Sirs,
Allow me to resume with comments on paragraph four of Layne Simpson's "Incomplete Story" of the .458 Win. Mag.
The fourth paragraph:
"During the 1940s, Alaska school teacher James Watts began planning a lengthy safari in Rhodesia and decided to duplicate the performance of the .450 Nitro Express 3-1/4" by necking up the .375 H&H Magnum for .458-inch 480-grain bullets made by Kynoch and fireforming the case to straight taper with no shoulder. He called it the .450 Watts, and obtaining a rifle was as easy as switching barrels on a Winchester Model 70 in .375 H&H. Except for being 0.050 inch longer, the .450 Watts case is identical to the .458 Lott introduced about 30 years later."
I read again the Cal Pappas biography of James Watts, to give proper context to the comic lines above.
James Watts was born July 11, 1913, in Mulvane, Kansas, son of a Methodist Minister, George, and his wife Rebecca.
His middle initial was "A." on a Boeing Engineer ID card circa 1945.
His middle initial was "H." on a 1952 copyright for the .450 Watts Rimmed, a .458/.348 WCF.
Nowhere in the book is this discrepancy addressed or clarified.
James started grade school in Oxford, Kansas in 1918.
He attended college in Kansas and had a bachelor's degree by 1936.
He taught at a Kansas high school, English and history, for one school year in 1936-1937.
He had a summer job in San Antonio, Texas in 1937 where he became acquainted with the infant discipline of seismology being used in the oil fields.
He went back to graduate school to study physics and geology from 1937 to 1938, but never got a master's degree.
In the fall of 1937 he ordered a .375 H&H M70 from Winchester and eventually received the 17th rifle of that chambering.
In the spring of 1938 he heard a church lady in Kansas giving a presentation about Alaska and he "got the bug" to go there.
She was the daughter of the mayor of Fairbanks, AK, pioneer Judge E. B. Collins, but had married and moved to Kansas.
By the summer of 1938, young James Watts had landed at Seward, AK and boated over to Valdez where he started a 4-week, nearly 400-mile hike to Fairbanks.
It was a solitary backpacking adventure and test of himself, carrying a 60-pound pack and his .375 H&H M70.
He was about 5'6" tall with his boots on, and a skookum explorer.
James worked through the winter, all over interior AK, with Fairbanks as base, and Judge Collins setting him up for all sorts of labor and skilled jobs,
from ditch digging to flying around for surveying and assaying mining claims.
In the summer of 1939 he was ready to hike another 4 weeks to Valdez from Fairbanks, along the course of the Richardson Highway.
He got charged by a grizzly boar along the way while he was wading a creek.
James got one shot off with his .375 H&H before the bear slapped the 7.5"-barreled Colt New Service .45 LC off his hip when the bear bowled him over.
Thus, in 1939, the .375 H&H and the .45 Long Colt had a baby, and it eventually grew into the .458 Winchester Magnum.
Returning to Seward by July of 1939, James Watts stayed there until December 1941, stevedoring, longshoring, and railroading.
He married wife Bea there on October 30, 1941, just over a month before Pearl Harbor. She was from Montana, where her family still ranched.
The couple were back in Kansas by January 1942. Bea got a job at Boeing. James enlisted but had asthma problems there in Kansas that got him medically discharged inside of 3 months.
So James went to work at Boeing in Wichita, Kansas too, initially as a tool and die inspector and then finally as an engineer in the function testing division,
sighting in the 50 BMG and 20mm Buford guns on the B-29 bombers being built by Boeing.
James and Bea left Boeing in May of 1944, tried Seward, Alaska for a few months, but the employment did not invite that time,
so onward to Montana from October 1944 to March 1945, to stay with Bea's parents while the couple looked for work.
James Watts went to NYC, NY in January 1945 and interviewed at the Standard Oil exploration division.
Standard Oil did not pan out but he stopped in at Griffin & Howe's NYC shop and had his first thought of an African safari for himself.
.303 British were the only rifles in stock at G&H's shop near the end of WWII, a disappointment for James the gunnutt.
The Watts returned to Boeing in early 1945, this time to Seattle, WA. But the A-bomb was dropped in August and massive layoffs from Boeing followed.
By September 1945, James was hired as a teacher, thanks to the GI Bill boom in education for returning military servicemen.
That trickled down (or up) to high school teacher employment too.
James and Bea settled in Yakima, WA, he as a teacher of history and coach of football, wrestling, and track, she as a secretary.
James was a winning football coach his first year. The captain of the HS team was Harvey B. Anderson, Jr.
Harvey Senior was a gunsmith-inventor-tinkerer and had an apartment to rent to James and Bea. They really hit it off.
By early 1946 Harvey, Sr. had re-chambered a .35 Remington take-off barrel to .35 Whelen Improved on a G-33 Mauser.
James Watts stocked that rifle himself, his first from scratch.
During the period 1945 to 1947 James Watts claimed to have written to Winchester twice, about necking up the .375 H&H to .458.
The first time he was rebuffed with a reply that the British had the big bore market sewn up and that nothing bigger than .375 H&H was need in NA.
The second time he did not get a reply.
In the summer of 1946, James and Bea and Bea's brother Edward went on a 400-mile hike/"vacation" in the Northwest Territory of Canada. It was a doozy.
He used the .35 Whelen Improved to feed the crew. They got back late for school and James had to sit out the rest of the school year, but resumed teaching at the Yakima, WA high school in fall 1947. They lived in the Anderson apartment again, adjacent to the gunsmith shop.
Watts began tinkering with his "idea" and by 1948 Anderson was on board by making the reamer.
By 1949 the first complete .450 Watts Magnum rifle was produced. Anderson installed a P. O. Ackley barrel on an opened-up FN Mauser.
It went like gangbusters for a while.
For Christmas vacation in 1949, James Watts visited Roy Weatherby in CA. Roy's biggest gun then was the .375 Weatherby Magnum.
1949-1950, Ralph Hammer wrote of the .450 Watts Magnum in "a national hunting magazine."
1950: Fred Barnes started making 400-, 500-, and 600-gr, heavy-jacketed (0.049" thickness) bullets in .458 caliber. Kynoch 480-grainers were too fragile.
Harvey B. Anderson, Sr. copyrighted the .450 Watts Magnum.
1950-1952, Fred Ness of the AMERICAN RIFLEMAN research lab got a .450 Watts Magnum and did an extensive writeup, and Jack O'Connor took one to Africa.
1951-1952, James Watts shortened the case to 2.5" and called it the .450 Watts Short.
1952-1954, Watts corresponded with Winchester and says he "gave them a release" so they could produce the .450 Watts Short as the .458 Winchester Magnum.
Winchester did not do it short to make it fit into a standard M98 !
They did it for ease of fitting it into an un-opened-up Pre-'64 M70 which is the same length action as used for the .30-06 !
Meanwhile, James and Bea Watts moved back to Seattle in spring 1950 where work was beginning on a "stratocruiser" that eventually led to the B-52 bomber.
Thank the Cold War for that uptick in employment.
James worked the night shift as a Boeing engineer and he taught at the University of Washington school of mines, daytime. All that for a year.
In spring of 1951 to December 1951, James returned to Seward, AK to work on highway and bridge construction from Seward to Anchorage.
January 1952 to "spring" 1952 James returned to his dual gig at Boeing and U. of WA.
In the spring of 1952, James and Bea drove to Alaska to stay.
He continued highway construction work until beginning a high school teaching job in the fall of 1952 in Seward.
FINALLY HE BECAME AN ALASKAN TEACHER LIKE LAYNE SIMPSON SAID IN HIS GROSS OVERSIMPLIFICATION.
James Watts did not dream up the .450 Watts Magnum to use Kynoch bullets in Rhodesia.
He hated Kynoch bullets in the .450 Watts Magnum.
He dreamed up a transcontinental African safari in 1958, after he and Bea recovered from the polio epidemic that hit Seward in 1956.
James was mildly afflicted, Bea had it pretty bad.
There is much more needed to complete the "Incomplete Story" of the .458 Winchester Magnum by Layne Simpson.
To be continued with his next commission and/or omissions.