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

The .375 H&H M70 Winchester and a Colt revolver in .45 LC were on James Watts,
until the grizzly shot by the .375 ran over him and clawed the pistol belt and holstered gun off James Watts' hip
in the middle of a creek.
The bear did die on the other side of the creek across which he had charged.
James got wet and bruised by a paw swat that knocked him over.
In his mind the .375 H&H and the .45 Long Colt had a baby, in the Summer of 1939.



After 1939, WWII and other factors intervened, so James Watts did not have a shooting
.450 Watts Magnum rifle until 1949.
But he did get to shoot a lot of 50 BMG guns, installing them in bombers and zeroing them.

The gunsmith Harvey Anderson who built the first .450 Watts Magnum, on an FN Mauser in 1949,
copyrighted the cartridge in 1950, and did fair business making .450 Watts Magnum rifle for others.
He and James also produced other cartridges including the .450 Watts Short.
By 1953 the .450 Watts Magnum had been written up in magazines and Jack O'Connor had used it as a Safari Rifle.
About 1954 Watts said he signed "a release" to WRAC for them to go ahead with what would become
the .458 Winchester Magnum, shooting by 1955, all over the world by 1956.
Watts had been begging Winchester to do something like that since 1947.

Some joker without a clue must have written this in 1953 to get it into the 1954 edition of GUN DIGEST:













This is akin to stolen valor, like with Jack Lott inventing a replacement for the .458 WinMag
in 1971 after his gut shot to the buffalo in 1959,
though he and his buddies continued using the .458 WinMag in the interim,
with much better success than Jack's first outing with it.

Nowadays you can buy factory loads with 500-grainers that produce 2240 fps from a 24" barrel.
Jack had trouble handling 2125 fps with 500- and 510-gr bullets from his 25" barreled M70 African.
After a soft to the buffalo's gut, the RN steel FMJ "solid" went squirrely.
Jack moaned a Lott after that.
He should have blamed his own shooting and the lousy RN FMJ "solid."
But no, he blamed the .458 Winchester Magnum cartridge 12 years later,
a likely excuse for face saving and self aggrandizement, naming a cartridge after himself.
Finally, suicide was the only way out.
Very sad.