is, apparently, a challenge. But we happen to know of one guy who was up for the challenge:
That’s the thing about American shooters and gun-nuts; we love the unusual, the odd, and most of all, the challengingly powerful. Well, most of us do. My oldest friend, whom I have known for over half a century, is fond of low-recoil trap loads and 22 rimfire rifles and pistols. As for me, though, I like the big stuff, operating as I do on the principle that you can shoot little stuff with a big gun, but you can’t shoot big stuff with a little gun. Here in the Great Land, of course, we’ve got the biggest of the big stuff, so I go afield with either a .338 Winchester Magnum or a Marlin 1895G in .45-70, so I’m ready for any eventuality. And as for the unusual, I’m guilty there as well; when I was seeking a .45 Colt carbine to complement my pair of .45 Colt sixguns, I didn’t go with the ubiquitous 1892 Winchester replicas, but instead a replica of the 1860 Spencer. What can I say? I like to make the guys on the range walk over and ask, “Hey, just what the heck have you got there?”The .70-150 may well be a bridge too far for me. But it’s a neat footnote in the history of American arms – and even neater that some enterprising sorts have taken a thunderous doom stomper of a cartridge intended as a publicity stunt 140 years ago, and made it into the real thing. If that’s not America, I don’t know what is.
