The French, still very much smarting from their humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and now having this wonderful new propellant, quickly developed the world's first smokeless cartridge and a (then) high tech rifle (the Lebel) that could shoot it. This sent shock waves through their principle enemy, the young German nation and so the German government put together a military commission to develop their own smokeless cartridge and an advanced technology rifle to shoot it.

The Commission took in all the latest cartridge design ideas (mostly from the Swiss), and then developed their famous 8X57 MM cartridge.  To this day, this cartridge is throughly modern looking and (with a slightly larger bullet) is still used in rifles today. The Commission then contracted with a Jewish sewing machine manufacturer who had a reputation for making precision machinery of the highest quality. This was the famous Ludwig Loewe of Berlin who then began manufacturing the famous 1888 Commission Rifle (the GEW 88).  There were two things that made the Commission Rifle superior to the French Lebel as a military weapon: (1) it fired a cartridge superior in design and function to the very odd  Lebel cartridge (although it must be said that the overall ballistics of the two cartridges were nearly identical) and (2) it had a vastly superior Mannlicher magazine that was loaded by inserting a clip of 5 cartridges (later modified to a stripper clip cartridge charger) so that it was ever so much faster to reload than the French rifle with its ridiculous tubular magazine. 

By the way, nearly all hunting and military rifles today shoot cartridges very similar to the 1888 8X57, but few or none shoot anything like the Lebel cartridge.  One exception might be the 8 MM Steyr Mannlicher rifle used by the Austrian Army.  It's cartridge is almost as odd as the Lebel's and it likewise failed to survive past WW 2 as a military or hunting cartridge. Other exceptions might be the Enfield .303 and the Russian Mosin-Nagant and, although their cartridges are rimmed, neither has the very odd shape of the Lebel. 

As busy as the Loewe factory was turning out the 88 Commission Rifle, the factory's design department, headed by the famous Mauser brothers, was busy designing improved rifles for the export market. The Mauser brothers greatly improved certain features of the Commission Rifle using their own ideas and Ludwig Loewe started selling Mauser rifles to governments and hunters all over the world.  The Mauser rifles Loewe manufactured for export were the most technically advanced rifles made anywhere and were beautifully fabricated from the highest quality steels and components.  The steel was expertly heat-treated and hardened and the metalwork was beautifully machined and finished.   After this, every country (without a domestic arms industry) wanted a Mauser, so  models (all similar to each other) were produced for scores of countries ranging from Argentina to Mexico to Turkey. When Kaiser Wilhelm boasted to the world about the unmatched quality and excellence of German design and manufacturing, almost always it was Loewe's Mausers he was referring to.

During their ballistic experiments with different diameter and weight bullets, the Mauser brothers realized that the new smokeless  powder and the new rifles they were designing would be even more effective if they reduced the bullet diameter from 8 MM to 7 MM and reduced the weight from 225 grains to 170 grains.  They took the 8X57 cartridge and necked it down for the smaller bullet and came up with the famous 7X57 cartridge.  In 1893, the first 7X57 MM Mausers were manufactured and sold to the Spanish Government.  To say the least, this rifle and its cartridge was a sensation.  In 1895, a very similar, but slightly improved model was produced for Chile and large numbers of that model were also sold to the Boers of South Africa for use in their fight against a British Empire take-over of their country.

The first real military use of the  7X57 came during the Spanish American War in 1898.  When the American Army invaded Cuba, they came up against vastly inferior numbers of Spanish soldiers armed with their 7X57 Spanish Mausers and the U.S. soldiers got their butts kicked - hard.  Thousands of U.S. soldiers were held back until they could overwhelm the Spanish positions by sheer numbers and only after suffering large causalities.  The 7X57 Mausers proved vastly superior to our old black powder 45-70s and even our new smokeless 30-40 Krag-Jorgensen's. 

This embarrassment on the battlefield resulted in a demand for a new rifle and cartridge since (unlike the Enfields) the 30-40 Krag-Jorgensen's action was too weak to stand up to a hotter powder charge. The demand for a new rifle and cartridge resulted in the model 1903 Springfield rifle and the 30-06 cartridge.  It so happens that the design of the Springfield Rifle is based almost entirely on the Mauser Rifle and the 30-06 cartridge is almost identical to the 7X57 except it is stretched out to hold more powder and necked up for a .308 caliber bullet (since we had millions of .308 bullets manufactured for the Krag-Jorgensen's).  America had ripped off the designs from Mauser so blatantly, the US had to pay patent infringement penalties to Germany up until WW 1 and then to a holding company after that.  By the way, in the 1950s the U.S. Army finally realized that the 30-06 cartridge's extra length wasn't necessary and so it was reduced down to 51 MM for the M14 (NATO .308).  The 51 MM NATO cartridge has been necked down for 7 MM bullets and today they make hunting rifles in 7X51, but they are ballistically no better than rifles shooting the older 7X57 Mauser cartridge.

 The second military use of the  7X57 came a little later (starting about 1900) during the Boer War. The British were using rifles chambered for their “new,” but actually very old fashioned, .30 caliber rimmed cartridge.  Some British units were armed with the Lee Medford rifle that used the .30 caliber rimmed cartridge, but their cartridges were loaded with compressed black powder - yes, black powder.  Other units were armed with the newer, but nearly identical Lee Enfield Rifle that shot a cartridge that looked identical, but was loaded with a smokeless propellant they called cordite.  Because of the 7X57 cartridge and the superb riflings of the 1895 model Mauser rifles, they were far superior to the Lee Metfords and out gunned the Lee Enfields too.  Many British soldiers were killed and wounded at ranges and with an accuracy the British couldn't match.  The “small” 7 MM (.28 caliber) bullet was also surprisingly deadly, even more so than the larger and heaver .30 caliber British bullets. This caused the British to completely redesign how their bullets worked and to abandon black powder entirely in favor of cartridges loaded with cordite.   By the way, the British kept the old rimmed cartridge (even through WW 2) after the changes they made brought the performance of their cartridges and bullets up to Mauser standards.  

After WW 1, there were a lot of beautifully made hunting rifles (called Plezier rifles) still in use in East Africa (particularly in the game-rich former German colony of Tanganyika) and many of them were in the 7X57 caliber. The very famous Elephant hunter of East Africa, Walter Bell, preferred the 7X57 to all other cartridges because the recoil is so light and yet the long 7 MM military bullet has an amazing penetrating power.  Rifles shooting the 7X57 cartridges are comfortable to shoot so that when they fire, the shooter does not tend to 'flinch' and mess up his shots.  Because of this, some very precision shooting can be done with them.  Bell discovered that the penetrating power of a standard military 170 grain full metal jacketed bullet together with the ease of holding the rifle on target combined to make the 7X57 a highly effective elephant cartridge – as “tiny” as the bullet was. Walter Bell went on to professionally kill more elephants with the 7X57 MM cartridge than have been killed by all the many “elephant gun” cartridges combined and that is an amazing record that stands to this day. Today it is illegal to shoot elephants (where elephants are legal to shoot) with a 7X57 because few hunters know the cranial anatomy of the elephant or are as good a shot as Bell was. 

Today, to be legal, you must use something like a .470 Nitro Express shooting a 500 grain bullet with 120 grains of smokeless powder. You must also be able to stand the huge blast and a bone breaking recoil (about 10 times more than my Mauser) all without flinching so badly you miss the elephant (or other dangerous game) altogether – something that few shooters can do.  A modern elephant gun is so intimidating to shoot that it's hard to hold on target and it's easy to miss what you're shooting at.  Missing or failing to disable an angry elephant (or other dangerous game) will likely result in a greasy spot on the ground where your crushed body once was and your sad fate will become a topic of scurrilous jokes told by cruel hunters around their campfires.  The moral of the story: don't shoot any rifle with a cartridge and bullet weight one bit bigger than you can hold on target without flinching.

As mentioned, my parents were totally against me owing anything more powerful than a .22 and very much against hunting in general. My parents were meat eating people, but who didn't believe in killing things themselves,  Like so many people, they somehow felt that eating meat is OK as long as somebody else does the killing and does the bloody butchering. Even as a kid, I've always thought that if you are going to eat meat (and eating meat is why our ancestors survived and the vegetarian hominids became extinct) then, by everything that's fair, you should experience for yourself the brutal, bloody, stinking and messy thing it is to kill and prepare animal food.  In my case, it has given me greater respect for animals and what they endure to feed us.  Killing, eviscerating and butchering game animals has had the effect of limiting the amount of meat I actually eat because I now understand what actually occurs. 

If anything, my hunting experiences have given me an enhanced sense of reverence for Nature.  Of course, I've also met hunters who have no reverence for anything.  I've met hunters who just love to kill things and have a beautiful work of Nature die in front of them as if somehow that gives them power over life or something.  The power of death is nothing, any fool who can afford a rifle has it.  It is in conserving a vibrant natural environment and a reverence for Nature that takes intelligence.   

Anyway, back to the story.  Regardless of my parent's feelings and my own reservations, I wanted to go hunting with Bobby and his dad, but for that I'd need a rifle – which I couldn't have. One day I was in the old Sears Warehouse (when they had one here in town) and I saw a guy behind the counter playing with this beautiful old rifle. I asked him about it and he told me it was a Mauser and it shot a bullet very similar to the famous .270 that Bobby's dad owned. I asked him how much for the rifle and he said $19.00. I could easily afford $19.00 (around $200.00 in today's money) because I had made money selling news papers on the street since age 11 and was presently working in a drug store. I asked the clerk if he'd sell me the rifle and he said "sure" – no gun laws back in those days. I gave the guy the money, tied it on my bike (kids could do that in those days without the 'SWAT' team being called), took the rifle home and hid it away. 

I then bought some old pre-WW 1 ammunition for the thing – boy do I wish I would have saved some of it because it was really old fashioned with rounded silver colored bullets that would now be a valuable collectible.  Anyway, the ammo was cheap and powerful and friends and I would secretly take my Mauser shooting at the Santa Maria River bed.  The original round nosed bullets were hard and powerful and it was fun to shoot the doors off of abandoned cars down there by aiming at the thick steel hinges of the doors.  Those bullets would also penetrate the six cylinder engines and cause them to smoke.  That was really fun and I smile now thinking about it.  Later I bought more modern military "spitzer" bullets, but my fun was over when I aimed at a door hinge about 20 feet away and before I was aware of the rifle going off, I felt a stabbing pain on my face.  The "modern" bullets must have been much softer than the older ones because instead of penetrating the thick steel, they disintegrated, formed a crater and then the crater directed some of the fragments back at me.  My face was bloody and I picked out a larger lead fragment just below my eye.  Naturally, I said nothing to anybody, but when asked about my face, I'd simply say that I was having a particularly bad time with acne.  Boy did I feel like an idiot and I was so thankful that nothing got in my eye.

After several months one of my friend's mother told my mother that I had the rifle. Oh, there was a scene, but it was too late to forbid me to have it and I had already shown that I could own and use it responsibly, so I was allowed to keep it. After the cat was out of the bag, the first thing I did was to cut down the military stock and then I took the barrel and receiver to a gunsmith to have the barrel cut down, re-crowned, and new front sights put on. The thing looked horrible, but at least it was a hunting rifle and I was all set to invite myself to go hunting with Bobby and his dad when deer season opened in the late summer.

Bobby's mom and dad had a rocky marriage and it didn't help a bit when another woman came in and destabilized the marriage altogether. Divorce ensued with a tragic and disastrous effect on my friend Bobby that made me profoundly sad too. Of course, that meant that any chance to go deer hunting was now dead and I had this old, ugly Mauser rifle as a useless piece of junk sitting in a closet.

First thing I did was to remove the old military stock and buy a nice modern wooden stock and mount all the steel items securely into it. I bought a nice looking walnut blank that was semi-inletting and then proceeded to carve it up and fit everything into it while filling all the voids with epoxy for a tight fit. I then experimented with mounting a scope forward of the receiver on top of the old rear sight with very limited success. Since the scope was forward of the receiver, I had to use a 'pistol scope' that had a very long eye-relief. It was ugly as sin, but it was far superior to the open military type sights.

I took my new “scout type” rifle with the forward mounted scope and straight bolt to the shooting range and was severely disappointed to see that the bullets were all over the place. I tried several things to improve accuracy and they helped, a little, but the thing was pretty much useless for hunting because it was so inaccurate. I then performed a very heavy copper removal cleaning operation and removed an amazing amount of fouling from the barrel. There was over 100 years of junk that came out of that barrel so I was confident it would now shoot straight, but such was not the case. To my great disappointment, the rifle still shot badly.

At this point, I decided that I was in too deeply to just throw the thing away, so I decided to spend the equivalent of a new rifle by having the barrel reamed out to the 8X57 cartridge size. I found a gunsmith, incompetent as it turned out, who agreed to do it. Well after waiting about 8 months for the rifle, he sent me a note that he had ruined the barrel, but he offered to make me a new one in the original 7X57 for the same price. I was very disappointed because I wanted to keep the rifle as original as possible, but I was pleased to have it in 7X57 again so I told the gunsmith to go ahead with the project.

Several weeks later I received the rifle back with the new barrel only to discover that the “throat” hadn't been machined and you couldn't load cartridges in the firing chamber. I sent it back and a few weeks later it came back more or less machined correctly. For a long time I was severely disappointed with my new barrel because, to tell the truth, it didn't seem to shoot a whole lot better than the old original barrel even with the deep, precision cut riflings.   I had never heard of "barrel harmonics" and when I first heard of it I was extremely skeptical.  After some experiments I became a real believer.  There are two approaches for "tuning" your barrel for maximum accuracy: you can (1)  experiment with different loads until you find just the right combination of bullet weight, bullet type, powder type and powder volume or you can (2). buy one of those silly looking rubber "de-resonators" and slide it down the barrel until you find the "sweet spot" for the particular ammo you are shooting.  I tried both approaches and I am extremely pleased at how well each of them works.  My plan is to use the de-resonator until all my H414 powder is used up and then slip it off and start shooting with IMR 4320.  Both loads gives me similar muzzle velocity and similar pressures, and with the rubber de-resonator, similar sub-MOA (less than 1" @ 100 Yds.) groupings.

Another thing I wanted to do was mount a conventional scope over the action and get rid of the forward mounted pistol scope.  You can't use a scope with a strait bolt handle, so I bought a offset bolt kit and fitted it myself.   I took the rifle to a great old gunsmith who machined flat a portion of the charger guide at the rear of the receiver and then he expertly drilled and tapped the receiver for "Weaver" type scope mounts that I had purchased from a supplier made especially for my Mauser. Having a real rifle scope mounted over the receiver vastly improved the looks and function of the rifle. 

The original "tang" safety flipped up too high for use with a scope, so I fitted a low profile safety lever myself that works well and looks good. Finally, I took off the old military double stage trigger mechanism and installed an adjustable trigger mechanism that has a snappy, light but safe pull. My rifle is now about as complete as any custom-built rifle there is.

After the scope was mounted, I very carefully bore sighted the rifle so I'd be somewhere on a target when I arrived at the shooting range. To my great disappointment, the first few shots showed a good pattern, but the pattern moved the more I shot the rifle. I'd adjust the scope, but then it shot somewhere else and it didn't make sense. I couldn't understand this until it occurred on me that as the barrel heated up and as I gripped the forearm of the stock differently, the barrel's press against the wooden forearm of the stock was also changing and that resulted in a change in where the barrel was pointing. 

I hadn't considered it possible for the barrel to interact with the stock because, after all, the barrel is made of rigid steel, right? On doing some research, I discovered that most authorities recommend a gap between the stock and the barrel wide enough to allow a dollar bill to slide from the end of the stock to firing chamber to prevent barrel-stock interaction. I was still skeptical so I took a optical bore-sighting tool and attached it to the muzzle of my rifle.  I applied hand pressure on the wooden stock and on the steel barrel and to my amazement, the sight pattern changed quite noticeably just by gripping and pulling on the stock and barrel with minor amounts of force.  

I was now convinced that I needed to "float the barrel" so I then proceeded to carefully sand out the channel in the stock until I could slip two $1 bills all the way down to the firing chamber without touching wood. After that, I took the rifle back to the shooting range and was gratified to see that the patterns did not depend on how many shots I had previously taken. Judging from some discussions I've read, “floating a barrel” is a little controversial and some shooters think you actually do harm to your accuracy, but most authorities recommend the practice and it certainly worked for me.  One thing that must be avoided with a free floating barrel is allowing anything to touch the barrel while shooting and to only hold or support the rifle with the wooden stock or your accuracy will be terrible.

To comply with the law, I sent away for a supply of rather expensive 'Barns Triple X (tm)' 100% copper bullets, loaded up a box of cartridges, took them to the shooting range and found that I love shooting them.  These are now the only bullets I want to shoot regardless of cost.  They are the most accurate bullets I've ever used in my Mauser and I do rather like the idea of not having to worry about lead in my meat.  Besides that, the copper bullets penetrate deeply and expand in a remarkable way to insure that game is killed swiftly and humanely.  In my opinion, these are the best bullets on the market.

For the larger game in this area and for ranges up to 300 yards, 7 MM bullets should weigh 140 grains.  A bullet of that weight has the power to kill anything ranging from bears to deer to the largest boar.  I now load my cartridges with 45 grains of  H414 behind 140 grain all copper bullets for an average muzzle velocity of just about 2700 feet per second (as measured by my electronic bullet chronograph).   For a 120 year old cartridge, this is pretty hot and yet it is not putting my old rifle under any undue strain.   The recoil from these loads is pleasantly light, but strong enough to give you the very satisfying feeling that you have just shot a deadly projectile.  Overall, this load makes my Mauser a very fun gun to shoot and there is nothing unpleasant or intimidating about firing it.

 The external ballistics of the Barns bullets fired from my Mauser gives me a "Point Blank Range" of a little over 300 yards.  That means that if I aim for the center of the chest of a deer (or bear or wild boar) and the target is anywhere within 1 to 300 yards, I will hit a vital area and the creature will be swiftly killed all without having to adjust my sights.  Beyond 300 yards, my bullets still have a huge amount of kinetic energy, but I'd have to adjust my sights and besides, holding any rifle on target beyond 150 yards (even with a scope) is extremely difficult.  In my opinion, shooting at game beyond 150 yards raises a serious question of hunting ethics and I would hesitate to take such a shot unless I had extraordinary means to steady my rifle before firing.  In the field, it is difficult or impossible to obtain the kinds of accuracy you can achieve at a rifle range so ethical hunters should consider passing up shots that may be within the range of their rifle, but are highly likely to result in a wounded animal that gets away only to die later in agony. 

In addition to my own reloaded cartridges I have factory loaded jacketed lead bullets in weights all the way up to 175 grains that would be very effective against Moose, buffalo and other large game animals - maybe even elephants.  

Since writing this last section I've made some important discoveries regarding accuracy.  Earlier I was convinced that after all my trouble and expense, my Mauser with its new barrel and precision cut riflings, was no "tack driver."  Good enough for hunting, but to tell the truth, I found the accuracy very disappointing and I blamed it entirely on the barrel (and me).  Now I've discovered my poor accuracy wasn't because of a poor barrel (or my shooting), but due to my cartridge loads not matched to the harmonic vibrations of my barrel.  Up until recently I didn't realize just how critical barrel harmonics are and I had never tried to adjust my loads to match my barrel's harmonics.  

The End