The .308 Marlin Express

It's a conspiracy. Hornady and Marlin are out to hoodwink American hunters into thinking bolt rifles are no longer relevant.

Loading the .444 and .450 Marlin cannot have made Hornady much money. In retrospect, it's easy to see that trolls deep in Hornady's underground ballistics lab were piling up rifles and brass for more nefarious projects. Like LEVERevolution. Old news now, the soft plastic point of Evolution bullets has chipped away at the sales of real bullets with hard noses for the past couple of years. The data is still coming in, but word on the street is that dust has gathered on bolt handles in gunshops all across America, and lever guns are flying off the shelves.

Those softpointed bullets, we're told, not only deliver chalk-line trajectories, but deadly mushrooms inside ribs. Hornady's ballistics guru Dave Emary even claimed bolt-rifle accuracy from Marlin 336s and 1895s.

Then, last summer he slipped me a cartridge from underneath his coat. "Write about this before the green light, and we'll make sure you never draw a Nebraska grizzly tag," he warned. Uncowed by the threat, I nonetheless maintained my silence. Who would believe I had the inside story on a cartridge that would match the .308 Winchester, yet fit and feed in a loop-belly carbine? Why squander my credibility?

No journalist wants to relinquish a scoop. As I filed notes and photos from 2005 hunts, Dave's claims seemed less and less preposterous. If he could build .30-30 loads that delivered half a ton of energy at 300 yards and struck only a foot low with a 200-yard zero; if he could make the .444 Marlin shoot flat enough for point-blank aim to 250 yards; if he could keep a 325-grain .45-70 bullet motoring at more than 1,200 fps 300 yards away--well, maybe he could design a round that did what the .300 Savage failed to do.

Arguably our first high-performance .30-caliber hunting round, the .300 Savage appeared in 1920, ostensibly to package bolt-rifle ballistics for Savage 99 lever actions. It came pretty close. The first .30-06 sporting ammo featured 150-grain bullets at a modest 2,700 fps--essentially what the Savage could peg at its top end. But the '06 has a bigger case, and loaded to its potential soon outpaced the short .300. Heavy bullets were also much easier to load in the .30-06.

In 1952 the .308 Winchester showed up to challenge the '06, which by then had become the bolt-gun standard for big game hunters. A bit longer than the .300 Savage, the .308 operated at higher pressures. Its bullets beat the Savage's out of the gate by almost 200 fps but still fell shy of matching the .30-06.