Talk:.45-70

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Anyone think Billy Dixon's shot is close enough to relevant to be worth mentioning?

"Billy Dixon took a shot at a mounted Kiowa warrior, knocking him off of his horse at a distance that was later confirmed by a surveyor to be 1538 yards, or a full nine-tenths of a mile!"

It was believed to be a .50-70 or .50-90 (the .45-70 was only a year old at that point), but as the Sandy Hook tests show, the .45-70-500 stacks up pretty well against the bigger cartridges. His record stood for the better part of a century, it's only being beat with the new .50 BMG rifles. scot 04:40, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nice job!

This is a great article! There is a slight POV issue in the part that claims that shooters of the west were better judges of range and trajectory. That is kind of hard to substantiate. RPellessier | Talk 15:05, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Hard to substantiate, maybe, but there is still a good, though circular, argument to be made. Back then, the .45-70 was a small bore, high velocity cartridge, and pretty flat shooting compared to the contemporary .50 caliber cartridges, and the .58 caliber rifled musket that preceded it. Since it was among the flattest shooting cartridges available, it was (???) required that shooters become good judges of range. Drop was less of an issue with properly calibrated tangent and tang sights; if you knew the range, they would handle the drop compensation for you. Maybe that argument is worth putting in the article? scot 14:33, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

That's funny. As trajectories get flatter, old shooters can always complain that the new guys have it too easy. I think that should be mentioned in the article somehow. The older cartridges must have been atrociously short-ranged beasts. So at one time, the .45-70 was considered flat! (Shouldn't 'less' go in the place of (???) above? Sorry for editing your statement.) RPellessier | Talk 01:57, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

The sentence you marked was correct to begin with; what I meant was that since the .45-70 was a flat shooting cartridge compared to its contemporaries, any shooter wanting to hit at long range had to be a good judge of range, because being off by even a few dozen yards at long range could mean the difference between a hit and a miss. However, if you can judge the range well, or have known range markers, you can hit things at incredible distances with the .45-70, and the massive bullet (by today's standards) will do an amazing amount of damage--see the Sany Hook test article to read what a .45-70-500 will do at a range of 2 miles. Billy Dixon's shot is a perfect example of what a good shooter with an accurate range assesment could do. The Kiowa was riding along a ridge line, so he was at a precise, known distance from the fort. The tang sights on those old Sharps rifles had were precision instruments, with calibrated marks and vernier adjustments (see here for a reproduction), and those old black powder cartridges were quite consistent, due to the constant burn rate of quality black powder and the compressed charges they used. The big, heavy bullets had high sectional densities, which helped offset the long time of flight and kept the wind drift down. All Dixon had to do was dial his sights to the correct elevation for the ridgeline, add a bit of "Kentucky windage" to account for the wind (if there was any that day), and shoot. Since a Sharps rifle is quite capable of 1 MOA accuracy (which is why good reproductions are still in high demand) that gives you a 15" probably hit circle at 1500 yards. Not a certain hit, but with a bit of luck and a lot of skill, he pulled it off.

I'm going to try to update the article based on this discussion, and see if I can get things straight. I might see if I can track down some long range ballistics info I can use, to put the range limitations in context, by showing how the drop changes with range, and link to maximum point blank range to explain why the .45-70 is considered both a short range cartridge and a long range cartridge, depending on the skill and equipment of the shooter. scot 15:02, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Data for update

According to http://www.researchpress.co.uk/targets/ballistics/sandyhook02.htm, the .45-70-405 at 1500 yards required 5d20'4" of elevation, or about 320' of holdover. 1' is 1.05 inches at 100 yards, so 320' * 15 hundred yards * 1.05 inches equals 5040 inches, or 140 yards of holdover...holy s**t that's a lot of holdover. Double check the math; arctan(1500/140)= 5.332, or 5d19'56" of angle, so 140 yards is correct.

http://www.shootingtimes.com/ballistics/45_70_cowboy.html has ballistics chart for a .45-70-405 Cowboy load, so a BP load or equivalent. With a 200 yard zero, the ballistics chart looks like this:

• yds inches
• 100 +11.5
• 200 0
• 300 -41.1
• 400 -116.5
• 500 -230.1

So a 200 yard ain't gonna cut it for a max point blank range on a deer, that 11.5" hump puts you right over the back of the deer. scot 15:51, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Better zeroed chart for .45-70-405 Cowboy load at http://www.pmcammo.com/cowboy-ballistics.php

• yds inches
• 50 2.47
• 100 0.00
• 150 -8.56
• 200 -23.86

So 100 yard zero looks like it might give a good MPBR for a 6" diameter, muzzle out to about 120ish yards. scot 21:21, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Dug out my internal ballistics software and plugged in the .45-70-405 data based on the Sandy Hook trials and a .308 long range load, and got the following:

The scale exagerates the slope a bit--the .45-70 is actually traveling downwards at about a 20 degree angle when it hits--but the .308 is only doing about a 3.6 degree angle. To hit a 6' high target with the .308 you're going to need to get the range within +- 50 feet, while doing that with the .45-70 would require +- 8 feet... scot 22:21, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Here's a link to an article on the .50-70-425, adopted in 1866 as a trapdoor conversion of the Springfield percussion rifle: http://www.shootmagazine.com/articles/firearms/50-70_govt.htm Gen. Custer was making shots out to ovd 630 yards, with an average shot at an antelope being 250 yards. And this is a prime example of a cartridge to which the .45-70-405 was "flat shooting". scot 15:19, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Old West

In the history section, there is a very suspect bit about the greater skill of Old West riflemen. This sounds like runaway romanticism. Is there any support for leaving it in? --Adamrush 11:36, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

It's not so much romanticism as a fact of life. The .45-70 was a flat shooting cartridge when it came out, and the early generation of cartridge rifles coming out around that time (the Springfield trapdoor rifles, the Sharps, the Remington rolling block) where and in fact still are quite accurate--quite a bit more than the typical percussion muzzleloader (Gun Test magazine did a review of two .50 caliber percussion rifles this month, both of which were averaging about 5" at 75 yards, the military specs for the 1873 called for 4" at 100 yards, and with care it will shoot MOA). The article on the .50-70 above, which is not as flat a shooter as the .45-70 due to the fatter, heavier bullet, mentions that Gen. Custer was hitting antelope at average distances of 250 yards, and took one at over 650 yards. There's also Billy Dixon's 1538 yard shot (that's 5d20' of elevation) at the Kiowa warrior--lucky, yes, but the Sandy Hook tests show that the military really was interested in those long shots.

Given the "rainbow" trajectory of those early cartridges, if you wanted to take a shot out beyond about 200 yards, you had to be a good judge of trajectory, or you woudn't make the shot--it was just a fact of life that if you wanted to be an accurate shot, you had to be an accurate judge of range. Modern cartridges have greatly relieved this burden--nowadays, with high mounted scopes (which does make a significant difference) and high velocity cartridges, you can get 6" diameter point blank ranges out to hundreds of yards, a feat demonstrably not possible with the .45-70-405.

In case you're not familiar with ballistics, perhaps an analogy might help. I could say that drivers in the early 1900's were more adept at double clutching. Finding a source that flat out states this might be hard, but you could point out that very few vehicles on the roads today have non-synchronized transmissions, so very few drivers need to know how to double clutch, while most early transmissions lacked synchronizers and thus required double-clutching. scot 04:06, 4 June 2006 (UTC)