Have written about some of this before in various places, but the Montana hunter I knew who may have killed more elk than any of my other friends used the .30-06--one which would be considered pitiful today. It was a South American military Mauser in .30-06 (can't remember which country now, but it might have been Argentina), which he purchased while in high school for something like $25, back when such "war surplus" rifles were abundant and cheap. The stock had been cut down ("sporterized") and he never used anything except the military open sights.
However, he did handload--and was probably the only handloader I ever knew who actually saved money. He had a simple single-stage press, and bought whatever 180-grain bullets were cheapest at the local sporting goods store--except for Winchester Silvertips, which he hated. Of course they were all cup-and-core, and he used the "middle load" of IMR 4320 in the Speer manual, which probably got 2600 fps or a little more. He never owned a chronograph (or scope), but no matter the brand the bullets landed a little above the Mauser's front sight at 100 yards, and penetrated fine.
He was an excellent game shot. I not only hunted elk with him, but deer. We both lived in a small town in northeastern Montana, and in the prairie country surrounding it the typical technique of the day was to "push" brushy coulees to jump deer, sometimes tossing rocks into the thicker brush, and primarily shot them on the run. In that country most were whitetails, with a few muleys in the rougher country. I cannot remember him missing a running deer (though he had to, some time or other), and witnessed him dropping them out to 150-200 yards. He killed a lot of deer, because he was married to one of the enrolled tribal members of the Fort Peck Reservation (as was I at the time), and so legally had the same hunting rights. We both had large "extended" families, so helped feed them as well.
He hunted elk at the opposite end of Montana, in the steep mountains along the Idaho Panhandle, near a small town where one of his sisters lived, camping in the same drainage every year. He started hunting back when if one of the party got into a herd, they'd fill as many tags as possible. Quite a few were big bulls, but he also killed a lot of cows--often when somebody else had a permit. When I hunted with him, during the first week of the season either sex was legal, so that's when he and his family went hunting, usually before any snow had fallen. I also cannot remember him not killing an elk during that week.
By then he was in his 40's, and had been hunting elk there since his teens. I would guess his elk total was over 100, along with several hundred deer, but he never kept track.
