A Lament for Custer’s Troops
Recently I encountered a problem that was akin to that known by Custer’s men at the Little Big Horn and doubtless by many others in the Old West. Having collected old firearms for over sixty years I had known that there was such a thing as a headless shell extractor: used with the early 45-70 cartridges. In the 1960s I visited the Custer Battlefield and bought a fired 45-70 and a 50-70 case that an Indian adjacent to the field had found when digging postholes. They were both inside primed and bore no headstamp. As a cartridge collector, I also knew about the early copper-colored center fire cartridges with the crimps near the head. This crimp held a primer inside the case, thus the term “inside primed”. Those cartridges were only one of many experiments in the development of cartridges, as we know them today. The inside primed cartridges were centerfire instead of the well-known rim fires used in the Henry and Spencer firearms of that era. Some time ago I purchased two boxes of c...