The Wyoming Schuetzen Union’s “Center Shot”

The stateside effects of WWI wore on the whole of American citizenry. If that era’s handloaders imagined that they would escape being affected, they were mistaken. United States arms manufacturers, ammunition plants, and industrial shops curtailed normal domestic production to pursue necessary war contracts. Thus, the American gun crank was – at a minimum – inconvenienced by the arms and ammunition shortages the fracas created.

John Barlow, founder of the Ideal Manufacturing Company, had sold out to his New Haven neighbor in 1910. Marlin continued to produce the Ideal line until 1916, when the press of war work relegated its loading tool and bullet mould business to “back-burner” status. Ideal tools were taken out of production and their essential tong tools became virtually unobtainable. Thus, Ideal was essentially out of the market it had been instrumental in creating. With Ideal impotent, the dearth of reloading tools was more than a mild bother; to civilian and military marksmen alike, it was a disabling handicap.

The Bond Machine Company of Wilmington, Delaware, had been fabricating heavy bench mounted presses for National Guard Armories and was approached by the NRA and the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice to develop a hand tool for personal use. With backing by the NRA and a handful of prominent military riflemen, a unit was designed and expedited onto the market. By late winter of 1919, Bond was ready with the goods. Lt. Col. Townsend Whelen, one of the principals behind Bond Machine Company’s recruitment as Ideal’s replacement, gave the robust Bond Tong Tool some favorable ink in the March 15, 1920 number of Arms And The Man.

As the new enterprise took up the slack, the echo of opportunity knocking was overheard by other venturesome concerns. The field for new invention was a ripe one. Yankee Specialty Company of Erie, Pennsylvania, answered the call during the great reloading tool famine with a cartridge loader that worked on the straight-line principle, contrasted to the “arc” used by Ideal and Modern Bond. Yankee’s substantial bullet moulds were unitized and made from rustproof bronze. These were in production by 1920.

In 1916, Warren S. Belding and Nate Mull founded a mail order operation specializing in products for shooters and sportsmen. As these things often naturally develop, the co-proprietors deliberated the feasibility of extending their enterprise to include the manufacture of a number of items that answered a need and ever-increasing demands of the “gun-cranky” American rifleman. The time and the market had never been more right. After Armistice, the market was supersaturated with the essential machine tooling and priced to sell.

Simple steel cleaning rods with the centering Mull tip came first, followed by the Belding-designed riflescopes and scope mounts. A bullet mould and reloading tool were in the works. Misters Belding and Mull didn’t just dip their toes into the water – they jumped in with both feet!

In 1923, Mr. Belding manned the B&M booth at Camp Perry’s Commercial Row with a handful of telescopic sights. Two years later, Belding and Mull had the Row’s only electrically lighted shed, brightly illuminating a display of 131 items of their manufacture. Their line now included bullet moulds in the full spectrum of calibers.

The first mention of the moulds was in May of 1924, and particulars were fleshed out in a circular released in June of that year. An American Rifleman advertisement that same month showcased the two key mould designs in the B&M line-up. By investing in a costly quarter page ad, Misters Belding and Mull were making a high stake, ultra-serious attempt to get noticed with their moulds introduction. Illustrated larger than life for effect were the .30 caliber Squibb-Miller and the Squibb Spitzer, which were in certain small but cognizant circles, not totally unknown. “Already famous” were the words B&M’s ad writers chose to express their firm’s intent. Squibb and Miller were not household names and pinning the company’s hopes on a couple of relatively undistinguished bullets required both optimism and faith. 

For the Long Island rifle enthusiast, the 200-yard range of the Cypress Hills Rifle and Revolver Association was the local center of Schuetzen competition and informal single shot shooting. Two years after its organization in 1906, the club received its allotment of sixteen 1903 Springfield rifles, the younger members predictably became enamored with the military-style of shooting then in vogue. As it was, the Cypress Hills 200-yard range was perfectly safe for mild lead bullet Schuetzen loads, but it was found to be positively perilous with the full-charge Springfield .30-1906 metal jacketed bullets. Facing the rocky backstop with timbers did little to diminish the ricochet hazards for the pit crews or other personnel and property downrange.

If the Springfield rifle were to be fired on the existing range, the membership determined, a low-powered, glance-proof handload, which was ballistically along the lines of the mild-mannered 32-40 would be required.

Sam Squibb, club secretary and accomplished Schuetzen rifleman, spearheaded the drive to develop the necessary loading. The name Sam Squibb has the uncertain feel of a pseudonym, the use of which was the quaint custom of a day already passed, but rather than a whimsical reference to a feebly discharging cartridge, it was his real name. When the Cypress Hills range was opened in 1906, its members elected Sam Squibb as its first shooting master. Sam was a 46-year-old, father of three with a lifelong involvement in the quarrying business. He got his start in 1900, as a blacksmith and tool sharpener in the stone yards. He worked his way into the management aspect of the trade and served as a union officer at various levels, including as president of the Granite Cutters International.

Together with a like-minded band of assistants, Sam Squibb set to work. What .30 caliber Ideal moulds were available from among members were gathered up. Unable to procure certain designs during the reloading tool famine, Mr. Squibb placed an ad in the Arms And The Man classifieds seeking secondhand specimens. The Ideal bullets were cast from an array of alloys, loaded into .30-1906 cases with every conceivable powder charge and seating depth, and put to the test. They tried specially made pointed bullets, bullets patched with paper, bullets with and without gas checks, and with columns of Cream of Wheat firewalling the projectile’s “Achilles Heel”, namely its easily violated base band.

An account of Squibb’s preliminary efforts in this direction is found in a letter printed in the February 1910, issue of National Sportsman magazine. At that point, Squibb’s efforts appear to be mostly a solitary undertaking. Along with the mention of his work to that point, we find the man’s modest self-description as a confessed “. . . plugger, piking along with no hope of ever landing in the Hall of Fame but shooting for the love of it.” He was then at the stage of focusing on nearly full power with the ignition of 34-36 grains of Marksman powder for each shot. Recent results with an experimental sharp-pointed 180-grain bullet, the cherry having been made for him by club member Mr. Haskell, showed great promise, staying in a 2.5-inch circle at 200 yards. Accompanying the hope-filled report was the lamentation that this load, and everything else he’d tried, was needlessly powerful. Mr. Squibb had yet to learn that he was handicapping himself by burning too much powder.

The hot nitroglycerine-based powders of the day were partially responsible for the disappointing performance of the Ideal bullets the Cypress Hills group had tried. The searing ignition of Sharpshooter, Infallible, and Lightning torched past the bullet’s base and left a trail of alloy along the length of the bore. Cleaning the rifle at the end of a day’s shooting was a ritual of bristling out shiny streaks and flakes of lead. This handicap was mostly eliminated with the release of DuPont No. 80 in 1913. 

With the leading matter under control to the extent that it could be, the bullet itself became the sole obstacle to overcome. Mr. Squibb had tried every approach in the lead bullet shooter’s bag of tricks and came up short. Discouraged yet determined, and advantaged by knowing what didn’t work, he struck out in a different direction and dabbled in the design of other bullets. To achieve this end, the energies of a dozen club members were focused on this common objective. Two of them, both driven and imaginative, became uncommonly involved.

Leonard S. Miller was an exceptional and formidable competitor whose forte was gallery and outdoor small bore competition, but he sub-specialized in .30 caliber shooting. Miller’s name routinely appeared near the top of the winner’s list of every regional match he entered. 

About 1920, legendary barrel maker and equally prominent Schuetzen marksman Harry Pope developed a tapered .30 caliber bullet for topflight short-range accuracy. His seven-banded 170-grainer tapered at both ends. The top four bands at .301 were barely marked by the lands, while the fifth and sixth, at .3025 were more meaningfully engraved. The base band measured a bore-corking .314-315. The inward slanting base band provided trouble free seating, but its chief purpose was to eliminate finning, the formation of tiny vanes of alloy displaced by each groove which trailed the flat based bullet’s steering end. The fins could vary in length, which conceivably could affect accuracy. Pope’s system was as close to breech seating as fixed ammunition could approach.

Inspired by the merits of this Pope bullet, Miller and Squibb nitpicked its theoretical flaws and reasoned out improvements. In their revision, the front four bands were a bore riding .301. Bore sealing began with band number five at .310 with the sixth two thousandths larger. A flange at the front of the .314-inch base band served as a stop that prevented the bullet from receding into the un-sized case neck slightly shy of snug. This bullet came to be known as the Squibb-Miller bullet. Mr. Miller, in a 1921 Arms And The Man classified ad, offered the Squibb-Miller bullets cast, lubed, and ready to load. Like the Pope, the Squibb-Miller was exclusively a target bullet. Both were intended to be hand-lubed and finger-seated by easing them into un-sized, primed, and charged cases.

Club officer Arthur Hubalek was one of the finest offhand and gallery shots in the East, and just outside Team Squibb’s inner circle. Hubalek favored a charge of 12.5 grains of No. 80 for his Squibb-Miller shooting in his Springfield. Hubalek gave Squibb’s band of experimenters the unlimited and free use of his personal machine rest.

The Pope bullet and the Squibb-Miller squared off on March 25, 1922, at the indoor range of the Second Naval Battalion for the annual Indoor Rifle Tournament held under the auspices of the Metropolitan Rifle League of New York. The showdown took place during the important 50-shot, 100-yard, indoor competition in the prone Special Rifle Class open to “any rifle”. Many Schuetzen rifles were on the firing line. Jacketed bullets were not allowed. 

Major John W. Hession of the elite Manhattan Rifle and Revolver club had been expected to compete. Hession was an Olympian, Palma Team member, two-time Wimbledon Cup winner, and on any range was regarded as the man to beat. He’d brought with him the finest outfit procurable. His 32-inch Pope-barreled Springfield was telescope-sighted and his 30-06 cartridges were hand-loaded with 12 grains of No. 80 behind the new Pope taper-base bullet.

Leonard Miller was shooting as a member of the Brooklyn Rifle Club. His rifle was a No. 3 weight Winchester-barreled Springfield, also scope sighted. Miller’s cases held 12.5 grains of No. 80 and topped with the newer Squibb-Miller bullet. Each man had equal opportunity to perforate the two-inch, ten-ring. When the smokeless had cleared, League President Harry Pope officially scored the targets and declared Miller the winner by a single point. Miller’s “giant-killing” and much celebrated achievement was all the talk at New York City’s many gun clubs for some time, and its mention in the magazines didn’t die out entirely for nearly a year. Belding and Mull got their share of mileage out of it, too.

Short-range target loads featuring the Pope or Squibb-Miller bullets were much too long and fragile to stack in a Springfield’s magazine, one of the essential first considerations of a rapid-fire practice round. Sam Squibb, meantime, had something in the works that would magazine flawlessly. Through trial and error, Squibb developed a series of conventionally seated gas check bullets, trying them each in turn and making refinements as experiments progressed. He had little faith in the inviolability of a base band lead bullet of any reasonable length, and insisted upon the segregation of powder and bullet be done with a copper gas check cup. Squibb’s preferred tin-less alloy of 90 percent lead and 10 percent antimony was as hard as it was difficult to manage. Squibb’s innovation was a lube bearing groove forward of the uppermost band, the leading edge of which functions as a dirt scraper.

What ultimately resulted was a sleekly pointed spitzer with a gracefully flowing ogive. The weight and form were patterned after a government full metal-jacketed spire-point. The Squibb bullet weighed 169 grains and fit the Springfield’s throat like it should. Sized to .309 and propelled by 11-16 grains of No. 80 (1,150-1,375 fps) the Squibb delivered the goods at the target; some of the 100-yard machine rest targets broke the one-inch barrier. One group in particular raised the eyebrows of Arms And The Man readers in August of 1922. An illustration showed the imprint of five Squibb bullets that a dime would hide. The sought-after grade of accuracy had been achieved.

Charles Gebhard, who also answered to “Pop,” was the senior member of the Squibb triumvirate. Charlie had an old-timer’s involvement in the rifle sports without the old-school outlook. Creative and resourceful, he brought to the effort an inventive flair and an investigative turn of mind.

Gebhard was a skilled tool and die maker and machinist. He made the cherries and cut the many moulds required in the group’s quest for the common goal. Seemingly eye-to-eye on general bullet configuration, Squibb and Gebhard were not in agreement on its rear end. Pop leaned toward a substantial base band while Sam demanded a gas check. A failed attempt best exemplifies the man’s ingenuity. To overcome a bullet’s slippage on engagement with the rifling, Gebhard overlaid the top band of a two-banded bullet with a copper belt, hoping to better grasp the rifling. In the end it was too time intensive to be worthwhile.

Mr. Gebhard finally arrived at a pointed bullet that he was pleased to put his name on. Predictably, the best accuracy wrested from the Gebhard bullet occurred, just as it had for Squibb and Miller, at the 1,200 to 1,400 fps level generated by light charges of DuPont No. 80.

Emanating from metropolitan New York in 1922, word of the wonderful scores turned out by the Squibb-Miller, Squibb and the Gebhard bullets fanned out along the East Coast. A demand and a market were created thereby. The designers turned out a few moulds for sale. The fledgling firm of Belding and Mull expressed an interest in manufacturing and marketing the moulds. Thus, the Squibb-Miller became well known as B&M 311168, the Squibb Spitzer was assigned 311169, and Gebhard’s pointed bullet was given the designation 311170.

From time to time, the need arose to update the many interested riflemen following the advances of the Cypress Hills coterie of lead bullet experimenters. When the occasion arose, the regular notifications were always broadcast in the AMERICAN RIFLEMAN and appeared under the byline of “Sam Squibb”. Sam was the able representative and spokesperson for the Cypress Hills club (in 1922, rechristened the Brooklyn Rifle Club) and he had a flair for this. Communication was one of his strengths, and he was good at it. His club and American Rifleman readers were well served by Sam Squibb.

Though not in-house designs, Belding and Mull aggressively promoted the “famous” bullet designs of the Cypress Hills riflemen along with their own, and carried them in their catalogs for almost thirty years. Belding and Mull also handled these bullets cast and ready to load.

Several years ago, I spent an entire range season shooting five-shot groups with the three famous B&M bullets. The test rifle was my only scoped, dedicated cast bullet gun, a Unertl-sighted Model 54 Winchester in .30 WCF. My very best five-shot, 100-yard groups came at the magical Sam Squibb prescribed velocity range of 1,200 – 1,350 fps. There was no sense in hot-rodding the Squibb-Miller. This bullet simply did not live up to the hype, generally. It turned in a handful of one-inch groups, but the stack of disappointing targets (two to four-inch groups) was bigger. Best accuracy came at the 1,000 to 1,250 fps. Old Belding and Mull handbooks contain loads with mostly obsolete powders. For the most part my old Winchester and Gebhard’s bullet didn’t get along. The very best accuracy was at 1,150 to 1,250 fps. Bumping up the velocity to a mere 1,400 fps and I was looking at eight-inch groups though the spotting scope.

Lyman Gunsight acquired Ideal in 1925, and two years later the Squibb bullet was introduced as a regular production mould in the Lyman line up, and it has been well known thereafter by its Lyman bullet number 311413, aka “Squibb”. It has been one of the most popular .30 caliber cast bullet of the past 100 years.

Sam Squibb went to the top levels with the Granite and Stone Cutters Union. In December of 1934, he was killed in traffic while exiting a bus on a Quincey, Massachusetts street. The old Belding and Mull is no more, and the three .30 caliber bullets that helped to establish the firm are no longer famous, but the trio of celebrity bullet designers in a very small circle are no longer unsung.

ADDENDUM

Some time back, an interesting bullet mould came on the market and it must have been in the cards that I wind up with it. It started its useful life as a common Winchester mould cut for the standard .22 W.C.F bullet. As the need arose, it was a prime candidate for modernization. At some point, the unitized mould was scavenged for its handles and block of solid bronze were expertly fitted to replace the integral block of the factory mold. The replacement block was cherried for an up-to-date cavity, the .30 caliber Squibb, and pinned to the Winchester frame. Completing a nice piece of machine work, the handles were marked with what was presumably the owner’s stamp. This mould conversion could not have landed in a more appreciative home.