Amazing how any thread on the Campfire turns into a pissing match anymore. But I'd still like to make a few comments:
1) Jack O'Connor got his job at OUTDOOR LIFE because he'd been publishing good stories on hunting and shooting for many years. He'd also been hunting on his own for many years, though on a couple of occasions he hired guides--with his own money. OL never paid for ANY of his trips until he was in his 40's. Even then there was usually some other financing, often O'Connor's own bank account, or some help from an outfitter or airline or whatever. In his later years, after he and OL parted, he financed many of his own hunts entirely.
He EARNED those OL hunts by proving his worth to the magazine, not because he graduated from college and somebody all of a sudden handed him a dream job.
2) Elmer Keith also earned his own experience, and also started going on free hunts later in life. Elmer, however, was neither the writer O'Connor was, nor did his writing relate to the common man as much. This may seem strange, because personally Elmer was much more friendly and open than O'Connor. But the two main reasons Elmer didn't get a job like O'Connor's were that he didn't write nearly as well, and that he would have been advising Eastern whitetail hunters to use a wildcat .33.
Plus, even though Elmer was a major force in the design of some commercial cartridges, in some ways he never really progressed beyond pre-WWII technology. For instance, He never really understood Nosler Partitions, and O'Connor did.
In short, despite their personalities, O'Connor's writing appealed more to the common man, either because he understood the average guy didn't shoot enough to handle a hard-kicking rifle, or because the average guy liked to go along when O'Connor hunted the Canadian or African wilderness.
Also, Elmer shot a LOT of dinks in his life, just as O'Connor did. Both were married with kids during the Depression, and both supplemented the family table with meat animals. Personally, I liked that, especially about Elmer. Neither man claimed to be a pure trophy hunter, which has somehow come to mean "superior" these days. But both shot a lot of big trophies.
As for experience, there is always somebody else who has more experience (which these days apparently means "animals killed") than somebody else. O'Connor had a lot more experience than Elmer in both Africa and the northern part of North America, as well as the southwestern U.S. and Mexico. Elmer had a lot more experience on elk, mostly due to his personal hunting and outfitting career--but again, he made up his mind on elk cartridges long before the Nosler Partition.
In fact Elmer made up his mind on African calibers before ever shooting a single one, and would have had an entirely different opinion if he'd used Nosler Partitions--which had been in existence for a decade when he made his first safari. Instead he used really bad bullets in a .333 OKH, and came to conclusion that even impala are really hard to kill.
So experience isn't just numbers of animals killed, but what is learned. Warren Page killed a pile of animals, but many were killed on cull shoots in New Zealand and other places. There's a lot to be learned from that, but shooting dozens of cull deer with the same bullet doesn't proven much, at least beyond the first couple of dozen deer killed with the same cartridge and bullet.
It's also possible to learn from other people's experiences. If that wasn't so, then human technology would have to start all over again every day. O'Connor freely admitted that Les Bowman had more experience in North America than he did--and learned from it. (The fact that Bowman's experience and opinions pretty much agreed with O'Connor's didn't hurt.)
Both Keith and O'Connor had a LOT to contribute to the general knowledge of hunting and rifles, which is why they're both still read today. But to claim one was "more right" than the other, or that one was a liar and then other wasn't, is about as fruitless as arguing about writing styles. Personally, I liked the writing of both, the reason I have most of the books both wrote.
One thing that keeps cropping up in "Ask The Gunwriters" is the occasional dip-brain who resents gun/hunting writers getting to hunt more than average people, with somebody else paying. Well, I don't know anybody who has made their living in this business who hasn't paid for that "benefit" with a lot of hard work, including both O'Connor and Keith. If somebody doesn't like that little bit of reality, tough. Try it yourself if you think it's easy.
