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Scarce MARLIN Lever Action
It’s getting more and more difficult to remember just how much magic was radiated by the word “magnum” back in the magnum-mad 1960s. It meant big belted cases, blinding speed, and vaporized animals at impossible distances.
How, then, did the diminutive, mild-mannered .256 Winchester Magnum ever come by the name? Let’s be realistic: A 60-grain bullet at 2,750 fps is not exactly traveling at the speed of light—and that’s what you get on a good day. Of its more famous .25-caliber brethren—Savage, Roberts, Weatherby—it shades only the .25-20 WCF, and that certainly is not setting the bar very high.
Usually, the magnum name was attached to cartridges that were a more powerful version of a cartridge that already existed.
The .44 Magnum, for example, is simply a longer, more powerful .44 Special. Well, back in the 1930s, Smith & Wesson decided the .38 Special needed juicing up and came out with a longer-cased version they called the “.357 Magnum.” Purists will note that it simply could have been called the “.357” as no other cartridge by that name existed, but S&W wanted the magic, and the .357 Magnum delivered it.
The .357 Magnum case intrigued cartridge designers who were convinced it could be necked down into something useful.
Remington decided it could be the basis for a hot .22 to use in handguns, while Winchester leaned toward .25. The result was two cartridges that appeared almost simultaneously around 1961: the .22 Remington Jet and the .256 Winchester Magnum. Like most children, the .256 took its father’s name, and just like so many offspring of famous men, it was a disappointment.
The .256 Win. Mag. was intended as a handgun varmint cartridge, but bottleneck cartridges don’t do well in revolvers, so Ruger brought out its single-shot Hawkeye pistol chambered for it, made 3,300 of them, and called it a day.
Marlin adopted the .256 Win. Mag. and redesigned its short-throw Levermatic rifle to accommodate it. It was called the Model 62, and Marlin turned out about 8,000. Universal Firearms offered it in the semiautomatic M1 Carbine, and Thompson/Center has offered it in limited quantities of single-shot Contender pistol barrels.
In the 57 years since, writers (including yours truly) have had a field day explaining why the whole idea was doomed from the start.
In my own case, such hindsight has been rather rueful because I fell in love with the Levermatic Model 62 and the .256 Win. Mag. cartridge the day the 1964 Marlin catalog arrived in the mail. The word “magnum” hooked me, and the modern, streamlined look of the Model 62 seduced my imagination. Truth to tell, I still have that catalog, and when I open it to that page, I still get that tingle almost 60 years later.
Like many rifle lovers who reach a certain age and level of financial ability, I went looking for a Model 62, eventually found one, prevailed upon Leupold to make me a slightly retro 3X scope, found a period-original George Lawrence leather sling, and began the long road to securing a supply of ammunition.
Winchester produced its last run of .256 Win. Mag. around 1993, and brass disappeared from the market shortly after.
Although a few independent makers have flirted with it since, including Jamison Industries (the successor to B.E.L.L.), most of us have had to acquire the wherewithal to turn common .357 Mag. brass into .256 Win. Mag. You can also use .22 Jet brass, but I found it cheaper and easier in the long run to use .357 Mag.
In the process, I learned a lot about fashioning one cartridge from another. Most valuable, perhaps, I learned that one has to be very careful how hot you load the .256 Win. Mag. because the Levermatic is not blessed with a stout extractor and cases stick quite easily.
In other words, this so-called magnum cannot even be juiced much beyond its already modest factory ballistics.
What’s in a name? In this case, not much. Taken together with the rifle, though, they make a nice walking-around combination that does fine work on marauding armadillos. And you know what? The armadillos never realize the .256 Win. Mag is not really a magnum.
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Remington Model 51.
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REMEMBERING SKEETER
AND SIXGUNS
It is hard to believe Skeeter Skelton has been gone from us for a quarter of a century. There have been many excellent gunwriters over the past 100 years or so, and I have looked up articles by them written before WWI. Beginning in the late 1920s, Elmer Keith caught the attention of shooters and held it for over 50 years; I believe I’ve read everything he ever wrote, especially pertaining to sixguns. Keith wrote about sixguns, shotguns, rifles and hunting with nearly a dozen books to his credit.
Skeeter on the other hand, wrote mostly, almost exclusively, about handguns. His writing career lasted less than 30 years and he never wrote a book, however many of his articles were compiled into a pair of books after his passing and his influence and appeal are everlasting. Those two books which demand high dollar prices these days are Hipshots, Hoglegs, and Jalapenos and Good Friends, Good Guns, Good Whiskey. Just as with Elmer Keith, today Skeeter’s articles seem somewhat dated, nevertheless, just as with Keith, they are also highly relevant in many ways to shooters today.
Skeeter joined the Border Patrol in the early 1950s at a time when it was still a horseback outfit, and also was actually allowed to enforce federal law concerning illegals. He went on to become sheriff of Deaf Smith County, Texas, and while serving as sheriff wrote many of his early articles. His first freelance efforts appeared in this very magazine under his given name of Charles A. Skelton.
Skeeter Skelton was directly responsible for the resurrection of the S&W .44 Specials in the early 1980s.
Some articles I recall (in fact saved in my file) are “Pistols For Plainclothesmen,” “The New Varminters,” “Rigging Up For Sixgunning” and “Belt Guns Along Rio Grande.” I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I would be willing to wager many of those reading this have done the same thing. Skeeter also freelanced for Gun World and GunSport, then became handgun editor for Shooting Times in the mid-1960s. For more than 20 years in that position, Skeeter caught the imagination and attention of sixgunners everywhere.
Skeeter was more than just a gunwriter as he had a natural talent for entertaining stories, whether they were about his childhood days with his friend in the “Me And Joe” tales or his fictional accounts of the adventures of Dobe Grant. The imaginary Dobe was made up using a compilation of the attributes of several real characters in Skeeter’s life such as Bill Jordan and Evan Quiros. With “Me And Joe,” many of us were able to relive parts of our childhood and dream of years gone by that we shall never see again; with Dobe Grant there was always an adventure and a good definition of what real friendship is.
I first met Skeeter in 1978. The NRA Show was held in Salt Lake City that year, so Diamond Dot and I drove down to attend it as well as The Outstanding American Handgunner Awards Foundation Banquet. I had high hopes Skeeter would win that year, which he did, and I still have the banquet program he autographed for me. I caught his attention on the show floor by walking up to him and handing him a picture. It was a picture of a 1st Generation Colt Single Action I owned and the close-up of the barrel revealed an inscription: “Russian and S&W Special 44.” Skeeter grabbed me by the arm and said, “Let’s go find a place to talk.” He loved Colt Single Actions, especially the .44 Special.
Over the years, Skeeter’s physical condition suffered greatly because of several fights he experienced as a law officer, car accidents and especially a botched operation. He was 60 years old when everything finally caught up with him. While Skeeter was in the hospital I sent him many of my manuscripts, hoping with them he would experience just a small part of the enjoyment I had received from his.
Skeeter often carried a Colt Single Action (above). Skeeter with
his favorite 5″ Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum (below).
Two of my friends, John Wootters and Bob Baer, spent a lot of time visiting with Skeeter in the hospital, and the three of them, along with the help of Bill Grover, built what turned out to be Skeeter’s last sixgun. It is a Ruger 3-Screw .357 Blackhawk converted to .44 Special, fitted with stocks made from the horns of a bighorn sheep picked up by Wootters and Skeeter while in British Columbia. This sixgun now belongs to John Wootters and is pictured in my Book of the .44, which is now out of print. I also dedicated a chapter in that book to Skeeter and the resurrection of the .44 Special. Since his passing in 1988, I have tried to pick up the torch and carry it for sixguns in general… the .44 Special in particular.
Skeeter’s articles were mostly written at the time of the Classic Sixguns, in the middle of the 20th century. I was in college when he wrote about the arrival of the Colt New Frontier. His 5-1/2″ .44 Special was about the most beautiful single-action sixgun I had ever seen and I dreamed of the day I could possibly have one of my own. He not only liked the New Frontier but he had a special fondness for 4-3/4″ Colt Single Actions in both .45 Colt and .44 Special. He made all of us dream of what could be with his articles on custom single actions.
By the late 1970s, it was pretty impossible to find a Colt or Smith & Wesson .44 Special as they had both been removed from production. Skeeter showed us how to make our own in one of his articles. His piece on converting .357 Magnums to .44 Specials has had a tremendous affect over the past 30 years, with the result several top-drawer gunsmiths have converted hundreds of .357 Magnums to .44 Specials.
Skeeter showed us how to do it with both a Ruger 3-Screw Blackhawk and a S&W Highway Patrolman. Because of his writings, Colt returned the .44 Special Single Action into production and S&W produced both blued and stainless steel N-Frame .44 Specials in the early 1980s. Today both companies again offer .44 Specials; Ruger produces the .44 Special Flat-Top New Model while Lipsey’s offers special runs of Ruger .44 Specials, including the Bisley Model and the stainless steel Flat-Top Blackhawk. The .44 Special is indeed alive and well and are a lasting testimony to Skeeter’s inspirational articles.
Skeeter was also a great fan of the S&W double-action sixgun. We could all sympathize with him as he wrote how difficult it was to find a .357 Magnum S&W in the late 1950s. He finally came up with a 5″ Smith and, from his writings, I conclude it was one of his all-time favorite sixguns. Not only were .357 Magnum revolvers hard to find at that time, it was also very difficult to come up with .357 Magnum brass.
The load he developed will probably be forever known as the “Skeeter Load” and consisted of .38 Special brass, 13.5 grains of 2400 powder, and the Lyman Ray Thompson designed 358156 gas-checked bullet. This bullet has two crimping grooves and Skeeter used the bottom groove to allow more case capacity; muzzle velocity is right at 1,300 fps. With the arrival of the K-framed Smith & Wesson .357 Combat Magnum, Skeeter found he had a smaller and lighter Magnum which was much easier to pack all day; however, he still used his same load for this S&W sixgun.
Skeeter acquired one of the first 4″ 1950 Target .44 Special S&Ws, although when the .44 Magnum arrived he replaced it with a 4″ version of the latter. He soon found the Magnum was too heavy and too powerful for police work and went back to a 4″ 1950 Target Model .44 Special. (Just about every .44 Special sixgunner knows of and uses Skeeter’s .44 Special Load, the 250-grain Keith bullet over 7.5 grains of Unique.) He opined at the time the .44 Magnum was strictly for hunting and he found a slightly used 7-1/2″ .44 Blackhawk, the original Flat-Top version and this became his favorite hunting handgun carried in a George Lawrence No. 120 Keith holster. He was carrying that sixgun and his brush clothes when he was called to take part in a drug raid and also when he pulled down on a drug smuggler, who was armed and ready to fight.
With that big .44, all the fight disappeared from the contrabandista; the man later said: “That cowboy had the biggest gun I ever saw!”
What are probably the most popular double-action revolver stocks ever designed are now known as Skeeter Skelton Stocks. Skeeter took the stocks Walter Roper designed for the S&W in the 1930s but modified them to better fit his hand. My friend, the late Deacon Deason of BearHug, acquired permission from Skeeter to reproduce this grip. With the passing of Deacon, friend Tedd Adamovich of BluMagnum now offers the same excellent grip for S&W double-action sixguns.
When it comes to sixguns and sixgunning, Elmer Keith and Skeeter Skelton influenced just about everything. Their writings caught the imagination, heart and soul of every true sixgunner. I hope in some small way, I have carried on their tradition.
BluMagnum Grips
2605 E. Willamette Ave.
Colorado Springs, CO 80909
(719) 632-9417
www.blu-magnum.com
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed ten new gun control bills on Saturday, one of which is designed to block 3D printers from printing firearms.
Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety cheered Newsom’s signature on The Firearm Printing Prevention Act (AB 2047), describing it as “groundbreaking legislation.”
AB 2047 was fashioned to “stop the next generation of ghost guns before they are made by requiring consumer 3D printers sold in California to incorporate technology that identifies and blocks attempts to print firearms and illegal firearm parts.”
Another one of the gun controls, Senate Bill 948, “dramatically expands California’s Firearm Safety Certificate (FSC) requirements by mandating a minimum four-hour training course beginning in 2029, including live-fire exercises and state-prescribed classroom instruction,” according to the NRA-ILA.
Among the other new controls, AB 1743, “expands the state’s firearm owner’s data-sharing framework by increasing access to information maintained in California’s Automated Firearms System and related databases.”
Senate Bill 1220 “[adds] a new firearm-prohibiting misdemeanor to California’s list of offenses that trigger a 10-year firearm prohibition.”Gov. Newsom’s office put out a press release on the signing the new gun controls, describing California as the “[No. 1] state in the nation for gun law strength and effectiveness.”
His office did not mention FBI figures highlighted by Breitbart News, which show that while California is No. 1 in gun control it was also No. 1 in “active shooter instances” in both 2021 and 2023.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world.