World's most famous hunting rifles (pics & story)

bellero

bellero

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Since many of us love reading about history, hunting and firearms, I thought about starting a thread about the rifles used by legendary hunters all across the world.

I hope to discover new stories and rifles I never heard of before (Please post pics along with the story)

Let me start with Karamojo Bell's .275 Rigby

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Walter D.M. Bell (1881-1951) has become a legend among elephant hunters due to his great success in the ivory trade during the golden age of hunting in East Africa. He is known as “Karamojo” Bell because of his safaris through this remote wilderness area in North Eastern Uganda. He is famous for perfecting the brain shot on elephants, dissecting their skulls and making a careful study of the anatomy of the skull so he could predict paths of bullet travel from a shot at any angle in order to reach the brain. Using mostly 6.5mm and 7 mm caliber rifles, he was an advocate of shot placement over big bore power for killing efficiently. Bell perfected his shot to the degree that he mastered it from all positions, including diagonally from the back. This has been since referred as “BELL SHOT”.

“He shot his 1011 elephants with a 7x57mm rifle”...

Bell recorded all of his kills and shots fired. It was a business to him, not pleasure, and he needed to record expenditures…

• He shot exactly 1,011 elephants with a series of 6 Rigby-made 7x57mm (.275 Rigby) rifles with 173 grain military ammo.
• He shot 300 elephants with a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5x54mm carbine using the long 159 grain FMJ bullets.
• He shot 200 pachyderms with the .303 and the 215 grain army bullet.
• He went to a .318 Westley Richards for a while, which is a cartridge firing a 250 grain bullet at about 2400 fps, but found the ammunition unreliable and returned to the 7mm.
• He also recorded that one of the reasons why he favored the 7x57 was that the ammunition was more reliable and he could not recall ever having a fault with it. Whereas British sporting ammunition, apart from the .303 military ammo, gave him endless trouble with splitting cases.( He used the .303 in the hope of running into a Herd of Bulls so he could make use of the 10shots ! He was famed for using a Martini in .303 & holding the spare rounds between his fingers & could fire the rifle as fast as a bolt action !)
• The balance of his elephants were shot with this .318 and his .450/400 Jeffrey double rifle.
• He wrote about being able to drop an elephant with a light caliber rifle if he shot it in the same place that he would have shot it with a heavy rifle.
• It was unmentioned, but understood, that 7x57 ammunition cost a tenth the price of large caliber .450/400 Jeffrey cartridges and money is always a factor in business.
Just out of interest, it is must to be mention that to judge ammunition expenditure and his own shooting, he calculated an average. He discovered that with the .275 (7x57mm) he fired an average of 1.5 shots per kill. This means that half the time he only needed one shot. That is a fair performance for such a large number of elephants killed and considering that it is common today to fire an insurance shot, anyway. Seemingly a business man of a Hunter with a profit & loss acumen.

It is also interesting to note that, although Bell is the most famous proponent of using small caliber "nitro" rifles for large game, he did not discover the technique, nor was he its earliest advocate. Well known hunter Arthur Neumann, for example, had been shooting elephants with a .303 Lee Met ford rifle for years before Walter Bell got into the business.

WDM Bell is forever associated with the John Rigby & Sons Mauser rifle and the .275 Rigby cartridge. ".275 Rigby" was the British designation for the German 7x57mm Mauser cartridge. This cartridge propelled a .284 caliber, 173 grain bullet at around 2300 fps and the bullets he used for elephant brain shots were full metal jacketed solids. He declared once that a soft point bullet had never sullied the bore of his rifle. It is interesting to compare these ballistics with what is commonly regarded as essential performance today.
 
Another favorite of mine, Jack O'Connor's famous Winchester 70

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In 1959, Jack O’Connor bought a Winchester Model 70 .270 Featherweight in a hardware store in Lewiston, Idaho. He had bought his first Winchester .270, a Model 54, in 1925, and in the ensuing years had made the cartridge synonymous with his name. He already had several .270s, but as we all understand, one or two of anything is never enough.

The new gun—O’Connor called this the No. 2 rifle--turned out to be very accurate (MOA or just under, which in 1959 was sensational), and so O’Connor took it to his favorite custom gunsmith, Al Biesen, of Spokane, to give it a level of elegance befitting its performance. Biesen completed the work in 1960. Biesen was not only a first-rate craftsman, but had a very good feel for ergonomics. All his stocks had a very slim pistol grip that belled toward the bottom, and they have a very distinctive feel. You can mount a Biesen rifle blindfolded and pick it out of a bunch of rifles.

The wood is quite dense, flawlessly inletted, and rather plain. Biesen left the barrel intact (He turned down the standard-weight Model 70 barrels on which he worked.), tuned the trigger, replaced the loathsome aluminum floorplate with a steel one and converted the floorplate release to a straddle type. Checkering was 26 lpi, in his distinctive fleur-de-lis pattern, and the stock has an embossed grip cap and buttplate. For a scope, Biesen used a 4X Leupold Mountaineer mounted very low and very far forward in a Tilden mount.

Two things strike you about No. 2. First, it weighs 8 pounds even, which was considered state-of-the-art light in 1960, but now feels quite heavy. If the same rifle were built today, it would probably weigh 7 pounds or less. The other thing is, No. 2 has seen a ton of use. The bluing is worn off the muzzle and completely off the floorplate and the stock is covered with small nicks and dings. O’Connor took this rifle on two African safaris and who knows how many North American hunts, and it had seen nearly two decades of hard use when he passed away in 1978.

No. 2 was present at the SHOT Show courtesy of Jack’s son Brad (a charming gentleman who was probably the only person at SHOT who is older and deafer than myself) and can normally be viewed at the Jack O’Connor Center in Lewiston, where the rifle resides. Brad told me that No. 2 is still very much in use; he shoots it and lets other people shoot it. He says that’s what it was made for, and he’s absolutely right.

It was at SHOT to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Model 70, and to commemorate that landmark and celebrate the memory of the gun’s owner, Winchester is offering two Jack O’Connor commemorative Model 70s, both stocked in very fancy walnut, carved in the lines of the Biesen original, with his checkering pattern.

When Gun Nuts TV rolls around for its third season, you will get to see me holding No. 2 and talking about it. Considering that I was weaned on O’Connor’s writing, that was a great honor. A friend of mine claims that there is nothing deader than a dead gun writer, but in the case of Mr. O’Connor, not so.
 
Another one;

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Warren Page, during his historic tenure as Field & Stream’s shooting editor, did most of his hunting with only two rifles. One was a 7mm Mashburn Magnum (Old Betsy Number One -- shown) and the other was a .375 Weatherby Magnum. The former was the brainchild of Art Mashburn, a rifle maker and wildcatter who blew out and necked down the .375 H&H case to 7mm. Warren took something over 450 head of game with it all over the world, and with only one load—the 175-grain semi-spitzer Nosler screw-machine bullet at 3,060 fps from a 22-inch barrel.
 
Bellero.......as you noted Bell used 173 gn FMJ military ammo, which was almost exclusively German made and with a million 7mm Mausers in the hands of the Boers in SA at the time it always assured Bell that he would have an endless supply of high quality FMJ ammo.
 
Bellero, just to correct a few points about Bell; his total score was 1011 ( 983 bulls and 28 cows) of which he states that "over 800" were shot with the .275. That doesn't leave a lot for the other calibres. He started his career with a .303, switched to the .275, experimented with 6.5 M-S, but found it unreliable for a number of reasons. When the .318 became available, he seems to have switched to it entirely, and wrote that it was the best of the lot. He was planning a last safari to Uganda in the late '30's, and had a lightweight take-down .318 built for the occasion, but the war intervened and the trip never came off.

He had several .275 rifles ( I've heard as many as 6) and the one you have illustrated is the last of the line. When he died, his widow placed on consignment with Westley Richards, were it was picked up by Robert Ruark. It was subsequently given as a gift to Harry Selby's son ( can't recall the name at the moment) where it stayed for a few decades. Ultimately it fell into the clutches of an American collector.

P.S. Bell died in June 1954; the incorrect date is the fault of Townsend Whelen, who got it wrong when he edited Bell's last book for publication in 1960, I believe.
 
And just to add something positive to the thread; this is Jim Corbett's last tiger rifle. It's a W.J. Jeffery No. 2 grade box-lock ejector in .450/.400 3". I wish I had more information about this rifle, but details are rather scarce. Corbett used a number of rifles, including a .500 BPE, and a .450, as well as shooting several with a .275 Rigby ( those Rigby's sure seem to get around). He acquired this rifle sometime in the late '20's or early '30's, and it plays a prominent role in several of the hunts recounted in his books. When India achieved independance, Corbett moved to East Africa, and he sold this rifle while living there some years later. Ultimately in wound up in the hands of Elmer Keith. This is what Keith wrote about this lovely rifle:

"I own the late Jim Corbett's tiger rifle-the best quality boxlock .450-400(3") double rifle by W.J. Jeffery & Co., with which he killed so many man-eating tigers for the Indian government. He also used it in Africa. The brass-cornered oak and leather case is in fine shape, while the rifle shows more use and less abuse than any old rifle I have ever seen. The metal is as bright as a silver dollar. The action is that good No. 2 Jeffery is sound and tight as a rat trap. Engraving shows up even better on the bright steel. Only traces of checkering are left. The stock ears are actually worn away from the frame, as is the butt of the stock from the engraved heel and toe plates. The bores are grey in the grooves from cordite, and the lands are worn down about halfway, but there are no pits from neglect. With Corbett lying out in tree crotches and machans in the rain waiting for tigers, this rifle was exposed to all kinds of weather. Jim Corbett had no Hoppes No. 9, or Rice's X-10 solvent, but I would bet he poured many gallons of water through these tubes. In spite of external wear, this .450-400 is as effective and accurate a hunting rifle as when turned out by W.J. Jeffery & Co.. I fired both barrels at a six inch bull's eye at 80 yards, shooting from a car window. The bullets(Kynoch 400 grain softnose) landed one inch apart, one directly over the other, both cutting the centerline of the target. Jim sold this rifle to a man from Vancouver, and my friend George Neary got it from him. I swapped a perfect .350 Elliot caliber Danial Frazer double ejector for it. I would like to have known Jim Corbett. His book, Man Eaters of Kumoan, is a masterpiece on the Indian tiger and proves he knew more about life and habits, of that beast than any living man. I treasure his old rifle. You can judge a man by the condition of his rifle."

This rifle now resides in the Elmer Keith museum, in Salmon Idaho.

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Jim Corbetts .275 rigby,currently with John Rigby and sons in London England. The silver plaque on the butt stock mentions that this rifle was presented to him on the successful hunt of the Champawat tiger.
 
Great thread guys- Mods can delete my post if its unwanted as I'd love to see more of these stories an guns!

Thanks fellas
WL
 
"If only this rifle could talk" imagine what a conversation it would be to have Bell's and Corbett's .275 Rigby's together in the same cabinet.

Ok, I'll add a couple more, big bores this time to balance things out.

First up in Ernest Hemingway's Westley Richards .577 double. This best quality detachable box-lock rifle was built for a cavalry officer, who was killed in France in September 1914, less than a year after the rifle was completed. It was then acquired by Winston Guest. Guest and Hemingway were personal friends, and almost certainly Hemingway acquired the rifle directly from Guest. The rifle sold at auction a few years ago to American collector Bill Jones for a staggering $340,000.

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Next is another Westley Richards .577. This one was built to order in 1906 for famous elephant hunter, James Sutherland. Sutherland operated in Southern Tanzania, then German East Africa, in the area that would become the Selous Reserve when the Brits took over. He managed to evade capture by the Germans when war broke out, and served as an intelligence officer in the British army. In 1912 Sutherland published one of the classic works on elephant hunting, "The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter". Sutherland resumed his elephant hunting post war, shifting operations to French Equatorial Africa, also known as Bangui, now known as the Central African Republic. He was poisoned by his cook sometime around 1930. He survived the poisoning, but never fully recovered, and died in 1931 at the age of 64.

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Both Hemingways and Sutherlands rifles are single selective trigger. Remarkable about Sutherland's rifle are the longish barrels, and very short buttstock. Sutherland was not a particularly large man, 5'-7" or 5-9".
 
Samuel Baker's 2 bore "Baby"

"I was afraid to use it, but now and then as it was absolutely necessary, it was cleaned after months of staying loaded. On such occasions my men had the gratification of firing it, and the explosion was always accompanied by two men falling on their backs (one having propped up the shooter) and the “Baby” flying some yards behind them. This rifle was made by Holland and Holland, of Bond Street, and I could highly recommend it for the Goliath of Gath, but not for the men of A.D. 1866.“


- Sir Samuel Baker -The Albert N’Yanza, Great Basin Of The Nile, 1866 pp.138 -
 
I did a little more digging on the Bell rifle; it was made in 1923, so it's too new to have been used in Bell's heyday, but was used on a motor safari with Malcom and Gerrit Forbes. This trip is mentioned briefly in his last book published pothumously, Bell of Africa. Robert Ruark acquired it in 1955 or '56 from Westley Richards after Bell's death. A silver plaque was added on the bottom of the buttstock where a monogram oval would normally go: " Mark R Selby from Uncle Bob Ruark".

The scope is not original; it was added by Harry Selby after the rifle was brought to Kenya. There is a curious slot in the buttstock... there is some speculation as to the purpose, bu the most likely reason is some sort of silent sling. One end would loop over the barrel and the other buckle through the slot.

The last photo is of Harry Selby's daughter, Gail, with what is likely the last elephant this famous rifle will ever take.

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