A Sportsman's Working Battery

Guns and Gunning, Captain Paul A. Curtis. Penn Publishing Co. 1934.

The notion of a personal working battery for a sportsman is a favorite topic of  unending debate among gun cranks.  There is a lot of classic literature on both hunting rifles and on shotguns. On balance, the rifle literature tends to be American and much of the shotgun literature, though not all, is British.  Classics authors writing about hunting rifles include (in alphabetical order)  Carmichael, O'Connor, Keith, Taylor, and Whelen.  There is a largely separate literature on shotguns by Boothroyd, Brister, Burrard, O'Connor, Keith, and others.   Bodio's Good Guns Again straddles the classification by discussing both.

I first recall reading a specification for a personal battery in Curtis' book Guns and Gunning.  This book is a favorite of mine though it is not often mentioned today - prices for used copies do not indicate it holds much collector value.  Like reading Datus Proper's recommendation that a man should spend a months salary on his shotgun (I have not), Curtis's recommendations for an all-round battery gave me a kind of permission to think in a way I'd not have dared to before reading it.

Considering a battery (and not a collection) is a holistic view that remains surprisingly infrequently discussed in writing.  The question answered by the consideration of the battery is just this: "What collection of firearms does a modern hunter need to participate in the various forms of hunting throughout the season?" Obviously the answer depends on what you hunt, where you live, if you travel to hunt and of course on personal tastes.

For the North American game hunter not planning to travel to Alaska or Africa, Curtis recommends the following minimal battery:

• Rifles:  a small game rifle [.22 LR],  .a varmint rifle [.22 Hornet], a general service rifle [.30-06]
• Shotguns: an upland gun [20 GA double], for all round use [12 GA double], a duck gun [Magnum 12 bore or 10 bore]
• Sidearms: A .22 revolver or automatic and a large frame revolver [.45 Colt or .44-40]

If you are also a target shooter, Curtis provides the following additional recommendations:

• a heavy barreled .22 target rifle with telescopic sight
• a Springfield National Match rifle [.30-06]
• a trap gun [12 GA pump]
• a target pistol [.22 single shot heavy frame with adjustable sights]

At the end of the chapter Curtis apologizes for the small size of the battery he's selected!

"Remember, I said in the beginning that my ideal battery must be limited to a few guns to meet satisfactorily many needs. When one's battery assumes the proportions of a collection, he perforce becomes a slave to its care and it ceases to be ideal."

*                                   *                                   *

There's an old saying: "Beware the man with one gun."  What is left unsaid is that he certainly knows how to shoot it well.  An alternate approach to the question of a personal battery is based on a minimalist philosophy: a shotgun a rifle and perhaps a sidearm.  After a lifetime of gun trading, Steve Bodio may have reached a kind of perfection in his (current) minimalist battery.

Steve with his small working battery.

Steve has settled on his choices and, thankfully, brought them with him on his recent visit to show off to friends here in Laramie and surrounding environs.

Steve has a British sidelock 12 GA shotgun, a Mannlicher Schoenauer 1903 rifle and a Smith and Wesson model 629 in .44 Magnum.  Not shown in the photos is a Smith and Wesson model 34 kit gun which is chambered for a .22LR.  He of course has other firearms, but these are the ones he brought, and they form a kind of elegant minimalist working battery.

F. C. Scott sidelock, 1903 Mannlicher Schoenauer and S&W .44 Mag. 

The Mannlicher is a model 1903 takedown chambered in 6.5x54 MS.  It has the most elegant factory pop-up peep sight I have ever seen.  The peep is articulated so that when the bolt is pulled back, it lowers into the tang of the stock and as the bolt is pushed back forward it pops back up.  In photos (and I am kicking myself for not taking more of them) the mechanism looks like it might be flimsy, in person it is not - it is astoundingly robust.  The rifle handles like a shotgun - notice the Prince of Wales grip.  I was disappointed we did not get a chance to shoot while he was here.

The 6.5x54 is a very interesting cartridge.  In fact, Curtis himself recommended the 6.5x54 specifically (with the Savage 250-3000 as an alternate) for the hunter who wanted to combine his varmint rifle with a rifle for medium sized game shooting.  The 6.5 shoots heavy for caliber bullets at lower velocity.  This translates to bullets with very high sectional density and thus exceptional penetration.  The 6.5 Mannlicher was famously used (with 160 gr solids) by W. D. M. Bell to kill elephants.  It is an outstanding deer and hog rifle and is not to be sneezed at for elk in the timber when shooting a 140 or 160 grain bullet.  It is interesting that both Jack O'Connor and Elmer Keith agreed that it is an exceptional cartridge. John Taylor was less complimentary.

Steve took the Mannlicher (and the Scott) to show to the rifle maker Nathan Heineke here in Laramie. The rifle has been previously drilled for a side mounted scope and Steve is planning to have Nate put a Griffin and Howe side mount on the rifle.  Nate worked as a gunsmith at Griffin & Howe in NJ for about 8 years and may well be the most qualified person in the country to do the work.  The great thing about a G&H side mount is that the scope is guaranteed to return to zero and, it does not mess up the engraving on the front ring of the action.  With a classic rifle I consider this to be an important feature.  If the rifle had not previously been drilled and tapped for a side-mount it would be a shame to add it but, since it has, adding a side-mount it is more akin to a restoration.

Steve's choice of a shotgun is an Birmingham made F. C. Scott sidelock in 12 GA with original  2 3/4" chambers. It was probably made in 1910.  For British made guns of the period, 2 1/2" chambers were standard.   Fredrick Scott was known for his pigeon guns and this may explain the non-standard chamber size. A description of the gun by Steve from an email:

He (Frederick, called "Frank") was in business from 1904 to 1918 (some say 19). I think he made fewer than a thousand guns. The wood is really nice which doesn't show well-- may eventually refinish. LOP 14 1/2 or a little less to checkered butt; barrels 70 cm (continental--??), chokes 1/4 & F. balance on hinge pin. Slightly more pitch up than BL and slightly shorter, and weighs 6 1/2 instead of 6 1/4 so it took a little practice to mount as well but I find if I hold it on the barrel ahead of the forearm it points very well. I will probably disable the ejectors (remove springs?) because they are no use to me. I think it was all tightened up when re-proofed (for pigeon level loads -- 1 1/4 oz-- which I will NOT shoot).  I think I will never get closer to a London gun. People who loved the AyA can see how superior it is even if they know nothing about guns (and it weighs exactly the same). 

The Scott is a perfect upland game gun (good for NM quail) and will serve for the occasional duck.

F. C. Scott ad from 1910.

For handguns, Steve's S&W revolver in .44 Mag has the lightest single action trigger I've ever pulled. A pound? Steve assured us that  it is a joy to shoot.  He's outfitted both the .44 and the S&W model 34 kit gun with Hogue grips so, disregarding the heft, they have a similar feel in the hand.

*                                   *                                   *

At this point my personal battery is closer to Curtis's recommended selection than to Bodio's.  I think I'd like to fix that, which of course means, more buying and selling which is half the fun.  

A Sportsman's Library

Steve Bodio's newest book is out, and it's great.  It is an erudite, idiosyncratic, personal catalog of one hundred sporting titles. At 256 + xvi pages, each title gets, on average, an 2.56 page description.  And what descriptions they are, one chapter for each of the hundred books.  Each description contains information on the author, a gloss of the content of the book and and Steve's reasons for including the book among among the hundred. He knows many of the living authors and that comes through in personal anecdotes about them.
Steve manages to pull together so many cultural and literary threads it's hard to imagine how he keeps them all in his head.

I was lucky enough to have been sent a preprint back in November - but I just got my bound copy today.  Aside from the pleasure of having a properly bound copy to hold in my hand, what I had not seen, was Malcolm Brooks' blurb on the back which is truly excellent.

"Nobody who loves traditional blood sport wants it's long literary line totally obfuscated by faux-gonzo, Wang-dang Nugents and gear-hawking carny barkers of cartoonish hunting shows.   Steve Bodio brings his formidable powers as both reader and writer to the cause, gifting us with a guide to the greats as varied, as magical, and yes, as essential as the works he champions."     -- Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses 

When a pre-print arrived in my inbox I printed a copy and could not put it down.  I quickly ordered a couple of the rarest titles that I did not already own, figuring prices for some of these out of print books are going to go sky high. In an unscientific survey I just checked to verify my theory and it seems to me that prices on some titles are definitely up. I claim it's because Steve's book is now out.  In a shrewd moment I thought of cornering the market on Plummer's Tales of a Rat Hunting Man, which wouldn't have been all that hard at the time - now it is impossible. One copy is now listed at $673.76.  Prices on a few of the titles in the hundred have been out of sight for a long time -- I'm thinking of Jack O'Connor's  Hunting in the Southwest which I looked for again after reading Steve's description.

Steve's book won't help the price situation, though it may actually get some classics back in print.  I notice that one of the hundred, Saxton Pope's 1923 book  Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, a longtime favorite of mine, is recently back in print. I traded my own copy, an early printing, to a fanatic bow hunter in Virginia for a hind quarter of a whitetail he killed with his bow.  That meat was the beginning of my own long relationship with game meat; killing, butchering, cooking and feasting. I cooked and shared a memorable meal with friends, one of whom popped the cork on a 1974 Chateau Latour for the occasion.  But I always regretted not having my copy of Pope's book which I bought for five dollars in a used book and magazine store in Norfolk Virginia.

In our broader culture, the trend to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, to reach the largest possible audience, seems inexorable.   Steve refuses to participate in that trend.  A selection of books like this reveals as much about the selector as it does about the books themselves.  Taken as a whole, it represents a lifetime of scholarship. This book, and the books he recommends, provide a view into the mind of perhaps the deepest thinker about blood sport we have today.  Thank you Steve.

Buy Steve's book now!