My .504 White Odyssey shooting 100 gr of 777 with a 600 gr conical retains 836 ft-lb of energy at 500 yards. A guy could bump that up to 120-150 gr powder if he really wanted to. Thats punchy enough for me though in a 6 lb 5 oz rifle.
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Since its's summer and hunting seasons are months away and everyone is bored -
To piggyback on the above.....
John Sedgwick (Union general in the ACW) was likely killed at something close to 800 yards by a blackpowder rifle.
An unknown Confederate got a kill at what was later estimated to be 1390 yards, against a Union soldier.
Billy Dixon famously killed an Indian at something like 1500+ yards at Adobe Walls.
And the legendary Jack Hinson, who regularly sniped Union officers at what historians believe was 500+ yards, using conventional notch-and-bead type open sights. Which seems utterly impossible to me.
And he was in his late 50's when he started.
Again, larger caliber (in our context I mean pretty much anything blackpowder, I'd certainly count the .451 Whitworth as 'large' for modern day use on game with a soft lead projectile) muzzleloaders using longer and heavier for caliber bullets, might not even start out at supersonic speeds and certainly won't stay there for long - but once they get down below the speed of sound, they hold their velocity fairly well, and with their weight (or more specifically, their high Sectional Density), they penetrate extremely well.
I've shot deer with .45 Colt at close to the speed of sound. I've finished off deer with .45ACP 230's at ~800'. And one winter after I started setting traps that year I realized that I didn't have a .22 pistol at home (it was at dad's house) so I used a .45 Colt load of a H&G68 over a tiny charge of Red Dot for something like 600'MV. It easily ventilated trapped foxes. Didn't catch any coyotes that year.
The point is - even at very mundane subsonic speeds, a bullet with a high SD can penetrate very well, easily more than enough to kill an elk or even Bison. And, of course, in the sort of open country where you can see western game at longer distances, it's very likely that an animal with even a small hole through both lungs, will drop within sight. No, a .50 bullet doesn't always make a .50"+ hole (it might, given enough meplat size and speed and weight, make a very large hole, or might just make a smaller one) but generally, a hole through both lungs, is fatal, fast.
There's a Revolutionary War era historical fiction film that shows a cannon ball sort of leisurely, slowly bouncing along far behind the line of soldiers it was actually fired at; it hit a rear-guard guy and took his leg off. There are similar accounts written by Civil War soldiers - one, where a guy saw a cannonball bouncing along, far behind the line it had been fired at, and he had the bright idea to use his foot to stop it. He lost his foot. Apparently he assumed he could just stop it with his foot, sort of like those gore-videos you'll see on the internet every now and then when a roll of steel sheet falls off a truck and is slowly rolling away and some guy tries to stop it with his body weight, and gets crushed.
The point is, momentum is a thing, and it's fairly easy to make a lethal hole through the lungs. I don't know what the minimum velocity would be to ventilate an elk's lungs, but it's low - probably way under 600' with the typical muzzleloader projectile. I mean, most of us have shot deer with arrows at well under 300' and they whistle right through animals, often through bone. Certainly, an arrow has advantages over a soft bullet, but, still, it just doesn't take much to make a hole in lungs.
Of course, "HITTING" stuff, with such gear, is a different story. We live in the good old days and lose track of just how good we have it and the harsh reality is that most of us - self included - aren't *that* good. We're just mediocre guys with very, very good gear that our forefathers could only dream of having.
