Rowdy, I shared your theory with the folks at the AR forum and another guy there thought it might have been a Canadian rifle - which would also explain how it came to end up here in Alaska.

Have been thinking overnight about your rifle, and realized there is another possibility as to the reason for and meaning of the re-stamping.

As you may recall, WDM Bell left the Yukon to answer the call to arms by Britain in the colonies early in WWI. Matter of fact, he joined a regiment being raised in Calgary particularly to help the motherland. The openings in the regiment filled so quickly that his main fear was that he wouldn't get there from the Yukon to still be able to enlist.

Anyway...early in the war the Canadian regiments were armed primarily with the Ross Model 1910, in .303 British, which worked fine even in the trenches, SO LONG AS it was fed high quality Canadian ammo of correct diemensions for their tight chambers.

But the British stuffed shirts with the gold braid on their hats were much like our own (and everyone else's...remember our M-16 problems in "Nam" for example?), and didn't recognize the quality problems with their own supplies of ammunition. So, the Canadian ammo was put in a common "pool" and the Ross rifles often went into combat with very poor QC british ammo made under great pressure to supply vast amounts after the war began. To say the least, it was dimensionally unfit for Ross rifles to function reliably with. Thus great "jamming" problems began occuring in the trenches. (Bolt retention on firing was an entirely different problem.)

The Canadian rifle was immediately blamed, rather than the faulty ammo, and fhe decision was made to rearm the Canadian troops with Lee-Enfields. That, of course meant grabbing SMLEs from stores ("supplies" in American English) and turning rhem over to the Canadian expeditionary force, en masse.

It is only natural, given the Canadian and British predelictions to record keeping, that the Canadians would re-number them for identification and tracking before handing them out to the field soldiers.

(One must remember that the term "red tape" came from the tape around British records which were kept about and on darned near everything. It was the tape around the individual file packets to keep the files together which was Red in colour....)

Anyway, I would not be at all surprised if the "CR" and the new number meant "Canadian Rifle", "Canada Rifle", "Canada Reserve", or something such as that. It could even mean something like "Chamber Reamed", Canada Renumber" or some such.

Incidentally, it is a matter of history that the SMLE rifles supplied to Canadian troops also jammed at first with the same inferior ammunition. Canadian officers tried to inform the Brits of the problem but were rebuffed. So the rifles for the Candaians had their chambers re-reamed larger before final issue on the front lines. And so eventually did most of the arms of the British Regiments. It was to make extraction more reliable.

There is a fair amount of documentation of that experience and ammunition problems, including even in a videotape tape issued about 4 years ago on how Canada's experiences in that war actually drew the nation together as an independent country in fact as well as name. I believe the tape was called "Vimy: Making of a Nation". I have a copy of it here somewhere if you'd like to watch it some day, Phil. And if I "eveeeeer" get fully unpacked so I could loan it to you.

It is also why I will try to get a contact number for the historical office of the MOD (Ministry of Defense) in Ottawa. I have used them often when I lived in Canada and they were remarkable in the kind of detail they have on vitually everything related to Canadian military history, and very willing to share info.