Ballard No. 5½ Montana

About the Ballard No. 5½ Montana

The Ballard No. 5½ Montana is a heavy single-shot, breech-loading falling-block rifle built on Charles Henry Ballard's action and produced by Marlin Firearms of New Haven, Connecticut for roughly two years, from about 1882 to 1884. Improved by John M. Marlin and marketed as the most powerful rifle in the Marlin-Ballard line, the Montana wore an extra-heavy No. 5½ weight octagon barrel as wide as its frame and was chambered exclusively for the potent .45-100 Sharps straight black-powder cartridge. It used double-set triggers offering either a standard eight-pound pull or a hair trigger, an extended loop finger lever sized for the set trigger, and a wooden wiping rod carried beneath the barrel in thimbles, with the whole rifle weighing about fourteen pounds.

Named for the Montana buffalo country it was meant to hunt, the No. 5½ Montana was the biggest and heaviest of the Marlin-Ballard single-shots — a fourteen-pound falling-block chambered for the thumping .45-100 Sharps. It appeared just as the buffalo were disappearing, and so few were built that the model is now one of the rarest prizes among American single-shot collectors.

Ballard No. 5½ Montana specifications

One of the rarest of all Marlin-Ballard models. Production estimates run from roughly 1,500 to 1,800 rifles, but surviving examples are scarce; the standard reference 'Ballard: The Great American Single Shot' originally identified only about 14 No. 5½ Montana rifles, with a handful more documented since. The Montana arrived just as the great buffalo herds were vanishing, leaving little market for so heavy a hunting rifle.