Last year for his 60th birthday, I bought my father a
Marlin Guide Gun 1895-GS in .45-70. This is a stainless version of the tried and true old 1895 rifle, with a round barrel, cut short. It comes with cut rifling (as opposed to the former Microgroove rifling), which gives nice accuracy with lead bullet loads. We replaced the open sights with the utterly bulletproof AO peep sights (which can be mounted on the receiver scope tapped holes), and for load development put on an AO intermediate relief scope mount, which attaches forward of the receiver, and is staked in the old rear sight dovetail. We put a Leupold 2.6X scout scope in it, and began working on loads. This was very tempting to leave on indefinitely-- it was compact, extremely fast to acquire targets with, and very accurate, even with my father's older eyes. Dad later elected to take the scope off while hunting, in favor of keeping the rifle in its original tough-as-nails trim. (We did leave the forward mount on it, though.)
With the scope on it, were impressed to find that we could regularly get 1.5" groups at 100 yards with 405g lead handloads! Occasional groups below 1.25", but not every time. For a rifle and load that could take a brown bear, moose, or perhaps a cape buff, we were impressed with the accuracy.
Factory .45-70 loads are extremely gentle out of this rifle, because it comes with a ventilated buttpad. That said, the new 1895 GS rifles are rated to shoot the outrageous Garrett and Buffalo Bore loadings through. (Even Marlin okays this, in these litigeous days!)
The specimen I bought for my dad has nice wood to metal fit, and the American black walnut stock is beautiful. I shopped around, and bought it new from the dealer for well under $500.
Field And Stream did an article comparing and contrasting popular hunting rifles a year or two ago, and were shocked to find that they were getting hundred yard groups of 1 inch
or smaller groups with a stock Marlin 336 that they had scoped and shot off the bench. I was pretty surprised too-- I wouldn't have thought that the cartridge had that inherent accuracy in the first place, but I
certainly didn't expect to hear of that kind of accuracy from any lever-action rifle! Wow.
That said, when you get a lever action to lock up that tight, you're bound to give up some of the smoothness and slickness of the action that comes from looser tolerances. For short-range, quick-handling in the brush, I still favor a '94 Winchester. But if I were to buy ONE rifle that might have to go into the brush or hunt over a longer field, and was stuck on the lever-action style, I think you'd be hard-put to do better than the Marlins.
