.50-70 Government

The .50-70 Government is a rimmed, straight-walled centerfire rifle cartridge the United States Army adopted in 1866, the first standard metallic-cartridge round it issued after the Civil War. It replaced the muzzle-loading rifle-muskets that had equipped Union and Confederate infantry, firing from breech-loading trapdoor conversions of existing Springfield rifle-muskets and, later, purpose-built trapdoor Springfields. Like other cartridges of its generation named on the American pattern, its name pairs the bullet’s nominal diameter in hundredths of an inch with a second number that described the original loading rather than any dimension of the cartridge.

The Army replaced it as its standard rifle cartridge in 1873 with the smaller-bored .45-70 Government, and the round’s own military service accordingly ran only from 1866 to 1873, though .50-70 rifles and ammunition remained in wider circulation afterward. It used a Benét internal primer, a design that concealed the priming compound inside the case head rather than in an exposed primer pocket.

Case and pressure dimensions here come from C.I.P.’s published standard and are recorded as verified. Three historical bullet weights are recorded from a handloading data page cited by Wikipedia’s infobox, but that page’s published velocities are maximum-handload results tied to a specific powder charge rather than factory-ammunition figures, so no velocity or energy is recorded for this cartridge. No period photograph of a trapdoor Springfield rifle chambered for it appears on this site.