Judging from his letters (I have a stack of 'em), he wrote essentially what you saw printed. The struggle for his editors was putting the broken words together, separating the jammed-together words, and removing the extraneous symbols and numbers that his near-misses on the keyboard had inserted where they didn't belong.
So m$et h&ingli*k#e th*is � only I'm exaggerating quite a bit. His mistakes left a lot more there that was a lot easier to read than my exaggerated example implies. If I could lay my hands on my treasured pack of Elmer Keith letters, I'd type a line or two here, exactly as he wrote 'em, so you could see for yourself.
I never saw any of his raw magazine copy, but my guess is that it was no worse and was probably better than what he allowed to go out the door in personal letters.
"Good enough" isn't.
Always take your responsibilities seriously but never yourself.
