A hammerless lever-action years ahead of its time, the Model 99 was available at various times with either a straight or curved grip. There was a takedown model as well. It’s lifespan stretched from 1899 to 1998 — exactly 99 years — which befits its model designation. Over the course of its production lifetime, it was chambered in .303 Savage, .32-40 Winchester, .30-30 Winchester, .25-35 Winchester, .250 Savage (also known as the .250/3000 because of the muzzle velocity it could achieve with light bullets), .22 Savage Hi-Power, .22-250 Remington, .243 Winchester, .38-55 Winchester, .375 Winchester and even .410 shotgun.
My grandpa’s rifle has the tapered forend with the Schnabel-type tip that only adds to the visually perfect profile. It’s got a decent trigger, only a little stiff, and some years ago I added a scope without a bell objective so I wouldn’t have to remove the rear buckhorn sight.
With a rotary magazine, the Model 99 Savage was and remains a classic. In later models, designers replaced the rotary magazine with a detachable box magazine then replaced the tapered forend with a bulkier forend. I prefer the rotary magazine because it allowed a counter to be added and one could see at a glance through a slot in the lower left-front of the receiver how many cartridges were.
Model 99 Savage: Heirloom and Keepsake
My grandfather was a quiet fellow with the patience that comes only after years of challenges; a man of experience who preferred to do things right and do the right thing.
He and grandma lived comfortably in their retirement in a house he personally built south of Tacoma, Washington in Pierce County on a fairly large piece of land. It afforded him a large vegetable garden, ample wood shed, nice lawn with some fruit trees and a cement driveway to the single-car garage. It was a solid house; my dad told me grandpa hammered six nails everywhere most people might just drive two.
I remember him only as being 6 feet tall, gray-haired, and the toughest man I ever knew; tougher than my dad or uncle and surely tougher than me.
By the time I graduated from high school, he wanted me to have something of value. He grew up in an era when a man’s finest possession was his rifle, so it came to pass he gave me his Model 99 Savage, a gun that had already accounted for its share of Evergreen State blacktail deer. Chambered for the .300 Savage cartridge, he had mounted a full buckhorn rear sight and carefully adjusted it to shoot dead center at 100 yards. I once hit an empty tin can at nearly twice that distance by raising the rear sight one step and aiming just a bit high, taking a fine bead.
I installed a sling and carried grandpa’s gun on a backpack trek into the Goat Rocks Wilderness during my 19th summer. It was my only companion on many an overnighter into the High Lonesome. Things with teeth, and things that just make noise in the dark, never bothered me when the Savage was close at hand.
Any little scratch in the stock was immediately treated with linseed oil and then a dab of warm shoe wax.
The Model 99 is quite possibly the epitome of a graceful rifle. I’ve seen other guns come close, but in my humble opinion, the Model 99 profile is a thing of beauty. It is also one of the lighter rifles I own, a fact not lost on me now more than 50 years later as my legs don’t take the miles quite as well as they did in my youth.
It also has a small pin on the top of the receiver behind the action which projected upward when there is a cartridge in the chamber.
One look at this rifle is all the inspection necessary to see how well it was cared for by its original owner and how well it was designed. , I was once told by my late father that its predecessor, in .303 Savage, had been stolen out of grandpa’s car one morning while he and a friend stopped at a café for breakfast on their way to hunt deer. Dad bought grandpa a Model 94 Winchester, but granddad said it didn’t “fit” him so he bought the Model 99. It was the last rifle he ever owned.
I shot my first buck with this rifle, high on a ridge top on a blue-sky season-opener. Suffice to say it has filled a freezer or two, and I semi-retired it when I acquired a wonderfully-accurate Marlin MR7 bolt-action in .30-06. That buck came hard, and dragging it uphill 200 yards through an old clearcut was no picnic. I had to field dress it literally on the edge of a cliff, something I don’t recommend trying yourself.
A few years ago, I replaced the lever, which had been banged up over the years, spending hours polishing it with fine emery cloth and steel wool, finally cleaning it off and finishing with three coats of blue. At the same time, I polished up the bottom of the receiver and re-blued it as well. A hand application of warm gun oil completed the process.
The Model 99 walked me out of the woods one night during an elk hunt. I came out to a road and fortunately, a guy drove up, asked me if I needed a ride and graciously got me back to camp, about 2 miles away.
It rode behind the seat of my pickup in a handmade sheepskin case more times than I can count, or even remember. One year when I had but a single day to hunt deer on a weekend home from college, the Model 99 was my only companion on a 200-mile round trip. The hunt ended unsuccessfully, and as evening came on I made it back home in time to wipe my rifle down with an oily cloth and stick it away before heading back to school.
I’ve worked up a couple of good handloads using 150-grain Speer boattails and Nosler Ballistic Tip bullets, propelled with IMR 4895. Anything within 350 yards is going to get punched.
I’ve never been certain what makes a “perfect” rifle, if such a thing exists. It’s certainly a combination of things but perhaps the deciding factor has nothing at all to do with design, engineering, caliber or finish. A little bit of love is part of the equation, and that only comes from the heart.