Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler
560 fps from the Smith’s 5-inch barrel. Shot from a rest at 15 yards, the shots grouped at 2-½ inches but were a couple inches high with one flyer skewing off to the right.
Next I decided to try a vintage box of Remington factory ammo. These were the same 146-grain lead round-nose bullets that are still offered to this day. Velocities with these were much better, running about 650 fps from the muzzle. From the same range of 15 yards, these also grouped at 2-½ inches but hit a bit low and off to the right.
I followed these up with a few of my handloads. The first were 146-grain lead bullets over 2.3 grains of Winchester 231. These turned out to be a disappointment, with a muzzle velocity of only 500 fps despite the fact that some of my manuals listed it as being much more. Groups were fairly ragged and a few inches low.
Next I brought along some loads using the same 146-grain lead bullets with 3.1 grains of Unique. These proved to be very accurate, hitting at nearly point of aim at 15 yards and having a velocity of 640 fps. Of all the loads I shot that day, these were the best overall with a 2-¼ inch group.
I then decided to see what kind of punch the little .38 S&W cartridge had. I didn’t want to waste a perfectly good surplus military helmet, so instead I found an old round metal kid’s sled that appeared to be just as thick. (Sorry for those of you that may be nostalgic over these.) I first decided to shoot some .38 Specials from a 5-inch-barreled Model 27 Smith & Wesson for a comparison. These were nothing more than standard 130-grain FMJ ammunition. The three .38 Specials I fired went right through with little difficulty. For the .38 S&W I used some vintage .380 Mk IIz loads from the same distance out of my 5-inch-barreled Smith & Wesson Military &Police revolver. Again I fired three shots, just to the right of the .38 Specials. Two .38 S&Ws went through, but one only tore the metal as it bounced off of the metal sled. I can see why the little .38 was not exactly seen as a manstopper during World War II.
Vintage Remington Kleanbore .38 S&W rounds (left) with modern, nickel plated-cased rounds (right).
What the .38 S&W really has going for it is its inherent accuracy combined with almost no recoil. In the K-frame sized gun, it had little more recoil than a revolver of the same sized chambered in .22 Long Rifle. With the right handloads and in the right gun, it makes for a very handy small game cartridge. Rabbits and squirrels would certainly be within the .38 S&W’s limits in either an old Smith & Wesson M&P or a Regulation Police. It has enough power to get the job done on game animals without destroying too much meat like more powerful calibers.
The .38 S&W, despite being written off at one time or another, is still hanging on even though no handguns have been produced for it for 35 years. I have little doubt that while it has been on the ragged edge of retirement more than once, the .38 S&W won’t be going away any time soon.
THE WEST AND THE GUN
BY JIM FORAL
After the Civil War, America moved westward across the continent. In the two decades to follow, civilization gradually but steadily stretched from ocean to ocean. The old emigrant trail had given way to the iron horse and the settler made certain that the savage made room for him. Cattle grazed where the buffalo once roamed, and regions formerly devoid of humanity were how inhabited.
In 1890, the Director of the Census announced that an unbroken frontier line in the West no longer existed. Lawless territories were tamed and granted statehood. The times were changing. By 1900, the Indian had been overpowered and his threat eliminated. The days of the open range were a far-gone memory and distances were abridged by the railway and the trolley. All of this had happened during the short lifetime of many individuals, and these were sad times for older men. That the West and its times had finally faded was a crushing and unpleasant thought. Their West, a unique period of about 40 years, the likes of which men never saw before and will never see again, was vanishing into history and folklore just as the bison and plains grizzly had vanished.
Against this backdrop of vanishing frontier and fading memories, a fanciful image of the old West had arisen. The wild misconception was that every mining or cow town, every lumber or farming community west of Omaha was afoul with rustlers, cutthroats, assorted thieves and bunko artists, saturated with sixgun and sawed-off shotgun-toters, were enveloped in a perpetual smog of black powder smoke, and were thoroughly dangerous places to be. This appears, in the minds of many, to be the popular image of the West just before WWI. Hollywood capitalizes on this erroneous notion still. Even though old timers aplenty stepped forward and insisted on setting folks straight, for the most part they were not successful in dispelling the myths.
There was, early in the twentieth century, a new generation of Outdoor Life readers who had formulated the misguided opinion concerning conditions of the old frontier West. The media played a major role. Sensationalistic newspaper accounts of the tabloid variety were especially to blame. Publishers relied on this twaddle and other literary garbage to increase sales and circulation. The young were also heavily influenced by the popular Western dime novel hair-raiser directed at them, many of which had been authored by writers who had never ventured west of Akron. The timing of the public unleashing of these sort of things could not have been better. The popular idea of the Old West, constructed in the press, was that the men – all of them – were armed and drunken gamblers who shot one another at the slightest provocation. Each woman was a dance hall girl with a public nickname. Each tree and boulder hid a lurking grizzly. Horses, even the plow mules, were unbreakable bucking broncos.
Chauncey Thomas did his best to straighten out the record and was instrumental in pooh-poohing the rampant misconceptions surrounding the Old West that were implanted firmly in the minds of the latter-day tenderfeet. Thomas knew whereof he spoke. Born on the banks of Cherry Creek, Colorado, in 1872, as a boy he saw Leadville in its heyday, Cripple Creek from the beginning, and herds of bison and the Indian, all free on the plains. Young Chauncey was trained as a journalist by his father, a veteran newspaperman. Later, he drifted from one eastern editorial office to another, finally returning to Denver in 1908. In demand as a lecturer, he was regarded as an authority on frontier history.
Chauncey Thomas (1872-1941) at age 39. Talented, cultured and articulate, he self-eulogized: “Whether my writing will live I do not know. Time is my sole critic so it is idle to speculate. Anyway, I have had a good time doing the work I had to do.” His name lives on in Mt. Chauncey, a 9500-ft. peak located a hundred miles west of Denver and named for him by the U.S. government.
Some of the absurdity generated by this loose type of journalism, especially as it pertained to the extent of the use of guns on the frontier, unavoidably found its way into the various departments of Outdoor Life magazine. A fair percentage of the readership was convinced that the gun was the only tool that figured prominently in opening the West, subduing the Indian, and wiping out the wolf and buffalo. Thomas endured these opinions for a while before he spoke out. He had been an eyewitness, he pointed out, and this is not what he saw.
Contrary to romance and what the tabloid media would have people believe, Thomas maintained that the gun had little to do with the West’s settlement. He spelled out the drab and disillusioning reality: “If not a pioneer after 1860 had had a gun, the West would have been settled just the same, neither better nor worse, as guns did not cut much figure either way. But the stamp mill and the irrigation ditch did – and therein lies the real romance of the West.” The real winners of the West, he wrote, were the pick and the shovel: the pick in the mountains, the irrigation shovel in the valleys. To these we might ad the ore cart, the spike driving sledge, the ox-yoke, the twin bladed axe, the branding iron and other mundane implements symbolic of exertion.