What were the main rounds (pistol and long rifle) used in cowboy times? I assume with lever actions and six shooters they would want every shot to count so no 9mms or other weak rounds.
Hell, was the whole fraction of an inch barrel diameter/gauge terminology standardised back then? how would they have talked about stuff like this? Decimal points seem a bit too mathy for cowboys, would it have been all "3/10ths of an inch" for .303 rounds for instance?
Lever actions were actually pretty rare in "cowboy" times, owning a levergat back then was like owning a gucci SCAR-17 today, most folk were actually sporting single shot rifles and shotguns.
youtube.com
I mean, what time in the old west? You kinda went from black powder, to the golden age of rimfire, to center fire.
I'm just gonna say 45 lc, 45-70.
The measurement was a little different though. Like today we say 9x19, 9 millimeter diameter by 19 millimeters long.
45-70 was .45 inches around but the 70 was grains of powder instead of length of cartridge.
They had "cowboy" pressures, which is alot fucking lower than 9mm
45/70 govt
357 mag
44 mag
There are others a quick Google search will show u.
303 wasn't used much until the end of the "cowboy" era.
Decimal points were not too "mathy" for cowboys. The gunsmiths definitely measured in small increments along with all kinds of engineers and builders. They weren't a bunch of total mongoloids, they built the American west boy
Prolly .45 Long Colt and 45-70 Government.
Most late-1800's black powder cartridges were measured by the bore diameter and how much black powder they could hold. So the 45-70, for instance, was 45 caliber and could hold 70 grains of black powder. TR's fave cartridge was the stretched version called the 45-90. And so forth.
Lower than 9mm in comparable calibers for handguns****
45lc not 44 mag**
>44 mag
>1958
>cowboy times
You'd best be trolling, partner
Oh shit, is that where the Selous scouts get there name?
I don't mean they couldn't measure that finely, I mean, especially non-gunsmiths, cowboys and regular folks using the decimal point terminology rather than fractions, when people are saying "four score and 7 years ago" and numeracy and literacy would have been almost nil, seems a bit odd for them to be talking in terms of decimal points to 3 significant figures.
9mm is significantly more powerful than "cowboy rounds" that were mostly black powder and at the end some 38 special which 9mm still is much more powerful than. 357 and 44 mag didn't come around till the 1900s and you clearly thought they were around at the time cause of Hollywood movies. Educate yourself before posting. There were a few handgun rounds that were powerful at the time but vast majority were weaker than 9mm by a lot, especially black powder shit.
For the actual winning of the west you're looking at mostly round ball from percussion arms in .36 or .44 for handguns and over .50 for long arms. Metallic cartridges came about pretty late into the tail end of the Indian Wars. The entirety of the Mexican American War was fought with powder and ball.
I can’t confirm this but I’ve heard a similar thing
>nobody was really using Colt SAA’s
>most pistols even when metallic cartridges were a thing were old black powder cap and ball revolvers from the civil war
Hollywood has absolutely butchered the history of the Old West.
I am drunk, sunsoaked and tired.
And I corrected myself before you posted so ha
Er..... yes. Frederick Selous was a guy. Not a placename or regiment or something.
That's true enough in rural NorCal in the old gold rush country. All the old men I knew when I was a kid who knew the gold miners when *they* were kids told me so.
Yeah if you were using cartridges in your revolver odds are it was a conversion like a 1851 Colt Navy or something. Your average poor homesteader wouldn’t blow the cash to get a fancy new SAA or Schofield or whatever
44-40
38-40
.45LC
.44 Henry
45-70
12 gauge, probably.
I've heard that .44-40 and .38-40 were among the most popular, since they were used in both revolvers and rifles. And despite what everyone thinks, .45LC wasn't used in period rifles, for reasons that remain baffling to this day.
Also worthy of note would be the million or so oddball single-shot rifle cartridges, from the fairly mundane like the .50-70 Gov't and .45-90 Winchester to whatever the fuck insane thing Maynard was making any given year (pic related).
Define "cowboy times" hat ranges from the early 1800's to the early 1900's
That stretches from before metallic cartridges were invented to the first semi auto's
So try asking a less dumb question?
Most people of that era couldn't afford nice guns like the Model Army, they were using cheap pepper box revolvers and such. Kinda like today how most people are using shitty Taurus' and M&P shied's, not custom 1911's and USP's
For long guns something like a shingle shot Hawken was pretty popular, revolvers ranged in caliber from .36 to .44.
After that you get into breach loading rifles and cartage revolvers. There were a ton of calibers for the breach loaders ranging from .44-77 to 50-110. For revolvers .44 and .45 colt were popular, but like I said most people were using shit guns.
In later periods I guess 30-30 and .38 S&W
Also here are some numbers I found
truewestmagazine.com
I'd pick a bugle
historynet.com
I wonder all the time how much longer he'd have held out with chainmail coat and a broadsword, but shit either way he's drowning in Valkyrie pussy right now.
everybody interested in 19th century North American frontier warfare should read
>9 Years Among the Indians by Herman Lehmann
>Scalp Dance by Thomas Goodrich
>6 Years With the Texas Rangers by Thomas Gillett
I didn't realize that Indians were still using archery in combat right up through the 1880's. Indians' big advantage was mobility, decentralized command structure and high morale/willingness to kill. Anybody in a Comanche raiding party for example, had already been vetted as cold-blooded or else they wouldn't be there whereas depending on your army unit or wagon train you might be stuck with guys who never practiced shooting or were't aggressive in a fight, which is where you see the big massacres occurring. But when you had white men who'd been selected for their ability to kick ass like Texas Rangers you see handfuls of troops, miners, buffalo hunters kicking the shit out of surprisingly large amounts of badass Indians.
There was a lot of heirloom guns from the civil war that carried over. Lever guns became more common as the years went on, but would have been a luxury item in the 1860s. Smokeless powder hadn't taken off yet, and an abundance of paper cartridges and musket balls alike would have been common. I suspect for many it was a matter of whatever you had on hand, or could get.
Can also indirectly confirm much of this, cap and ball or black powder was just cheaper overall back then, than the cartridge firearms we see today. Many of the older calibers are still effective as hunting round to this day.
>357 mag
>44 mag
>Cowboy times
Are you retarded?
I was watching Jeremiah Johnson the other day and noticed how much of a big deal they made out of the Hawken rifle. Would a high end muzzleloader be extremely expensive back in the early 1800s?
How can you stand to watch Robert Redford? He's such a boomer ass.
artist?
>how would they have talked about stuff like this?
Most rounds from that era had very simple names, like 45-70, for example. First number is caliber, second number is the weight of the gunpowder in grains. A 45-70 is a .45 caliber with 70 grains of powder. A 45-90 is a .45 with 90 grains, etc.
Shotguns were obviously measured using the standard gauge number.
>Would a high end muzzleloader be extremely expensive back in the early 1800s?
High-end rifles were/are always expensive. Even today a high-muzzleloader can cost a fuckload of money. High End implies fancy wood, engraving, and superior workmanship. That shit always costs a lot of money.
>they would want every shot to count so no 9mms or other weak rounds
9mm was actually pretty powerful for the era it was made in aside from mqybe 45 Colt. Black powder in general came with a lot of poorly performing cartridges compared to smokeless cartridges.
>op is now aware most people were using a .36 caliber ball weighing just 76gr and moving maybe a 1000 fps, weaker than a 380acp, in their "make every shot count" calibers
>tfw you'll never be a jaded civil war vet out west blasting injuns with your trusty henry
>What were the main rounds (pistol and long rifle) used in cowboy times?
smokeless powder and fixed ammunition were relatively new, in fact smokeless powder wasn't even invented until the 1870's
there was an enormous variety of cartridges available. by the turn of the 20th century, .38 and .45 cartrisges were the norm for handguns, but in a variety of setups. but that time the .45 LC was the most common as a result of the colt peacemaker
rifles? no idea. .45-70 and .30-30 were very common but there were a plethora of other bottlenecked rifle cartridges available
>.44-40
forgot about that one. extremely common
>numeracy and literacy would have been almost nil
Ten seconds with a search engine would have told you that the US literacy rate was over 75% in 1870, you ignorant twat. Are you too stupid to do 10 seconds of research?
>Redford
>born 1936
>boomer
Sure is summer in here
Well you can say a few things even with a large timelines because Colt was a litigious fuck
So from 1830s to 1850s: You're most likely looking at Texas Paterson revolvers, which allowed Colt to claim a patent on REVOLVERS in the US until the 1850s and thus most of the percussion cap era was these fuckers because Colt was lazy and money hungry and basically suppressed revolver development in the US for half a century. Weird little guns, you basically had to dismantle the cylinder (for reasons that'll become clear in a second) to reload because you had to disassemble the cylinder into it's three parts, manually pour powder into each chamber like tiny muzzle loaders, and so to stop it all just pouring out when you holstered it the front of the chamber had a single peice cap that fitted over the chamber mouths with a small aperture and you had to place the ball or shot into the chamber through this mouth using a tiny arbour or lever tool to cap it off. On the reverse side you had a special cap you a back plate that you you placed the percussion caps into. Once the cylinder was loaded on both sides and reassembled, you'd placed the entire cylinder back into the gun while at half-cock and NDs were discouraged by how long it took to reload, and the trigger folding back inside the gun until the hammer was fully cocked.
You'd carry multiple preloaded chambers on you rather than try reloading in the heat of combat (though Colt made a mint selling spare loading arbours lost in such situations). From '38 onward a lever mechanism and cap window was added to the cylinder which made swapping the cylinders out possible on horseback.
While there was a lot of different chambers ued various models over the years, from , it was usually chambered in .380 and despite what some people in this thread insist and it usually using blackpowder the chamber being kinda long and chonky by modern standards meant that it had comparable ballistics to modern 9mm rounds in every respect.
And even then Colt barely survived. Fuck off retard, patents are necessary for companies to recoup all the RD costs, would you rather have everyone waiting around for someone to make a technological advancement so they could steal it immediately without wasting the money designing the thing? No one would develop new ideas then.
The common revolver rounds were the .357’s and .44’s. Pistol rounds for the Vulcan Pistol and the imported Mauser was 9mm.
>Vulcan Pistol
>Common
Those things were so shit they couldn't even sell them
Nevermind the fact that 357 wasn't invented until the 1930's IIRC and 44 mag in 1958
>Fuck off retard, patents are necessary for companies to recoup all the RD costs
Colt literally got the idea of the revolver from seeing the Collier Flintlock revolvers in London, that he sued people for using the idea of revolvers was ridiculous and made him basically the Disney and copyright troll of the old west.
Thank god the congress of his day wasn't as corrupt as todays is otherwise the US would have gone into ww2 with percussion caps and lever actions due to Colt surpressing all fire arms innovations.
Yeah and guess what. Those revolvers were shit and no one wanted them. Colt made the revolver into something practical.
and then suppressed the free market whenever it tried to improve upon his shitty designs.
Picked up a Marlin I thought was in .22 but is actually in some obscure-ass cowboy cartridge, .25-20
TFW that stuff is $65-75 for a box of 50 and my indoor range may or may not let me shoot it
They did sell pretty well once the Model 3 came out in 1870, a time you could still say there was a 'wild west', though some might depute it. Top break beats the hell out of a loading gate and .44 Russian was a decent round. .44 S&W American wasn't awful, either.
Not that the Model 3 was a Volcanic/Vulan, just that it was S&W.
.25-20 is very reloadable at least
No, .45 Colt was used during the period, it was just less common than 44-40
.45 Colt had a very minimal time back in the day, roughly equal to .44 Russian despite the rather significant difference in case circumstance. You couldn't make rifles in the caliber with any reliability.
Meanwhile, .44-40 was readily available with comparable power chambered by almost everybody, even Colt rifles. .44-40 was Colt's second most popular chambering despite no military adoption...by anybody.
Boomer is a state of mind.
Best post itt except 10 gauge was the standard of the day.
.32-20
38 short/long colt
.41 long colt
Wasn't 44-40 some real shit back inadays?
>Hell, was the whole fraction of an inch barrel diameter/gauge terminology standardised back then? how would they have talked about stuff like this? Decimal points seem a bit too mathy for cowboys, would it have been all "3/10ths of an inch" for .303 rounds for instance?
They had decimalized calibers, but some of the names have been changed. For example, .44-40 was originally called .44 WCF. The WCF stands for Winchester Center Fire. .45 Colt is sometimes erroneously called .45 LONG Colt, which would make sense only if there were a short Colt, but there isn't.
Why the fuck do they all have Winchesters in those Western movies then?
>Why the fuck US soldiers are presented as perfect heroes in WW2 movies then?
real mystery are like that, real and mysterious
Props are dictated by what's available, what looks cool and what's easy to fire blanks out of. Movies often reuse the same props, also sometimes it might be an actor choice. I'm don't know much about John Wayne but I'm guessing he used a SAA in most of his movies simply because he liked it, it was his thing.