Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Express Rifles and Big Bores Only The great 458 Winchester. Everyone should own one at least once

HANDLOADER December 2021 No. 335
The "WILDCAT CARTRIDGES" column by Layne Simpson, pp. 22-25: ".450 Watts"

Simpson claims to have dug deep in researching this cartridge.
Besides my thinking that the title should be ".450 Watts Magnum"
as the cartridge was copyrighted in 1950,
I was appalled by a factual error in the second sentence of the article.
Simpson claimed that James Watts became a resident of Alaska in 1936.
Nope.
It was 1938.
This does not inspire confidence in Layne Simpson's deep dive into the .450 Watts Magnum.

Based on the Cal Pappas book interview of James Watts,
James A. Watts rode a Santa Fe Trailways bus from Kansas to Seattle, WA in mid 1938,
then took steerage on a ship to Seward, AK and then another boat to Valdez, AK.
In the summer of 1938 he hiked to Fairbanks and spent about a year working there.
In the summer of 1939 he hiked from Fairbanks back to Valdez.
Along the way, in summer 1939, his .45 Long Colt was swiped off his waist by the claws of a charging grizzly he had just shot with a .375 H&H M70.

The .45 LC and the .375 H&H conceived a baby in 1939, with James Watts eventually delivering it.
It was a 10-year gestation. The first functioning .450 Watts Magnum was on an FN Mauser. Born in year 1949.

Watts had been writing Winchester with his suggestion for necking the .375 H&H up to .450-bore since the end of WW II.
Surely his first rejection letter came no later than 1946.
He wrote again to Winchester in 1947, and the second time they did not even answer him.