In the present age of long-range shooting and extended-range hunting, specialty cartridges designed and groomed for those applications, cell phone ballistic apps and turreted scopes rivaling the ocular strength of the Hubble telescope, we’ve forgotten something. Peruse various reloading manuals from recent decades, and you won’t find it. Scrutinize volumes of books dedicated to guns and cartridges; it’s not there. Heck, some books detail wildcat cartridge designs that only a select group of shooters have heard of—with nary a mention of this old classic. Indeed, the .33 Winchester has been almost forgotten.
I’ve been lucky to have assembled a decent “gun book” library over the years. Very few of the titles in my collection give any detail about the .33 Winchester. However, the cartridge is mentioned in the “Obsolete American Rifle Cartridges” section of Cartridges of the World. As best as I can tell, the old cartridge was the first commercially offered round in the United States that seated a .338-caliber bullet in a factory case. Announced in 1902, the new .33 Winchester (aka .33 WCF) was chambered in Winchester’s rugged 1886 lever-action rifle. It was also the only round introduced as a smokeless powder cartridge in the Model 1886. It is simply a .45-70 Government necked down to .338 caliber.
The .33 Winchester enabled shooters to sling the new-fangled smokeless round at 2,000 fps when other widely used lever-action cartridges were lagging by several hundred feet per second. We are told it became a reliable killer at responsible ranges for pronghorn, deer, black
