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By
MortTon L. BENNETT

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HEREVER there is action,
WV adventure and thrills you'll
find firearms. Whether it’s the
dramatic story of man’s stubborn
stand against savage animals or tribes-
men, dictators or would-be dictators,
the crack of a rifle or pistol back-
grounds the changing course of
history.
And that’s why I got interested as
soon as I heard that Constable Joe

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Every known shell in the world
1s included inConstableGibault’ s
eight-inch thick catalogue.

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Page Seventy-eight

Cartridges...
Make History

fans, here's the story of a hobby that will take you
off the beaten track. R.C.M.P. Constable Gibault’s

Every red-blooded male likes a gun—and for gun
collection 1s Canada’s best.

Gibault of the Sidney Detachment of
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
had amassed the largest collection of
cartridges in Canada.

Joe has been a policeman for 15
years, most of it with the old B.C.
Provincial Police. But his interest in
shotguns, rifles and pistols goes back
years before that. In fact he’s been
scattering lead at targets and animals
since boyhood. Eighteen years ago he

found a few curious out-of-date relics
in a box of old cartridges; some were
so obsolete that he decided to find
out more about them. The first thing
he knew he was making a list, and
the list has grown into a loose-leaf
index that describes in detail over
5,200 individual pistol, rifle and shot-
gun cartridges. They range all the
way from the early paper-wrapped
powder and ball packages of the ’50’s,
down to the latest anti-tank types.

In drawer after drawer in his home
at Sidney, B.C., lie these glistening
brass tubes, and red-haired, stockily-
built Joe Gibault can tell you a little
of the history of every one of them
at a glance. His books on cartridges
alone would fill a good five-foot shelf.
His loose-leaf index, which is about
eight inches thick, is a marvel of
method. In it, four to a page, is the
description of practically every cart-
ridge known to the world, and the
ballistics and measurements of each
shell are in minute detail. But Joe
hasn’t yet got all the world’s cartridges