Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013 - 62

COLT MODEL 1911 .45 ACP magazine and a half moon clip. The clip holds three cartridges and was designed to hold the cartridges in place on top of the extractor on some revolvers.

down between my legs and ﬁre two rounds before hitting the ground and taking two leaps away before stopping. I’m not sure who was more shaken up, my friend, who also jumped from my yell and gunﬁre, or me in trying to escape a potential venomous bite. As our heart rates and adrenalin recovered, my friend asked what was going on. He said my boots were up about head height, and then he saw those two gun ﬂashes, and then me bouncing off the ground like on a trampoline. I explained that I had stepped on a rattlesnake (it was still dark enough where we couldn’t see the ground very clearly). After we bridled and gathered the horses it was light enough where we could see the dead coiled rattler. The two 45-caliber slugs made a mess out of it. I don’t know why I wasn’t bit, but we guessed that it was cold enough to where the snake didn’t have the energy to strike quickly. No matter what the reason, that .45 ACP did the job. It was during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) that the issued Colt double action pistol chambered in the .38 Long Colt cartridge proved that a 38-caliber 150-grain bullet traveling at 750 fps just didn’t have enough stopping power to reliably put down an enemy. So the military brought back the Colt Army single action in the .45 Long Colt cartridge to do the job, while they started developing/testing for a more modern 45-caliber cartridge designed with an automatic pistol in mind. In 1906 the Browning design of the rimless .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) cartridge that threw a 230-grain bullet at 850 fps that delivered around 450 ft lbs of energy (the .38 Long Colt was about half that), along with the Model 1905 pistol were accepted. The model 1905 was quickly reﬁned and redesigned by Colt into the famous Model 1911 and it was adopted
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by the military. When WWI was in full swing (19141918) there were not enough Model 1911s to go around, so Colt chambered their large Colt New Service revolver for the .45 ACP and called it the Model 1917. Smith & Wesson also brought out a version of their Hand Ejector revolver model, also calling it the Model 1917 for military purposes. But the rub was that because the cartridge was rimless, the cylinder extractor (which was designed for rimmed cartridges) on both the Colt and Smith could not extract/eject the cartridges. A half moon clip that held three cartridges was designed to hold the cartridges in place on top of the extractor. Of course, two loaded half moon clips were used to load the six shooter, and when the extractor rod was pushed it would extract out both clips and dump them clear of the gun. The Colt 1917 and S&W 1917 served their purpose well throughout WWI, WWII and Korea, and I have seen a few photos of them in the Vietnam War. The Colt Model 1917 was manufactured until 1920, and the S&W 1917 went on
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Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013

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