Woodrow--
I got in this late, but have a few observations to make, from the perspective of someone who has actually shot some relatively big animals with the .270 WSM, and shot a whole lot with the regular .270. I also have a lot of experience with the .338 Winchester Magnum, both in North America and Africa, as well as various other "medium bores," and middle or the road rounds like the .30-06 and various .300 magnums.
With the 140 Fail Safe factory load it is very rare to recover a bullet from any animal shot with the .270 WSM. Generally it has to be a angling or full-length shot to recover the expanded bullet, even on elk. The 140 Barnes X acts very similarly. About the only way you'll recover either on a broadside shot is if you hit the heaviest part of both shoulders, in which case the elk (or whatever) is dead anyway. I have seen a 140 X break both shoulders of a medium-sized bull and zing off across the countryside.
My experience with the Fail Safe, X and the very similar-acting Trophy Bonded Bear Claw has resulted in far more good blood trails with .25-7mm caliber bullets than with heavier, fatter Nosler Partitions. You have to go up to the 200-grain .30 Nosler to get consistent pass-through, and even then the blood trails doesn't generally match that from a .270 or 7mm Fail Safe or X.
I have lived in Montana all my life and done quite a bit of elk hunting and some elk guiding. While a .338 can indeed give you a few extra angles to shoot from, I have seen an awful lot of elk and moose dropped very quickly with .270's. In fact, I have yet to see one go more than 75 yards, and have never seen one lost. There was some good shooting involved, obviously, and good bullets, but both those factors are necessary for elk hunting, at least in the long run.
The conclusion I've come to over the years is that the .270 bore's bad rep on elk is mostly the result of bad bullets and bad shooting. There have been a lot of marginal .270 bullets shot into elk, by a lot of excited shooters. There have also been a lot of marginal .30 and .338 bullets put into elk, many in the wrong places. In the first case the .270 gets the blame, in the second case elk are regarded as extremely tough.
I wouldn't hesitate to go elk hunting with a .270 WSM using Fail Safe or Barnes X or Trophy Bonded bullets, whether as a native meat hunter or "outstate" trophy hunter. In fact, it wouldn't matter if the cartridge was the plain old .270 Winchester. As my friend Layne Simpson once put it, "If you can shoot, the .270 is an elk cartridge. If you can't, it ain't." Wish I had said that!
MD
