The Remington Rolling Block rifle is undeniably one of the all-time great firearm designs, produced from the US civil war until the 1930s, and limited quantities of reproductions are being made even today.
While the centrefire rifles — particularly those in buffalo-hunting calibres like .45/70 — are the best known, the rifle was widely used by militaries around the world in a variety of cartridges including .43 Spanish and .43 Egyptian in the black powder era, with some even made for the smokeless 7x57mm Mauser and 8mm Lebel rounds in the 20th Century.
In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries there were quite a range of so-called boys’ rifles — single-shot .22 rifles for youth for activities such as hunting, camping or just exploring forests and bushland — and Remington was quick to capitalise on this with its No 4 Rolling Block.
The No 4, introduced in 1890, was a scaled-down version of the buffalo-hunting rifle, chambered in rimfire cartridges such as .22 Short, .22 LR, .25 Stevens and .32 Rimfire.
A variant of this model of Remington Rolling Block which was adopted by the American Boy Scouts in 1913, and it is one of the rarest Remington rimfire rifles produced.
America had two competing boy scout organisations in the 1910s — the Boy Scouts Of America (BSA, not to be confused with the British arms-maker!) and the American Boy Scouts (ABS). The American Boy Scouts had a distinctly more military/cadet focus than the Boy Scouts of America, and included rifle drills and shooting as key components of its activities.
With this in mind, the ABS decided to adopt an official rifle not long after their formation in 1910, and started looking about for a military-style .22 rifle which could be provided at an affordable price to the organisation’s members.
The rifle they chose was a solid-frame version of the Remington No 4 Rolling Block, designed to look like a full-length ‘musket’ configuration with case-hardened action, barrel band, sling swivels and full American walnut woodwork including an upper handguard (as opposed to the more common sporting configuration, which lacked the handguard and barrel band and only had half-length forewood) chambered in .22 Short, and which even came with a bayonet.
Designated the Remington No 4S American Boy Scout Rifle, the firearm with bayonet cost American Boy Scouts members USD5 (about AUD260 today). They were later made available to the general public for USD8 (AUD410 today) with the bayonet.
Adopted in 1913, the No 4S American Boy Scout Rifles were only produced for a single year and fewer than 1500 are known to have been made; the bayonets are even rarer than the rifles as nearly all of them appear to have been lost over the years.
The bayonets are not the only thing in this story which has been lost to time, either. The American Boy Scouts themselves barely made it past the end of WWI.
The more martial approach of the American Boy Scouts over the general outdoors and civic-minded stance of Boy Scouts of America was somewhat controversial right from the start, and the two organisations did not get along, even sparring with each other in the newspapers of the day.
In 1912, a 12-year-old American Boy Scout shot and killed a 9-year-old child with his rifle (the shooter claimed he thought the gun was loaded with a blank round) and the resulting scandal pretty much ensured the end of the organisation. It was not helped by another accidental fatal shooting at an American Boy Scouts camp in December 1913, this one involving a shotgun.
The organisation renamed itself the United States Boy Scouts and limped on through WWI, playing off the patriotic fervour of the conflict, but never approached the size or reach of the Boy Scouts of America. They eventually lost a lawsuit brought by the BSA over the name (particularly the “Scout” part) and were wound up completely sometime in the early 1920s.
The Boy Scouts of America, however, continue to exist today – albeit renamed Scouting America.
While the American Boy Scout rifles were only made for a single year, Remington saw the popularity of the design and kept producing it as the Remington No 4S Military Model — identical in every way to the American Boy Scout version, except it had “Military Model” stamped on the side and was chambered for .22 LR (but could also fire .22 Short).
The price was also increased. In 1917 the rifle cost $11 (AUD$425) without the bayonet or $12 (AUD$465) with it. Marketing of the time claimed the rifles were popular with military academies and boys’ cadet groups, but this is difficult to verify.
Production of the Remington No 4S appears to have ended around 1923, there not being a great deal of demand of for them as the price of repeating .22 rifles (which could also chamber .22 LR ammunition) continued to fall, and the major organisation using them had ceased to exist.
The Standard Catalog of Remington Firearms says about 15,000 rifles were made between 1913 and 1923. This likely comprised 1500 American Boy Scout models and 13,500 Military Model rifles. The regular No 4 rolling block sporting rifles continued in production until 1932, with about 350,000 manufactured in total.
Sporting No 4 rifles in their takedown configuration are not uncommon in Australia, but the solid-frame (actually not a real solid frame; the takedown lever is just replaced with a left-hand-twist screw) 4S version is much rarer, and the American Boy Scout version even more so; it is unlikely there are more than a single-digit number of the rifles in the country.
SHOOTING THE REMINGTON NO 4S RIFLE
Operationally, the Remington No 4S is identical to the larger centrefire Rolling Blocks. The hammer is cocked, then the firing block is rolled back, exposing the breech, for a cartridge to be loaded.
The firer rolls the firing block closed, takes aim, and pulls the trigger, releasing the hammer and firing the gun. When the firing block is rolled back for reloading, a spring mechanism ejects the spent round. In practice, most of these springs are broken nowadays (and extremely difficult to replicate; spare parts are completely unavailable in Australia) so the rifles only extract the fired brass.
Despite being designed as a cadet or boys’ rifle, the No 4S is comfortable for adults to hold and shoot. It weighs 2.26kg (5lb) and has an overall length of 110cm (43in), 71cm (28in) of which is the barrel.
The trigger pull is around 1.8kg (4lb) and the rifle has almost no noticeable recoil.
The sights are easy to see but fiddly to adjust, and getting the cartridges in (and out, if the ejector spring has broken) of the small-scale rolling block action can also be a bit fiddly if you’re trying to do it in a hurry in the field.
A .22 No 4S with a good bore is an extremely accurate rifle, but many of the guns — particularly from the pre-WWI era — do not have good bores. The .22 cartridges of the time used corrosive primers, often in conjunction with a propellant known as Lesmok which was a mixture of smokeless and black powder, and the rifles were generally owned by boys and teenagers who were unlikely to be cleaning their guns properly (if at all) following an outing.
Spare parts for the rifles are somewhere between “extremely difficult to find” and “non-existent” in Australia — the combination extractor and ejector spring in particular is fragile, breaks easily and cannot easily be made by most shooters. Some spare parts, especially things such as triggers, mainsprings and buttstocks can be taken from the slightly more common .25- and .32-calibre No 4 rifles, however.
The Remington No 4S rifles are an interesting and notable element of Remington firearms design, as well as an important part of that early 20th Century club of boys’ or youth rifles, and if you can find one in good condition today, they’re still great fun for adults to shoot, too.
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