Originally Posted by
Bent Ramrod
Keith was a subsistence hunter in his youth. He started hunting just after game hunting seasons had been set up and were beginning to be taken seriously. Twenty years previously, a “true sportsman” was somebody who killed no more than two or three deer a day in the course of a two-week hunting vacation; now you might have a limit of one or two a season. Since most paying work out in the country closed down when temperatures dropped and farms, ranges and ranches were covered with snow, the meat was needed to cover food requirements over a long winter, and the loss of a wounded animal, or the effort needed to find and dispatch it, were things to be avoided at all costs.
In such circumstances, you couldn’t always pick your shot. If the game was running away, you needed something that would hit hard, penetrate and kill no matter how bad the shot was. (A guy wrote an article in The American Rifleman about finding a Winchester Highwall in .40-90 Sharps Straight in a pawn shop and contacting Keith for loading info. He said Elmer congratulated him on his find, remarking that the caliber was one of the few that he knew for certain would shoot lengthwise through an elk.)
Jack O’Connor was never hard up for winter meat. He lived in Arizona in his youth, and he and his wife would go down to Mexico deer and sheep hunting. They were glad of the chance to live off the land, but he had a day job so laying in provisions wasn’t the dire necessity that it was in Keith’s circumstance. He could pick his shots for best effect, and could be more interested in accuracy and low recoil than knockdown effect under the worst circumstances. Later, when he worked for Outdoor Life, and went hunting with millionaire Herb Klein and the Shah of Iran’s sportsman brother, he had guides to get him to the game for the optimum shot. He could use a .270 on a grizzly bear because its location was known, and it had been stalked and was unalarmed because of the guide’s skill and woodcraft.
When Elmer was a game guide, he saw plenty of instances of poor shots by once-a-year hunters who used light calibers. He had to chase the clients’ wounded animals all over the place, and considered O’Connor’s “advocacy” of light calibers in his writings the cause, although O’Connor, like Keith, just wrote about what worked for him at the time. This, combined with the poverty of his youth, hardened his attitude, even though by then sport hunting was more or less a luxury.
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