Lee Navy Straight-Pull Rifle

Forgotten Weapons has posted the operating manual for the M1895 Lee Rifle.

The M1895 was a repeater, not a magazine rifle. The manual goes to great pains to make this point. Magazine rifles had cut-offs which enabled the riflemen to single-load each shot while keeping the magazine in reserve. Krags (M1892 et seq) Springfields (M1903s) and some models of the SMLE were equipped with cut-offs. The Lee was not.

The Lee rifle was, in many respects, far ahead of its time. It fired a small-caliber, high-velocity cartridge. Because the cartridge was smaller and lighter than the .30 caliber cartridges, riflemen with Lee rifles could carry more rounds. No doubt that in the 1890s, the argument between the small-caliber and large-caliber proponents was a energetic as it is today.

Unfortunately, being "ahead of your time" is usually a synonym for "not practical at the time". The smokeless powder propellants of the 1890s, when used to push small-caliber bullets at high velocities, burned too hot and eroded the barrels.[1] The metallurgy of the time was also not as advanced as it is now. One of the remedies for the M-16, chrome-plating the barrels, was not then practical.

Beyond the bore erosion issue, the government, specifically the War Department, wanted to standardize small arms. The Navy and the Marine Corps adopted the same rifles that the Army used; first the Krag, then the Springfield. [2]

In the event that you have one that has been handed down from your great-great grandfather, an original Lee Navy in good condition would probably be worth several thousand dollars.

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[1] This is not a slam at the 1890s, for the Army got into difficulties with its propellant choices for the early models of the M-16 rifle.
[2] The small arms locker of Navy warships are usually the last bastions of older military weapons; M-1 rifles could be found there well into the 1970s. I have little doubt that Lee rifles could have been found there into the early 1920s, when they would have been replaced by M1903s and M1917s left over from the Great War.