.45-70 Government vs Every Predator in America – Where It Fails

There is a cartridge that has killed everything that walks this continent and it passed the century and a half mark this year. It dropped bison by the trainload when the herd still ran from horizon to horizon. It rode on the hip of the cavalry and today it is the rifle an Alaska guide reaches for when a brown bear the size of a compact car is closing the distance and the client is out of talent. The 45-70 government.

And here is the strange thing about it. The thing that makes this video different from every other one I have done. Every gun before this I had to tell you where it ran out, where the loophole closed and the animal won. This is the one where I have to tell you the opposite. This is the one where the answer is basically yes. Yes to the coyote.

Yes to the hog. Yes to the black bear. Yes to the grizzly. Yes all the way up to the biggest bears on Earth. It is enough for all of it. So today I am running the 45-70 against every predator in America one at a time. And that raises a question a lot more interesting than whether it works. If one cartridge genuinely handles every predator on the continent, why is not everybody carrying it? Why does anyone bother with a revolver on their belt or a semi-auto full of hardcast when this thing exists and has existed since 1873?

That is the real video. Not where it fails because it mostly does not. The bill. What it costs you to carry the one gun that is always enough because there is a bill and it is steep. By the end you are going to understand exactly why the most powerful thing in the truck is not always the smart thing on your shoulder.

But before any of that I have to tell you something about this cartridge that will keep you out of the hospital because it is not really one cartridge at all. It is three. The 45-70 you can buy at the counter comes in what are essentially three completely different power levels. They are not interchangeable and mixing them up is how people get hurt.

The mildest is the trapdoor load, named for that original 1873 Springfield. It is loaded soft on purpose, >> [music] >> so it is safe in a rifle your great-great-grandfather might have carried. Then there is the middle tier, built for a modern lever gun like the Marlin 1895, loaded a good deal hotter because that steel can take it.

And then there is the top tier, the nuclear stuff, loaded for a Ruger single shot with an action like a bank vault. Those rounds generate pressure that would turn an old trapdoor into a hand grenade. They are the same size on the shelf, and they carry the same name on the box. But the pressure between the mildest and the hottest is a different world.

So the very first rule of this gun, before we talk about a single animal, is that you match the ammunition to the rifle. The wrong load in the wrong gun does not hurt the bear, it hurts the person holding it. Now, with that out of the way, let me show you the yardstick. Here is where the 45-70 stops making the excuses every other gun in this series had to make.

You have heard me say it before, and it is still true. What kills an animal is not the number of foot-pounds on the box, it is penetration. A bullet reaching something vital and destroying it. A simple hunting arrow carries maybe 50 foot-pounds of energy, and it will pass clean through an elk. A screaming little varmint round with 20 times the energy blows up on the surface, and it would be illegal to hunt that same elk with.

What gets the job done is a deep hole in the right place, and every gun I have talked about so far, the .44, the little .357, the 10 mm, every one of them had to lean on that idea. None of them made enough raw power to just bully their way through a big animal. They needed the right bullet doing the smart thing. The .45-70 does not need the excuse.

It has the penetration in a fat hard cast bullet almost half an inch across. That drives through bone like the bone was not there. It has the frontal size, punching a hole you could nearly fit your thumb in. And in that middle lever gun tier, it has something none of the handguns could touch, which is real rifle energy. A heavy hard cast .

45-70 out of a Marlin runs somewhere north of 3,000 foot pounds. Let that land for a second. The heaviest, hottest .44 Magnum you can stuff in a revolver makes maybe 1,500. A stiff 10 mm, 700. This thing doubles the mighty .44 and quadruples the 10. It is not in the same conversation. So, when I tell you it is enough, understand that I am not stretching.

On the animals below, the .45-70 is not just adequate, it is overwhelming. And the whole story of this video lives in the space between overwhelming and portable. If you would rather have the honest math on a cartridge than the campfire mythology, this is the channel that runs the numbers before it runs its mouth.

>> [music] >> Subscribe and help push this toward 100,000 of us who want it that way. So, let me take them in order, from the animals this thing turns inside out to the ones where even all that power starts bumping into its limits. And we start at the bottom, where the .45-70 is almost comically more gun than the job requires.

The coyote is the predator you are most likely to actually run into. And against this rifle, it is not a contest. It is a disappearance. There are around 150 documented attacks on people in North America and roughly 11 deaths on record. Nearly every one of those traces back to a sick animal or one that lost its fear around a neighborhood.

A 35-lb coyote hit with a heavy .45-70 is not a defensive situation. It is a mess you will be explaining to whoever owns the field. Even the eastern coyote, the bigger one with some wolf mixed into its blood that folks have taken to calling the coywolf, does not change the math even slightly. The gun is so far past enough that the only real question is whether there is anything left to skin, which is a strange place to begin.

But, it sets the tone for the whole bottom of this list. For a long stretch here, enough is not the issue. Too much is. The wolf sits right beside it and gets feared far more than the record justifies. Across a full century, the wolf death toll for all of North America sits at roughly 33 people.

And that is the 100-year total, not a yearly figure. A healthy wolf wants nothing to do with you. For the .45-70, a wolf is just a slightly larger coyote. And the same reality holds. This is a rifle built to anchor animals 40 times what the wolf weighs. Putting it on a wolf is using a wrecking ball on a mailbox.

It works, obviously. It was never going to not work. The alligator is the first one that gets interesting. Not because the rifle struggles, but because of where you have to put the bullet. A gator does not fight like anything with fur. Deaths are rare, something like two dozen in Florida over 75 years. Though the trend rises as the gators rebound and neighborhoods push into their water.

A big gator is armored on top with heavy bone. Its brain is a target about the size of a walnut. And it explodes up out of the water and rolls before your eye has even found the sights. Now, the .45-70 will crack that skull like an egg, no question. The power is absurdly sufficient. The catch is that a rifle is a slow, two-handed thing to [music] bring up.

And a gator attack happens at bad breath range in a heartbeat. So, here is the first quiet lesson of the whole video. And it will come back louder later. The .45-70 has all the power in the world. And none of it matters. If the animal is on you before the rifle is up, power is not the same thing as speed. And it is not the same thing as being ready.

The mountain lion drives that lesson home hard. It is the one predator on this list that actually hunts people. And it is the worst possible match-up for a big, slow rifle. By the numbers, the cougar looks harmless. About 27 fatal attacks in a century. But the lion does not face you down. It comes from behind, from above, from cover. And the first you know of it is 150 lb landing on your back with its teeth already finding your neck.

And I want you to really sit with what that means for this rifle. >> [music] >> The .45-70 is the most powerful gun in this entire series and against the one animal that ambushes you, it may be the least useful thing you could be holding. You cannot swing a lever gun around onto your own spine.

By the time you understand the fight has started, the fight [music] is nearly over. Against the lion, the thing that saves your life is your eyes [music] and your awareness long before any trigger. The biggest cartridge on the list cannot buy you back the half second the cat already took. That is not a knock on the round. It is a knock on the idea that more power is always the answer.

Before we climb into the animals this cartridge was truly born for, one quick word. This is for the person who wants it sorted out at the kitchen table instead of learning it the hard way in the field. That is the reason the Prepper’s Firearms Guide exists. It runs 105 pages. Every gun and caliber that pulls its weight when money and time get tight.

Each one carries a dated real-world price and a plain warning about the used market traps that cost people money. Scan the code on the screen or use the description link and I am done selling after this sentence. Now we get to the middle of the list. The point where the .45-70 stops being overkill and starts being exactly the tool the feral hog.

People laugh at wild pigs right up until one comes through the brush low and fast and opens a leg to the bone. Worldwide they put eight or nine people in the ground a year and with the feral herds in this country now numbering in the millions, run-ins climb every season. And the hog is where a lot of guns in this series had to work for it.

A mature boar grows a shield across his shoulders, a slab of gristle and scar an inch or two thick and it stops a lesser bullet cold. The .45-70 does not work for it. The shield that defeats a handgun bullet is not even a speed bump to a heavy hard cast slug moving 1,800 ft per second. It goes through the shield, through the boar, and into the dirt on the far side.

This is genuinely one of the best hog rifles a person can carry. The only real criticism is that on a smaller pig, there is not going to be a lot left to put in the cooler. But as a pure question of whether it is enough, the hog is where the .45-70 stops apologizing and starts doing exactly what its size promises. The bison, along with the moose, is the animal where this rifle steps into a job that literally no other gun in this whole series can honestly claim.

Remember how this started. The animals that hurt the most people in this country are not the bears and the cats. They are these 1,000 to 2,000 lb grass eaters that people wander up to for a photograph. A bull moose in the rut or a bison that decides you crowded it will stomp and gore with more mass than every bear and cougar on the continent combined.

>> [music] >> And here is the thing. Every handgun I have talked about was marginal on this much animal. The .45-70 is not marginal. This is a round with an actual history of killing bison on purpose in large numbers. A modern hard cast load out of a lever gun will drive through 2,000 lbs of animal and reach what needs reaching.

This is the payoff tier. If you genuinely had to stop the largest land animal on the continent, this is the one gun on the list that does it reliably. Not with perfect placement and a prayer. Just done. Though I will say, even here, a bison can soak up more than you would ever expect.

So, the respect and the distance still matter more than the caliber. If you have been hunting for a channel that tells you which gun is actually enough instead of pushing the priciest one on the rack, you found it. Hit subscribe. And the next breakdown drops tomorrow. Now, the tier half of you came here for. The grizzly and its enormous coastal cousins, the brown bear and the Kodiak.

And this is where the .45-70 earns its crown. This is the one gun in the entire series that is genuinely, unarguably enough for the great bears with no asterisk on its power at all. A grizzly is a different order of animal. Fast enough to close the ground in a couple of seconds. Built through the shoulders like a bulldozer.

A big coastal brown can run three times the weight of an interior Grizz. Every handgun in this series I had to give you the same honest hedge that it can work, but it is really the backup and you ought to bring a rifle. This is that rifle. A Marlin guide gun loaded with heavy hard cast is one of the most trusted brown bear stoppers that has ever existed.

It is ridden in the hands of Alaska guides for exactly this reason for generations. The whole guide gun idea that short handy big bore lever was dreamed up by Alaska hunting and fishing guides. They needed something that would stop the biggest bear on earth from close range. Brown bear, a lever .45-70 is on the short list every time.

So for the first time in this series, I do not have to hedge on the great bears. The .45-70 reaches the vitals, breaks the bone, and does the job. But, and you knew there was a butt coming, here is where the bill finally lands. And it is worth understanding exactly. The .45-70 is enough for a grizzly. But enough is not the same as easy.

This is a cartridge that in full power form kicks about twice as hard as a .44 magnum. Into the neighborhood of a heavy 12 gauge slug. And it does that out of a rifle you have to bring up, aim, and work a lever between shots. Most people cannot shoot a full house .45-70 well. They flinch and a flinch throws the shot.

And a thrown shot on a charging brown bear is worth exactly nothing no matter how powerful the round was. So the gun that is the most enough is also the gun most people shoot the worst. And against the biggest bears, where you might get one or two shots before it reaches you, shooting it well is the entire game.

That is the paradox at the heart of this whole thing. Because power you cannot deliver on target, is not really power at all. It is just recoil into your own shoulder, which brings us to the top of the mountain. The polar bear. The largest land carnivore on the planet. An animal that will actually hunt a human being across the ice on purpose.

And this is the moment. The 45-70 does something no other gun in this series could do. It does not tap out. A lever 45-70 with heavy hard cast is a legitimate close-range polar bear defense rifle. And it has been carried as exactly that in the far north. It is the only cartridge on this entire list that is still a real answer when the biggest bear on earth is involved.

Now, I will be honest with you, the way I always am. If you were deliberately going to hunt one of these animals at distance, the professionals reach for a bigger bolt action rifle. Something like a .375. Reaching way out and putting one precisely into a bear is a different job than stopping one that is already close.

But defending yourself from a bear and hunting a bear are two different sentences. And for the first one, up close where it counts, the 45-70 is still standing when every other gun on this list has sat down. That is what enough for everything actually means. So, let me give you the two things that matter more than any of this.

And then the honest bottom line. The first is bear spray. And I’m going to be even-handed about it. Because most people only ever hear the half that suits whoever is talking. The downsides are real. And the label buries them. You get maybe 30 or 40 ft of reach. And a bear eats that distance in about a second.

One gust of wind or a wall of brush can scatter the whole cloud. Or hand it right back to your own eyes. It has failed. And people have died holding an empty can. It is no force field, but played inside its limits with the wind behaving and the can already in your hand, it has turned back a staggering number of bears with nobody firing a shot.

The folks who actually make their living in that country do not pick a side. They wear the spray and the rifle both, and they think choosing just one is foolish. And notice how the layered carry flips with this gun. On every video before this one, the rifle was the thing you wished you had, and the handgun was the reality on your hip. Here, the .

45-70 is the real answer. The handgun becomes the backup, the thing you reach for in the terrible moment the long gun is knocked from your hands, which is the whole reason, when you get down to it, that not everybody just carries this and calls it a day. Here is the honest bottom line, and it is the answer to the question I asked you at the start. The .

45-70 is enough for every predator that walks this continent. Every one. That part is simply true, and nothing else in this series can say the same. But enough for everything and right for everything are not the same sentence, and that gap is the entire bill. It is a rifle, so you cannot wear it on your chest while you fish or set up camp.

The bear that gets you is the one that catches you with your hands full. It kicks hard enough that most people cannot shoot it well, and a gun you flinch is worse than a smaller gun you can drive. It holds four or five rounds and reaches out to about 150 yards before the bullet starts falling out of the sky like a thrown rock.

It is a close-range, heavy-hitting, few-shots, hard-kicking specialist. So the man who carries a revolver on his belt is not wrong, and the man who carries this is not wrong. They have just made a different peace with the same trade. One picked the gun that is always with him. The other picked the gun that is always enough.

And almost nobody in the real world gets to carry a gun that is both. If you want the full rundown of which guns and calibers earn their keep when it counts, and what everyone really costs, that whole guide is linked down below. That is the last I will say about it. There is a crowd building here, climbing toward a >> [music] >> Every one of us the type who would take the straight version over the sold version any day.

If this earned a spot in your feed, ride along and stay a while. 150 years old and it still answers the question every other gun dodges. It is enough for all of it. You just have to be enough for it. Subscribe if this one earned it.