Mt Browning previously had taken care of the problem of portability for the horse soldiers with his air-cooled Colt-Browning Model of 1895. These eventually served the U.S. Military in the 6mm Lee U.S. Navy cartridge, that of the .30-40 Krag, the origiunal .30 1903 chambering of the Model 1904 Springfield Rifle and the modification of that cartridge into the .30-'06, which served the U.S. military during two world wars. The original Infantry gun design was modified into an aircraft gun by Marlin for WWI, then into a tank gun design that served America's Armoured Cavelry Corps until Browning's Model 1917 and 1919 designs came along.
I once observed a Model '95 *Potato Digger* that had been converted to the 7.62 NATO cartridge by the Army Ordnance Depaertment in the late 1950s, and I've always wanted to get one and a hatfull of M249 SAW links and convert one to 5.56mm/.223 just to bring the old design kicking and screaming into the XXI Century.
It's also worth noting that during the 09 March 1916 Pancho Villa early morning raid on Columbus, New Mexico, F Troop of the U.S. 13th Cavalry Regiment was garrisoned there, along with four M1909 Benet-Mercie machine-rifles and my maternal grandfather. Ten of the soldiers were killed during the attack, four more later dying of wounds, and though the horse troop machinegunners had some problems getting the guns with which they were minimally trained into action, once they began their work the banditos suffered some 80 dead or mortally wounded, mostly from those U.S. machine gun emplacements, expending some 20,000 rounds by 07:30 that morning when Villa's troops finally withdrew after setting fire to the center of the town.
