For instance, although the 45-70 really did use a powder charge of 70 grains of black powder, the 30-40 never was designed for black powder (the same is true of the classic 30-30 Winchester, which arrived a few years later), but was named that way for commercial use mainly for convenience and/or comparison. Cartridges had been named in a caliber-and-powder-charge manner for so long that some found the habit hard to break. The 30-40 cartridge was known as the 30 Army (or the 30 Government) until it hit the streets in commercial rifles around 1896. Although this rifle wasn’t the easiest gun to mass-produce, it was perhaps the smoothest-operating bolt action rifle ever designed. One of the Krag’s greatest boons was the rifle in which it came: the Krag-Jorgensen. There was also a new school of thought developing, and a move away from the big-and-slow approach to military ballistics.ġ892: Enter the 30-40 Krag, which was the US military’s first smokeless-powder cartridge, as well as its first small-bore rifle cartridge. As a military round, however, its reign was fairly brief, lasting just shy of 20 years before being supplanted by the 30-40.Īs repeating rifles became more common, advances were being made in gunpowder as well so-called “smokeless” powders offered better performance than black powder, without producing telltale clouds of white smoke and sulphurous fouling that could devour guns. Perhaps that’s why the 45-70 Government is still going strong, 140 years after its introduction in the 1873 Springfield rifle.
One thing has been true for far more than a century: if you want to ensure a cartridge’s endurance, get it adopted by the USA’s military. The Krag (not “Kraig” nor “Craig”) endures in a small way, no doubt due to the fine rifle in which it was issued, the Krag-Jorgensen. The 30-40 Krag cartridge, also known as the 30 Army, 30 Government, and even the 30 USA, was used by the US Army for about a decade before being replaced by a better-designed and faster-moving round that itself was replaced within three years by the 30-06 Springfield.