Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look at the story
of the Ross rifle with the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Although during this story we're actually still talking about the Royal North-West Mounted Police as it was originally formed.
They were kind of a group of cavalry, like rural constables, police force, out on the frontier in Western Canada
to deal with whiskey smuggling and rebellions and Native American incidents and all sorts of fun, frontier style.
And being mounted they typically used cavalry style firearms. When they first formed they used
Winchester lever action rifles, 1876s in short full-stocked carbine form, very cool guns.
They added some Lee-Metford carbines to that a little bit later on.
And then the Royal North-West Mounted Police would become one of the first customers for the Ross Rifle Company's
military Mark I rifles, actually carbines in this case.
... And by the way I should point out, it wasn't until the 1920s that the Royal North-West Mounted Police
merged with the Dominion Police and became what is today the RCMP, so I may
fumble words here through the course of this video, but this is the Royal North-West Mounted Police.
So let's take a look at the carbine that they purchased first.
We'll start with the markings on this Mark I carbine. We have a roundel here, and this one's really pretty faded.
It is not the standard military or government acceptance roundel,
this is marked RNWMP, Royal North-West Mounted Police, and this is serial number Charlie, C 364 and Mark I.
So Ross rifle production for the military was all done in thousand gun prefix letters.
So A 1 through 999, B 1 through 999 etc.
The first 500 went to the Oceans and Fisheries department, and those were A 1 through 500.
The second batch of A was never actually produced and then military production included the B, D, E, F, G and so on.
They skipped charlie and that was because the thousand guns in C series went to the Mounted Police.
Being the very first pattern of Mark I Ross, these are of course marked Ross Rifle Company, Quebec,
and they have a patent date of 1903.
Now what makes this batch of carbines unique among Rosses is that they are
the only true carbines that were ever manufactured by Ross.
And what they did was actually very simple, they simply cut the 28 inch barrel down to 26 inches.
So the front sight is right up at the end of the stock,
And they got rid of the bayonet lug that would normally be under here.
These were of course made to go in cavalry buckets or scabbards, you don't want the bayonet lug catching.
And of course with the barrel shortened it won't fit a bayonet anyway.
So shortened down like that. Now they were originally ordered as 25 inch barrels.
When the ... RNWMP inspectors showed up to approve them in 1904 when they were manufactured,
he first off discovered that the barrels were an inch longer than they had been ordered,
but that's OK, that's not a huge deal.
He also discovered that they had a rather fragile and kind of wonky rear sight, a very long leaf rear sight.
But Ross had just developed this new replacement style of sight, modelled after the German Gewehr 98.
Kind of a ski jump or roller coaster sort of rear sight there. And they were given the option...
Well, they weren't really given the option, the inspector said, "Oh, and by the way, we want that new rear sight,
that's a lot better." Well, it would take a full year before Ross was able to actually
... manufacturer, procure, mount and deliver 1,000 of these carbines with [these] rear sights.
So the guns were actually made in 1904, but they weren't delivered until 1905.
And it was at that point that these guns started to show serious problems.
They had problems with poor spring temper.
They had a major problem with the bolt release being ... unserviceable basically,
and occasionally allowing the bolt to simply fall out if the ... butt of the gun were struck
on the ground, as say one does in parade drill.
There were a lot of problems with these guns.
And they were issued out to the Royal North-West Mounted Police
who reported a lot of issues, sent guns back for repair, and just generally by 1907 were not pleased with the guns.
So Ross said he would make the situation better.
They had already by this time developed the Mark II version of the Ross
and he said, "That's cool, we'll replace your thousand guns with Mark IIs."
So in 1907 the Mounted Police officialdom rounded up these carbines, put them in storage figuring,
"We'll have our new Mark II Ross ... carbines in time for this year's annual marksmanship ... matches,
not a big deal, they'll come any day now.
And they waited around for the rifles,
and they waited around, and waited around, and ultimately it would be 1909
before the Mark II Ross finally showed up for the North-West Mounted Police.
Looking at the buttstock of this particular example, these were in the AE series, they were manufactured not until 1908.
These have the standard Quebec government military ... acceptance stamp,
they also have a Mounted Police stamp as the carbine did. And this is of course a Mark II rifle.
So when they did finally arrive, Commissioner Perry ... didn't immediately issue them out to his troopers.
He was leery of the guns, you know, kind of a once bitten twice shy attitude.
They had indeed had ... two serious safety incidents with Mark I carbines.
... It sounds like probably due to something like stripped jackets and early soft point ammo.
They had one gun blow up at the breech, and they had another blow its bolt open and seriously injure a trooper.
And they were leery of the new pattern and they figured, ... in fact they did keep them at the
police headquarters in Regina and only used them for target practice and training there.
And they figured they'd do that until they were thoroughly confident in the gun's quality and reliability,
You know, the troopers who would have these are going to be
legitimately trusting their lives to these carbines out in pretty darn wild rural parts of north-western Canada.
Well, ultimately that confidence never did happen.
They kept ... the old Lee-Metford carbines in issue and they kept the new Ross Mark IIs in Regina,
until in the spring of 1912 there was a fire at the depot, and all but 34 of them were completely destroyed.
The Mounted Police gave Ross one more chance in 1913, asking for 600 Mark II***** (5 star) rifles.
And the response from Ross was that they were working on an even better version,
which presumably would have been a pattern of the Mark III.
A representative was sent out to Regina with some test rifles.
There's no documentation of exactly what happened, but no order resulted.
Presumably they weren't satisfied with the new Mark IIIs either.
In the end the North-West Mounted Police never did actually get a functional good Ross rifle.
They never had one see proper real service.
So kind of interesting, they finally ultimately got Lee-Enfield carbines in 1914,
and they would move on quite happily from there.
So both of these rifles are extremely scarce today, as I said.
According to the documentation only 34 of these survived the fire that destroyed virtually all of them.
There's a similar survival rate for the Mark I carbines.
So, a big thank you to the collector who gave me access to these two to show to you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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