Cool rifle you have there, Jack! Strathcona's Horse no less! Very well done!
I'll have to dig out my Ross to see if it's "pinned" or not. I am pretty sure that it's a Mk III however.
I remember one of my first conversations with a range-master who ended up teaching me a LOT about firearms in general and black powder in particular, back when I was a kid, told me a horror story about a fellow shooting a Ross with the bolt re-assembled improperly. Needless to say it put me off of Ross's for a long time (only about 40 years or so...). However, I'm pretty impressed now that I have one. They have a very slick action, and WAY better sights that just about anything else I can think of from that era.
In the old tale about the Germans going to war with a hunting rifle, the Americans with a target rifle and the Brit's with an actual military rifle, I'd have to say that it probably originally was the Canadians going off to war with a target rifle. The '03 may have good sights in some respects, but the Ross has it over the Springfield in spades in my late-20th/early-21st Century opinion!
Again, I really think that in a Boer War reprise the Ross would have done well. Probably did quite well in tests out on the prairies, in fact (especially in .280 Ross!). But there it is, we're always arming and training for the last war, and the Brits just happened to get really, really lucky with the SMLE (there was of course a storm of criticism over it at the time of it's adoption). Sadly, it proved itself to be a far better battle rifle than either the Ross or the P14, which I expect was developed along similar lines of thought as the Ross.
Thanks again for the photo's. I need to drag the old girl to the range to try her against an SMLE or two, just to see what the differences are. The Ross is definitely heavier though, that's for sure!
Cheers!
Gordon