What I do like about the multi-ball load is the ability to increase your hit probability substantially. Although this comes at the expense of the lethality of each individual shot pellet being much lower than the single projectile load, the increase in hit probability could pay high dividends if shooting at night or in foul weather where visibility of the target (and your sights) are limited. With a gun as stout as a 45-70 Government in terms of recoil, I cannot imagine getting more than one shot at a running target. Why miss with a single projectile when you might be able to score a hit or two with the multi-ball load?

Ammunition selection for the 45-70 Government is simple—you can choose from expanding bullets with moderate recoil or hard cast/limited expansion bullets that will let you know that you pulled the trigger. For general use, I recommend the 300gr expanding bullet loaded as hot as you can tolerate (and traveling as fast as the bullet will hold together for.) If you are lucky enough to live in a place with Brown bears or other large animals that you might consider to be a potential threat, then I strongly recommend the hardest non-expanding bullets that you can control in your rifle.

Please be aware that there are three ’strengths’ of 45-70 Government cartridge available: the load appropriate for the Trapdoor Springfield, ’lever action loads’ and ’Strong Action only loads’. This is not prose or warning for the sake of sounding important. I intentionally shot a ’lever action load’ in a derringer which is designed for the Trapdoor loads only. The first shot (fired with the guns grip clamped in a vise) seemed to go ok. The second shot made the action a little bit hard to open. After reloading the weapon, the third shot stretched the frame and broke the firearm. You read that right—the firing pressure of the cartridge exceeded the ultimate tensile strength of the steel that the derringer was made of.

The recoil of the 45-70 Government and the close-range dominance of the weapon is an interesting topic that I hope is worth your consideration. On the one hand, firearms that are quick-handling are considered to be particularly useful for close-range shooting. This is backed up by the terminal ballistics of this cartridge being excellent while the velocity is still high. On the other hand, quick-handling firearms are made less ‘quick’ by the inclusion of rubber butt pads. Rubber butt pads will usually snag on your shirt as you are shouldering the weapon. The two techniques I know that fix that is to apply duct tape to the sides of the butt pad or to push the weapon a few inches towards the target as you bring it up (and then pull it back into your shoulder) or to simply man-up and eat the recoil of a steel or hard plastic buttplate. It also requires practice to be able to take that sort of beating—if you don’t place such a buttstock in the ‘pocket’ of your arm, the perceived recoil will be considerably worse than if you had.