Elmer Keith

[Char-Gar]

Nobody can deny that EK made a huge impact on the American shooting community and firearms development. He was self taught and to do what he did required a remarkable intelligence. He was also stubborn, opinionated and though very highly of himself and his opinions. I met him once at an NRA Convention in Texas. I was hanging out with a friend of his and several of us sat at a table with him while we all consumed quantities of adult beverages. I kept my mouth shut as he held court.

[Thumbcocker]

I think a lot of gun writers of that era got a bit cranky in their old age. I talked to a retired LEO who had gone to Gunsite when Jeff Cooper was still there. The LEO had brought his duty weapon, a 9mm, to train with. He was berated for his wimpy gun by the Colonel. He told Cooper that the gun was what was provided by his department and he had no say in the matter. He then asked the Colonel what he would do. Cooper stalked off with no reply.

[Char-Gar]

I think a lot of gun writers of that era got a bit cranky in their old age. I talked to a retired LEO who had gone to Gunsite when Jeff Cooper was still there. The LEO had brought his duty weapon, a 9mm, to train with. He was berated for his wimpy gun by the Colonel. He told Cooper that the gun was what was provided by his department and he had no say in the matter. He then asked the Colonel what he would do. Cooper stalked off with no reply.

Yes, the good Colonel refereed to himself as "we" in his later writtings. Pretty good "tell" about a big ego.

[M-Tecs]

Wolfdog I need to politely correct part of your initial post. Elmer Kieth was never a fan of high velocity bullets. He kiked big slower moving projectiles that would deeply penetrate. He definetly did not agree with Jack Oconner on the 270 Winchester.

Keith developed several HV wildcats. This is one.

http://cartridgecollector.net/338-378-kt

The 338-378 KT was designed by Elmer Keith and Bob Thompson in the 1960's as a long range elk cartridge to be used with slower burning powders available at that time. They kept the Weatherby double radius shoulder but shortened the case 1/4" to better suit case capacity to the burn rate of the slower burning powders. Performance mirrors the modern 338 Rem Ultra Mag. The 338-378 Weatherby is based on the 338-378 KT.

[almar]

https://www.loc.gov/audio/?fa=partof...r:keith,+elmer

Here's the man himself.

"Those were tough old times." Nowadays, we think we are in "tough times" when our cell phones only get one bar.

He did an earlier autobiography, Keith, An Autobiography. It has more text and fewer pictures, but is still very much worth finding and reading. I understand he thought Winchester Press ruined his book because he wanted the large size of the later Hell, I Was There!.

Both are definitely worth reading. The guy was a natural storyteller, and an instinctive experimenter.

Thank you. That was nice to put a voice to the man.

[Chief]

[firefly1957]

I am not sure how many books I have by Elmer Keith he gave a lot of very good information and lived a very interesting life .
He cost me a few bucks and is the only reason I bought a 44 magnum (in my profile image) and also a Sharps Shilo I ordered in 1985 in 50-3 1/4" . I bought (custom ordered) the rifle before Quigley went down under at $961 and only 6 week wait ! 50 -3 1/4" chamber , 34" number 1 taper barrel .

[Mikedominick]

Elmer was the reason I started buying the big cased Shilohs back in the early 80s and loading heavy cast bullets in Ruger Flattops and S&W mdl 29s. I think his autobiography, as well as "Hell I Was There", are great reads for the history of Montana and Idaho and his interactions with some of the early cowboys and settlers. I saw him once at the Kalispell gunshow, but didn't want to bother him. Back in the early 80s there were still a bunch of the bigbore gunsmiths and shooters around Great Falls Mt. Mike Stuckslager had a great gunshop there and knew about everyone.

[HollandNut]

He was my HERO in the 60's and is to blame for my current addiction to large caliber heavy and slow boolitz ... I had herd that the rivalry was more or less made up to promote each other and hunting , true or not ? Cant say , I met him once at an NRA meeting in the late 70's ..
I do have this pic of him and Jack standing next to each other .. Around 1960 IIRC and at one time I could name most of the others in the pic , right off there's John Amber and Warren Page .. Larry Koller ?? The guy in the white hat kneeling IIRC was a publisher and his name eludes me and the guy to his left in the white hat eludes me as well

[M-Tecs]

One of the incorrect myths of Elmer Keith is he was a fan of big and slow. That in only half correct. He was a fan of big and as fast as you can make it go.

https://www.gunsandammo.com/editoria...r-keith/249823

A little while ago Don Hurd of Billings, Mont., sent me some great Elmer Keith memorabilia. He was a friend in Elmer's later years, and the treasure trove included letters, copies of photos with Elmer and Mrs. Keith (Lorraine) and a cartridge that raised a bit of a mystery. We know that Elmer's hot handloads in .38 Special, .44 Special and .41 Long Colt resulted in the development of the .357, .44 and .41 Magnum cartridges. We know that the O'Neil-Keith-Hopkins team developed the .333 OKH, essentially the .338-06 with a .333-inch (.333 Jeffery) bullet, and the full-length .375 H&H case sized down to create the .334 OKH, which became the .340 Weatherby. Elmer loved his .33s and deserves credit for the .338 Winchester Magnum. Working with Bob Thomson, he developed the .338-.378 KT (Keith-Thomson), which became the .338-.378 Weatherby Magnum.

SEE PHOTO GALLERY
But the cartridge Don sent me is the .400 OKH, annotated as being from Elmer's rifle. Here's the mystery: Any decent reference that includes wildcat cartridges will give you Elmer's .33 wildcats, and most mention the .475 OKH, which also went nowhere. Oddly, however, I couldn't find a single mention of the .400 OKH. I do remember it from Elmer's writing, and I believe he used it on at least one of his safaris with Bob Petersen in the early 1970s. As we know, he took his elephants with his beloved double rifles (Elmer contributed greatly to keeping the concept of the double alive), but I think I recall a photo of a lion Keith took with his .400 OKH.

The cartridge is a full-length .375 H&H case necked down with some of the body taper removed. I miked the bullet at .411, nominally the same as the .450/.400, but in a bolt action it would yield 2,400 fps with a 400-grain bullet. It is not the only attempt at a true .40-caliber cartridge for a bolt-action rifle. The .400 Whelen on the .30-06 case goes back another generation, but with that case capacity it would have been a bit mild for the largest game. In the 1980s the proprietary .411 KDF achieved some popularity, and Holland & Holland's relatively new proprietary .400 H&H is quite similar. But Keith's version is a great-looking cartridge, with plenty of neck and a fairly sharp shoulder. It looks very effective, and I'm sure it is.

In performance it would be essentially identical to the .416 Remington/Rigby/Ruger or .404 Jeffery, so I suppose we have plenty of factory cartridges in this power range. And, the way things developed, there are a lot more bullets in .416-inch and .423-inch bullet diameter than .411. However, looking at the proliferation of .416s, there was clearly a market for a ".40 caliber" in this power range, and Keith developed his version long before the rebirth of the .416.

Elmer will always be remembered as a fan of the bigbores. His disdain for what he considered inadequate calibers was legendary. This quote from our November 1961 issue pretty much sums up his feelings in that regard: "I like one-shot kills where possible and prefer to do all my hunting before I shoot."

[Hickok]

I grew up reading and following Elmer Keith and Jack O' Connor. I learned a lot from both of them.

They at times were at odds with each other, but in each man's case, their lives and experiences were different. What they believed and put in print was the truth, so far as they had 'been there and done that!"

I believe in both men's cases, having lived the events they went through, as they grew older and somewhat more cantankerous, I believe they simply did not have patience "for stupid."

As we all get older, right or wrong, we get to the point of looking back on our successes and failures, we get to the point of not having time "for enduring or fixing stupid."

Remember the title of one of Elmer Keith's books, "Heck, I was there!"

[Mikedominick]

I was going to have Art Alphin at A Square build me a 338-378, but had him build it in a 340 Weatherby instead. I shot everything with it, from foxes to elk and big Mt muleys. All I shot through it was the 250 Nosler Partition, it was extremely accurate and a sure thing killer. Alphin had recommended the 338-378 with a Sierra Matchking, I asked him "didn't the bullet come apart when it hit something", his response was that it didn't matter, the load killed with devastating effect.

[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.

The back pages of the two-volume set of Keith’s Gun Notes are full of correspondence among Keith, O’Connor and Keith’s disciple at that time, Truman Fowler. It’s a pretty good digest of the Keith-O’Connor beef. The chapter “The Big-Bore Boys” in O’Connor’s autobiography, Confessions of a Gun Editor, covers O’Connor’s view of the feud in a pretty balanced way.

[dannyd]

If you do a search in Handloader magazine from the first issue to to the last of 2021 something about Mr. Keith and his bullets is Mentioned 2,555 times. That's speaks pretty good about his legacy.

[Geezer in NH]

Elmer IMHO was a true man who had made his own way very practical. As a young man I read Both his and Jack O'Connor's writings Jack and the .270 or 7x57.

Elmers Hunting stories were of the working mans; Jack of the academia connected royalties.

I liked Elmer much better.

[MT Gianni]

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.
.

The country Elmer hunted and guided in is thick timber where your shots might be less than 50 yards or breaking into open parks that you could see 400 yards to the next ridge. He also hunted the sage flats where it is rolling and cover is in pockets. For Elmer, a good shot was breaking a hip so the animal went nowhere. 3 1/2 quarters of meat in the smokehouse being better than none.
I think fast light bullets excel at 175-250 yards and heavy is better at closer and further. Closer and further favored the country Elmer hunted and lived in. Medium and open is the country Jack was guided to.

[1hole]

One of the incorrect myths of Elmer Keith is he was a fan of big and slow. That in only half correct. He was a fan of big and as fast as you can make it go.

Amen. Anyone saying Elmer liked "slow" bullets doesn't know the man, he blew up several firearms in his experiments while reloading to get higher velocities.

In Elmer's day all commercial bullets were cast OR "cup and core." In high velocity impacts light bullets often splatted without much penetration and Elmer, was a HUNTER who respected his quarry and he was a guide/outfitter who would have to search for his client's failures. Therefore, Elmer liked big diameter bullets that didn't need much expansion and he knew heavy bullets always penetrated deep ... but he also knew that high velocities from any bullets were always an advantage to a hunter.

This quote from our November 1961 issue pretty much sums up his feelings in that regard: "I like one-shot kills where possible and prefer to do all my hunting before I shoot."[/B][/I]

Elmer was a hard working common man/hunter trying to make a living by taking very well-off .270 shooters (like O'Conner) on long, expensive trips seeking trophies. Both Jack and Elmer were good at what they did - and what they wrote - but they were as different in perspective as is possible for any two men to be but, contrary to very common "knowledge", both men sought the highest possible velocities!

[johniv]

I always liked Elmer’s work, and read everything I could by him. Still have Sixguns and his bio, as well as several others.

[gwpercle]

I managed to buy an Army surplus 1903-A3 Springfield in the 1960's and after reading so much written by Elmer Keith ... I wanted to get it rebarreled to .333 OKH ( O'Neil-Keith-Hopkins ) which is basically a .333 - 06 . Thought that would be the absolute best rifle ! I must say ... I'm glad that was one pipe dream I never had come true ...
Have you seen what's available in .333" boolits ...the pickin's are slim and none .
That rifle is still in the original 30-06 two groove barrel and all ... but way more stuff available in .308"-.309"-.310" , probably one of the best things I never did !

Gary

[HWooldridge]

I managed to buy an Army surplus 1903-A3 Springfield in the 1960's and after reading so much written by Elmer Keith ... I wanted to get it rebarreled to .333 OKH ( O'Neil-Keith-Hopkins ) which is basically a .333 - 06 . Thought that would be the absolute best rifle ! I must say ... I'm glad that was one pipe dream I never had come true ...
Have you seen what's available in .333" boolits ...the pickin's are slim and none .
That rifle is still in the original 30-06 two groove barrel and all ... but way more stuff available in .308"-.309"-.310" , probably one of the best things I never did !

Gary

Gary,

I considered that exact same conversion but was going to jump it to .338 and use those bullet sizes. However, I wound up selling the '06 and bought a .338 Win Mag in a Ruger 77, which was a tack driver. I eventually sold it to a metallic silhouette shooter, who said it never failed to knock down steel plates...