Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns Elmer's Folly

I agree with you that he didn't "leave" SAs behind in the 1920, he just carried them less.

Since he carried from the time he put his boots on till the time he took them off and had a lots of handguns I'm sure he rotated depending what he was doing that day. But after The War, most of the pics I have seen and the articles read, he seemed to lean towards a S&W DA...

Skeeter actually wrote quite a bit about the Triple Lock and warmish .44 Special loads. Of course they were easier/cheaper to come by in his time. I think the last decent condition Triple Lock I saw was $2k plus, and while I am sure it is a wonderful old revolver, It's tough for me to justify. I'd rather put the money into a good pre-lock, pre-MIM S&W in the early 90's era. Or maybe a Freedom Arms.

Ok, what was Elmer's stature, size-wise? Did he have smallish hands? I'm a big guy with small hands and my .45 Colt New Service is kind of ungainly. A large frame Smith feels better, but the Colt is just so dammed ugly/pretty to me I can't let it go. It takes a lot of perseverance for me to shoot it well. Gotta stick a grip adapter on it someday.

Mr. Keith had fairly large hands but short fingers. I've shook his hand a few times & his hand felt different than any I've shook.

Doubt that.

Ross Seyfried personally told me he watched Elmer whack a porcupine at 60 yds using one hand off the back of a horse.

Elmer was wrong about much but the old feller most likely could put bullets on target.

I believe Keith transitioned from the 5.5" SAA to the 4" S&W .44spl when he left the ranch and moved to town where he spent more time sitting in chairs and getting in and out of automobiles and such. JMHO-YMMV......

Colt's were just as bad in that category. S&W addressed this before Colt did, and for my money, addressed it much better than Colt did. Post war S&W hammers are very nice, and the target hammer is just the coolest hammer ever put on a DA revolver!

Colt came up with the "beavertail" hammer on the "357" and two years later, the Python. Now it's a magnificent hammer in many ways, but don't drop your revolver hammer first...they did break. Now to be fair, I've fixed more than a couple broken S&W hammers, but the Python hammer was much more apt to break.

Now the later Colt Mk III's & Mk V's had a perfectly acceptable hammer. I thought they were nicer than the standard S&W, but not as nice as the S&W target hammer.

That wouldnt surprise me.

Although I met Elmer Keith once many, many years ago, I never saw him shoot, But, I used to know an elderly man here in Idaho (now deceased) who was a fantastic shot, rifles, handguns, and shotguns, excellent hunter, outdoorsman, gun collector with a fantastic collection, great gunsmith, and historian, who knew Keith well and often fished with him. I was talking with him once about Keith's shooting skills with handguns.

He told me that Keith was an excellent shot. He was fishing for Steelhead once with Keith when they saw a large hawk coursing over the stream about 40 yards away. Keith immediately drew his S&W revolver, a .44 (Mag or Special, he did not remember) and fired one shot, killing the flying hawk. This was before hawks, etc., were protected. Keith did not like hawks, etc. That was what I'd call pretty good shooting for holding a revolver in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.

That's a personal story.

L.W.

And yet Keith recommended to Lt. Jeff Cooper (later to become Col. Jeff Cooper) to pack a Colt SAA on Guadalcanal. Cooper later wrote he got tired real quick trying to reload that .45 hogleg in the dark, rain & mud while the Japanese were a-shooting at him. He then decided the USMC knew more about pistol fighting than the 'old timers' and went back to the 1911 .45 ACP he was supposed to be packing.

Do you mind citing a source from Cooper about that?

The Colt New Service revolver in 45 Colt was the test medium for the original 1911 tests
conducted by the Army /Ordnance Board. My two are both tough and accurate.
With strong Keith-bullet handloads, they are excellent in the outback. The closer one is to civilization
or actual combat, however- the more desirable is the 1911-IMHO. Both may encounter multiple targets, but the 1911
was designed for just that. (The Colt SAA is a black powder design, and is not in the running as a serious modern defensive handgun. )

Having carried a 1911 , a S&W 2in M&P backup, and a Car 15-together-in N. I -Corps with
MACVSOG/5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam, one carries the most that they can be comfortable with.
It's a personal choice. After all, your life just may be riding on your personal selection.

HRM
Lt Col-USA-R

I have a friend who went to Elmer's home town and interviewed everyone he could find that remembered Elmer.

I have never read Elmer, but I have blown up a lot of revolvers [split the cylinder and sometimes break the top strap].

My friend assures me that Elmer blew up more than I have.,,, but I can imagine I can calculate stress in steel better than Elmer did.

I remember reading it in Cooper's Commentaries/Cooper's Corner (and maybe in one of his books, I have few of Jeff's.) In fact there is lots of info here!

http://dvc.org.uk/jeff/

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/shooting-instructors-so-to-speak-jeff-cooper-vs-massad-ayoob/

You mention Col. Cooper having combat experience in WWII and yet from several sources, including the bottom link you provided, it seems Cooper has no actual combat experience. I've never been sure of if he did, or did not, have combat experience.

EK did inspection work at the Ogden Arsenal IIRC.. He related a story in his biography of confronting an unscrupulous administrator with two 1911's on his person for extra emphasis of his anger. I think he would have been intimately familiar with the platform. It makes me curious about his recommendation to JC..

He was also reputed to be snake quick with a Colt hogleg. Maybe his preference for single projectile impact power overshadowed a preference for more projectiles down range faster?

I have no combat experience. I was told once by someone that did that the M60 mg was a quote godsend compared to the BAR.. Seems like a reasonable statement. Same as the 1911 preference?

RJM, it seems to me I read in Elmer's second autobio.. that when he was a young man he had his .45 Colt loaded with 300 gr. bullets from a 45-90 mold... They were celebrating something the 4th or the end of WW 1.. Anyway he was on his horse and fired several shots into the air, the last one blew up the cylinder and the top strap of the old Colt.. He blamed it on the 300 gr. cast .. I am not sure he had a photo of the gun, because to the difficulty of getting pictures in those days.. I am certain I read this somewhere.. I remember the incident with the balloon head case also.. I will try and find this story if I can..

I've had one New Service. It was in 45 Colt. It was a nice gun but big. My hands are not huge. I was walking my dog one night. We lived in the country and had a gravel road in front of our house. I had my dog leashed and we were attacked by a big sheepdog. I jerked out the New Service and fired a couple of quick shots in the sheepdog's general direction, not aiming and not really intending to hit the dog. The sheepdog vacated and me and my dog went on about our business. That New Service was hard to reach the trigger on, kind of. I've had maybe three handguns that were just too big. The New Service, a Dan Wesson 44 Mag. and a Taurus Raging Judge.

The Colt New Service was sometimes best used with custom grips or a Tyler adapter. The RCMP used them in 45 Colt for half a century.
That being said, the S&W double action was smoother and that accounts for accuracy in the double-action mode.
If Keith did in fact use a 45-90 mould bullet, that answers that question. In addition to being heavy for caliber, the
Winchester 45-90 handled bullets of a nominal .458-459 actual diameter. Since it was cast, and possibly not sized down to 451-452,
pressures would spike badly.

I still have a 1984 letter from Jeff Cooper answering a military 9mm auto question.
I was an Army Captain then, and the response was sent back through channels to the Pentagon.
The subject matter concerned the new about-to-be adopted Beretta semi-auto and caliber.
Special Forces and some Marine units retained the Colt 1911A1 due to mission requirements
of "fight-stopping", as Cooper has always termed it. LtCol Cooper realized getting the Air Force-Army to change their minds was
an uphill battle on service handgun selection.