The Man
Elmer Keith was born in 1899 in Hardin, Missouri. He later lived in Idaho, Oregon, and Montana, where he worked as a rancher, cowpoke, and later, professional gunslinger, gun writer, trick shooter, and cartridge designer. Keith is generally regarded as the father of the modern magnum revolver, but his shooting career started very early.
In his 1955 book “Sixguns,” Keith writes of the first gunfight out of many he witnessed:
I was a small youngster running a horseback paper route mornings before school. Each morning I arrived at the Helena Independent office, slung a couple of sacks of papers on my horse and took off. I used to roll the papers, kink them so they could be thrown and toss them at front doors as I trotted past.
He was stopped by a local lawman of his acquaintance, Bill O'Connell, and young Keith watched as O’Connell engaged two thugs who were engaged in a stick-up:
As Bill went in the front door at the extreme tip of the wedged shaped building, one holdup whirled round and fired, then both bandits jumped over the bar. The others in the saloon dropped flat on the floor. The holdup's slug went through the transom over Bill's head. Bill had his .45 S.A. Colt cocked and waited. Soon one man's head popped up over the bar; as he fired Bill O'Connel's 250 grain slug hit him square between the eyes. The other holdup ran down the length of the back bar, keeping low out of Bill's vision, but when he attempted to cross the opening between the ends of the two bars at the corner he was exposed and Bill's second slug caught him squarely through both shoulders and he landed on his face kicking. No doubt he intended firing on Bill from the other bar, thinking Bill would still be watching the place where his partner had been killed.
Keith was known for his distinctive ideas on what guns were appropriate for specific purposes. Like me, he ascribed to the notion that you can shoot little stuff with a big gun, but you can’t shoot big stuff with a little gun. Keith liked big guns. Here are a few of his favorites.
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The Guns
Old No. 5 was a custom-made Colt Signal Action Army chambered in the .44 Special, a favorite of Keith’s. The gun had a Bisley-styled hammer and sort of a Bisley grip, and custom adjustable sights. Keith first described the gun in a 1929 article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine. Watch:
Elmer’s favorite everyday carry gun in his later years, as you might expect, was a Smith & Wesson N-frame Model 29 with a 3” barrel, chambered in the .44 Magnum, a cartridge which Keith was instrumental in designing. The Model 29 and all the N-frame guns (including my personal favorite sidearm, a Model 25-5 in .45 Colt) were all descended from the first of the N-frame guns, the famous Triple Lock. The Triple Lock in .44 Special was one of the guns Keith used to work up his hot .44 Special loads that led to the .44 Magnum.Colonel Charles Askins, a contemporary of Keith’s and a dyed-in-the-wool badass in his own right, once owned the first Ithaca NID 10-gauge side-by-side double shotgun, and later, Keith owned it as well, which gives this gun a pretty intensive list of owners. This was not only the first NID 10-gauge to come off the Ithaca line, it was also reportedly one of (if not the) first to chamber for the big, bruising 3 ½” 10-gauge round. The new cartridge was developed by Spencer Olin of Winchester-Western, and Ithaca built the gun to match.Another revolver round that Elmer Keith was instrumental in developing is the .41 Smith & Wesson Magnum, and when that round went on the market, Smith & Wesson presented Keith with two of the new Model 57 N-frame .41 Magnums with consecutive serial numbers, both with 4” barrels and ivory grips, with Keith’s signature engraved in them. The .41 Magnum never quite took off in the law-enforcement market the way Keith had hoped it would, but it’s still a great round.
Elmer Keith was also an early aficionado of Bill Ruger’s designs. In a follow-up to his book Sixguns, Keith describes who he had tried without success to convince Colt to upgrade the famous Single Action Army with better sights and modernized lockwork. Colt kept the great Single Action Army as it was, but then Bill Ruger came out with the Blackhawk and the .44 Magnum Super Blackhawk, which did all of those things; they kept the classic single-action lines with modern adjustable sights and more robust, coil-spring inner workings. Keith describes his first Blackhawk in his autobiography, Hell, I Was There, thusly:
For the shooter, the plinker, peace officer, cow-poke or hunter, this new Ruger is a good, well-made arm. Colt collectors may prefer the original old Peacemaker but any shooter who wants to have first class target sights combined in a really modern arm with all improvements including the rebounding separate firing pin will find the new Ruger Blackhawk the finest single action revolver manufactured to date.
My own Ruger is the Vaquero, the Blackhawk with traditional fixed sights; it’s a 4 5/8” barreled version in stainless steel, which looks a lot like the old nickel-plated Colts and it’s everything Elmer Keith describes and then some; it would be my favorite sidearm if I didn’t have my big Smith & Wesson 25-5, and even then, it’s close.
Finally, while Keith was first and foremost a six-gunner, again, like me, he wasn’t averse to an autoloader. He liked the .45 ACP round, calling it in his time the best auto pistol round available. Interestingly, the gun that he was said to have favored in that cartridge wasn’t the famous Colt-Browning 1911, but an earlier version, the Colt-Browning 1905 autoloader.
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The Legacy
Elmer Keith is, even today, one of the best-known gun writers in American firearms history. His works still hold up well today, and plenty of people still follow his advice. He was a man out of a time now (sadly) long past, when a steely-eyed lawman with a reliable sixgun could and did face multiple dangerous opponents.
Listen to one of his last spoken interviews, in 1981, only three years before he passed away; Keith was always a great one for spinning a yarn, in writing or in person.
No matter what anyone thinks of his rather strong opinions on guns, we could use a few more like him now.
