HANDGUNS
The Forgotten Forty-Fours
The beginning of the cartridge era immortalized some cartridges and left others in the dust bin of history.
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All readers of Guns & Ammo who have a few summers of shooting behind them know about the .44s. For these handgunners, the melodious alliteration "forty-four" strikes the ear pleasantly and conjures up a pair of images. One of them is Elmer Keith shooting one of his trademark Model 29 Smith & Wessons in .44 Magnum, followed by all of the other great guns of that caliber that followed the first S&W. The other image is the .44 Special from which it was derived. "Special" shooters are often active handloaders and always-passionate advocates of their pet cartridge. I'm a guy that understands this all too well. When I wrote an article about the demise of the .44 Special in these pages just a few years ago, I damn near had a lynch mob outside my office. The point is simply that the .44 Special and the .44 Magnum are the two remembered cartridges. There are many more that are virtually forgotten. In this 44th year of Guns & Ammo, it might be interesting to look back at the ones that sort of slipped away from us--the Forgotten Forty-Fours.
If I were writing this article about 20 years ago, I would have to include another .44 in the forgotten category. But the meteoric rise of Cowboy Action Shooting and the consequent rebirth of interest in all manner of thing pertaining to the Old West have rescued the .44-40 from oblivion. This old-timer dates to the early 1870s and is still alive and well in the cylinders and magazine tubes of original and replica firearms of the frontier era. The round was originally known as the .44 W.C.F. (for .44 Winchester Center Fire) and made its debut with the 1873 Winchester rifle. Eventually Colt got the bright idea to chamber its Peacemaker for the cartridge, calling the new pistol the Colt Frontier Six Shooter and forever linking the .44-40 to handguns. It is an effective and efficient round, ballistically close to the .44 Special. Once considered a difficult cartridge to reload because of its semi-bottlenecked contours, the .44-40 is now a widely loaded round by the Cowboy shooters. Mike Dillon has lots of those cheerful competitors producing this .44 cartridge by the thousands on his blue loading presses. The .44-40 is a long way from dead!
Let's take the discussion of those cartridges that are nearly forgotten all the way back to the beginning of cartridges in general. As most shooters are aware, the middle of the 19th Century was a time of great development in small arms. It was at this time that the fully self-contained metallic cartridge came into existence.
One of the first was a cartridge used in one of the most pivotal arms in American history--the Henry rifle. The cartridge is a rimfire called the .44 Henry or .44 Henry Flat. It's a true .44 with a bullet diameter of .446-inch and a case length of .875-inch. The long under-barrel magazine tube of the Henry held 15 of these stubby rounds, which were also used in the later Winchester '66 rifles and carbines. Colt made the 1872 Open Top and about 1,800 Peacemakers in the caliber and S&W produced a special rimfire version of their big No. 3 breaktop for the Turks. The same ammo worked in rifle and revolver, which marks the first use of the same ammo in both. While the .44 Henry was not an exceptionally potent cartridge, it was a respectable compromise between size and power. Many thousands of fine American guns were made for this historic cartridge and the ammunition companies loaded ammo for it as late as 1929.
The period of the late 1860s and early 1870s saw energetic competition between a number of revolver makers, the most prominent of which were Smith & Wesson, Colt and Remington. Smith & Wesson was busy developing a large-frame break-top. The first of these Model 3s were chambered for the .44 S&W American. It was not a true .44-caliber, using a bullet of .434-inch diameter in a rimmed centerfire case about .91-inch in length. .44 American cartridges used bullets of the so-called "heeled" type, where the bullet shank was smaller than the rest of the slug and fit into a bullet diameter-sized case. It is an older system that persists in such cartridges as the .22 Long Rifle. Bullets loaded with this method are about the same size as the cartridge case. There's something of a mechanical advantage to such a system in that the chambers are a little smaller in diameter and the cylinder can therefore be made a bit smaller. When a modern handloader goes about loading for the .44 American, he forms his cases from .41 Magnum brass.
