by Terry Wieland
In many ways, .35-caliber cartridges find themselves in the same situation as 35-year old men: Too old and not old enough, all at the same time, but mostly simply unappreciated.
One could draw out the comparison endlessly, but we shall refrain. Suffice to say, my recollection of reaching the age of 35 was that I had learned my trade (writing) sufficiently to go freelance, and that was the beginning of what I now consider my real life. Looking back, I can’t imagine doing anything else.
But back to the under-appreciated .35s. The problem they have is that the bullets are generally too heavy to qualify as high velocity, but not large enough to be considered a “big bore.” Thus they are espoused by neither of the two main rifle obsessives.
And yet, they hang on, surviving long past their alleged sell-by date (which some suggested was as early as 1915). Why? For one very simple reason: They do their job, and they do it well, without a lot of arrogant display.
Exhibit ‘A’ is the venerable .35 Remington, a modestly powered little number that has been around more than a century and is the last remaining member of a family of cartridges Remington designed for its semiauto Model 8 in 1906. The others, including a .25 and a .30, long ago fell by the wayside because, power-wise, they could not match their counterparts from Winchester.
The .35 hung on, however, largely because Marlin shrewdly deduced that its lever-action Model 336 could better compete with the Winchester ’94 if it offered a slightly more powerful alternative to the .30-30. The .35 Remington tosses a 200-grain bullet at around 2,100 feet per second (fps), depending on barrel length, compared to the .30-30’s 170-grain at the same velocity. In areas where deer hunters were likely to encounter black bears, the 336 was recommended over the 94 by many authorities, from 1945 onwards.
The stubby, homely little .35 Remington is still with us, and I hope it stays that way. My first big-game rifle was a 336, purchased when I was a gun-magazine-reading 15-year old. Although I never killed anything with it, I carried it hunting for five or six years before selling it to help finance by first trip to Africa. The affection for .35s stuck with me, however, and I later became enamored of the .358 Norma and, later still, the ancient Mannlicher-Schönauer 9×56 (1905).
Oddly, the Norma cartridge—a .458 Winchester necked down, or a .264 necked up—never achieved the renown it deserved except in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where the main game animal is the moose, and the main threat is the grizzly bear. The .358 was loaded with a 250-grain bullet at around 2,750 fps, which puts it on a par with both the .375 H&H and .338 Winchester, ballistically speaking.
