Great Hunting Rifles by Terry Wieland

Author:Terry Wieland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510731714
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Savage Model 99E.

CHAPTER VIII

THE .250-3000—SAVAGE’S VELOCITY KING

PROLOGUE

In 1914, Savage Arms unveiled its own latest entry in the high-velocity sweepstakes: The .250-3000. It earned its name because it promised a muzzle velocity of 3,000 fps. Over the years, many writers have stated that it was the first commercial cartridge to reach that height—taking Savage’s word for it, presumably—but of course it was not. That honor belongs to the .280 Ross, by almost a decade.

For Savage Arms, the .250-3000 (known more commonly today as the .250 Savage) was but the latest in a line of proprietary cartridges that delivered velocities higher than was normal at the time. Arthur W. Savage, designer of the Model 1899 lever action and founder of the company, learned early, as did P. T. Barnum, that there is no substitute for publicity. One area in which Arthur Savage truly deserves credit as a pioneer is in his use of advertising and bluster to sell rifles and ammunition.

Savage’s first effort was the .303 Savage, a cartridge that is a ballistic twin of the .30 WCF (.30-30) and which may actually have preceded the .30-30 as the first commercial smokeless cartridge in America. The two appeared within months of each other, and it has never been definitively proven which was first. In a David-and-Goliath battle against Winchester Repeating Arms, Arthur Savage turned to the power of the printed word. Shortly after the .303 Savage’s unveiling, ads began appearing with testimonials to its unprecedented killing power, not just in the US, but in Africa and Asia as well. From the sound of it, everything from tigers to elephants gave up the ghost at the mere sight of a .303 Savage.

The .303 Savage was the cartridge that really put both the Savage Model 1899 and Arthur Savage himself on the gunmaking map. With the 99 (as it became known) firmly established as the heretic’s favorite lever action, Savage decided to trump himself with an even newer, smaller, and faster cartridge. He turned to Charles Newton, a Buffalo, New York lawyer, ballistician, inventor, and writer, who was the first really serious wildcatter of the smokeless-powder era.

Newton is often called “the father of high velocity,” and that is actually the subtitle of Bruce Jennings’s 1985 biography, but Newton was at least third generation in the quest for speed. Lt. Col. David Davidson, James Purdey, and Sir Charles Ross had more valid claims to paternity, at least in terms of chronology. But Charles Newton was the first American to make velocity his life’s work, and he was unquestionably the most influential. When Roy Weatherby came along a half-century later, he was building on Newton’s foundation. Some call Weatherby the “modern father of high velocity,” and that’s fair enough. Although Newton’s real work in the field came later than Ross’s, they were contemporaries. Newton was four years older than Ross, and died a decade earlier—1932 versus 1942. The two men bore a remarkable physical resemblance to one another, and sharing a Christian name as they did, Phil Sharpe often referred to Newton jokingly as “Sir Charles.

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