Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Jack O’Connor

The hate is strong with this one..

No hate, Johnny.

Just the facts, ma'am.

Nice goat Ed, looks like you had a good day.

Sure

The guys worried about horse and a posed picture are missing the point. Read about what he used a 2.5 power scope and by today standards god awful Remington core-lokts

uh, no. And at least twice he deliberately shot "trophy" animals in the ass to slow them down until he could get a better shot or finish them. Self admitted. I read "Sheep and Sheep Hunting" right after my first (solo) sheep hunt. Other than distribution and some technical stuff, I learned nothing new, that I did not already know or learn on my hunt, and I learned a couple things that he never mentioned.

I'm not exactly a fan.

Corelokts are good bullets and my go-to., when I'm done screwing around with other stuff. And probably much better now than then.

As to horses and packers, Mike - that was maybe so sometimes short forays, but there isn't any way you are salvaging the meat from a 5-day ride in, far in- 3 or 4 week horseback hunting trip where you take a half-dozen animals including moose. Different times sure, but the only meat salvaged was camp meat and bear bait, if we count that as salvage...

He wrote about such trips, and a few years later would P&M about how that untouched pristine country was "now" over-run with guides and hunters. I'm not sure he ever made the connection.

My great grandfather, also named Jack was a big hunter in the 40s-60s and (supposedly) new O'Conner and had hunted with him, though I think only on occasion.
I have his (My GG Father's---not O'Conner's) 2nd year production Win 70 in .270 Win and original Lyman Alaskan 2.5X scope, though I put a somewhat period correct Lyman 4X Perma Center on it. That old Lyman Alaskan has absolutely horrid parallax issues. I still hunt with the rifle on occasion.

I was born and raised in Lewiston Idaho and our neighbor was Fred Warren. He owned Warren's Sporting Goods, a high end gun shop. I hung out there a lot as a kid and listened to conversations between Fred and Jack O'Conner. Jack hung out there also. Fred was our next door neighbor and gave me my first air rifle as a birthday gift. However, I was never a fan of the .270 regardless of what Jack had to say. The first rifle I bought for myself was a 7mm Rem Mag. It has served me well and I still have it.

Good point. Different times.

I idolized Jack O'Connor when I was growing up. I had to send off to the State of Alaska Library in Juneau for Sheep and Sheep Hunting and would keep checking it out. I shot my first moose with a 270 Winchester in a Remington 700 ADL and was on a path to continue using it. I really got hooked to a pushfeed Model 70 Winchester in 300 Win Mag and that became and still is my favorite rifle. Jack was such a great storyteller and made you feel you were on the mountain ridge sneaking up on a huge ram. I was a kid and went up to Nabesna and spent several evenings with Don DeHart who ranch the Dehart ranch. He told me that he had experience with both Jack and with Elmer Keith and that Jack drank a bit and would wake up late and go to bed early. Don loved Elmer. He said that Elmer worked as hard as the guides and shot a very nice dall sheep and a good moose with him.
I have wanted to go the Lewiston center and I have corresponded with Bradford who is a very wonderful gentleman. I always wanted to travel and see if I could corroborate the Dehart trip. I also talked to Urban Rahoi who had an interesting experience with Warren Page.

"By today's standards" Back then it was state of the art. Heck it was a year after this picture that John Nosler started in on the partition design due to the poor bullet performance of the day. I have no evidence but suspect that the CoreLoc of today is not the same as the CoreLoc of then.

I've read pretty much everything JC published and those folks (including his wife) shot at game a lot and that included a lot of way long range spray and pray shooting at stuff going over a ridge. Still, hard to argue he's not one of the greatest outdoors writers there was and he had tremendous influence on the evolution of our sport and sporting arms. We're much poorer for his loss.

most people that hate the 270 have spent there lives trying to find a better hunter caliber but have failed. it just cant be done.

I have a hunting partner who has used the 270 WCF to near exclusion of all others over the past 20 + years. I poked fun at him for the first 15 or so, asking if he was going to keep using his "poodle rifle". The light finally came on a handful of years back, and I bought my own 270. A life change including a move to a smaller house, coupled with a degree of laziness, and all my reloading gear is still in boxes. Pushing the easy button involved buying a couple 200 round "cases" of ammunition, and then buying additional boxes when I passed them at a good price. For grocery shopping in the venison isle, it delivers every time.

Jack O'Connor still is a favorite of mine. From his writings he liked to still hunt, walking and stalking game. He jumped a lot of animals so it's not surprising that some were shot in the rump. The same arguments about cartridges and everything else was alive and well back then. The .270 was the "Creedmoor" of that day. He wrote that he liked a lot of other cartridges but ended up championing the .270 because it was good and he couldn't stand to hear the railings and misinformation about it. We have the same arguments rehashed today along with the jokes and ribald idiocy that goes with it concerning certain cartridges. He reloaded for a number of different cartridges and wrote about that. He and his family used those to shoot everything.

O'Connor was influential in the design of the "Classic" stock and was not a fan of the California "Weatherby" style. I think he missed out on one of the great stockmakers of all time, Monty Kennedy. He was pretty outspoken on his likes of actions and had a good understanding of ballistics. He wrote about a lot of the failings of bullets available in his time. Scopes weren't as good or as reliable. Scope mounts were not as good as today. He liked the straight four power rather than the variable.

O'Connor and his entire family hunted pretty much year round. They honed their shooting skills on desert jackrabbits and coyotes. He was an educator and wrote well. He didn't give nicknames to the game animals and bullets. He just wrote a good story. I read a lot of other writers of the time including Keith. The competition between writers then was fierce and if you read many of them you will recognize it. I can't say whether he did everything correct or not because I wasn't there and nobody around now was either no matter what they'd like you to believe.

We have good writers today but they are different in that hunting has changed a lot since the 20-50's. The industry has changed since then as well. The carping critics haven't changed at all so human nature is alive and well.

Different times indeed. I recall reading one of Elmer’s takes where he shot an elk in the azz at long range, with FMJ .30/06 IIRC, to turn him around as well. O’Connor loved wild mutton, and I doubt if he left it behind.

He used to drive into Mexico to hunt sheep, at least once with “museum permits” he wrangled someplace, and also with whiskey to bribe the border guards.

When you read the old timers, you’ll discover many had cavalier attitudes about the shots they took. TR, Howard Hill, even Fred Bear tried some doozies. Bear, who made a big splash with his 80 yard shot on a running tiger, later admitted it was pure luck. He was actually trying to turn it, not hit it. Such a shot on a tiger was really ill-advised, as there were beaters nearby, and anyone who’s read Corbett knows what wounded tigers do to make a living in India.

It is a good round for my purposes which are hog and deer. I've used it a good bit when my .30-06 spent a year in a gunsmith shop while I patiently waited for him to rebarrel it. I would say it is usually as good as a .30-06. I read every Jack article I could find when I was a kid and if I remember he had kind words for the '06 and the 7X57.

Me too Jim. Bought it in 1979 and still love it. Here's something Jack O'Connor did for me and likely many more. Growing up in the 60s and early 70s I read all I could find about hunting and fishing. Jack O'Connor was mostly responsible for fueling that fire the most. He seemed to have a way of telling about his hunts that made me want to be there. He also included just enough detail to be helpful in how to get started. I'd much rather read what the writers of his day wrote than those of today. Then it was more about the hunt, the game and the hunting spot. Now it's more like a big commercial to sell gadgets.

I just found out that Remington introduced a new Core-Lokt this year with a polymer tip.

I’d like it better if they brought back the ones with the internal re-enforcing belt. No matter really as I don’t see any factory ammo in my future, or component bullets either, for that matter.

SPS really had me going for a while there…

No, exactly. The original Core-Lokts had heavy "sidewalls," which combined with the cannelure did tend to keep the core locked inside the jacket.

But around 1990 Remington changed the Pointed Soft-Point Core-Lokts, making the jacket thinner--though the they kept the heavy sidewalls in the roundnose version, probably because not many hunters bought them anymore, so the forming dies didn't wear out. For a while around then Remington also used Hornady Interlocks in supposedly PSP Core-Lokts, which are indeed pretty good bullets. I know this because they sent me some PSP Core-Lokt ammo for an article project in the early 1990s, and the bullets looked suspiciously "pencil-pointed," as Elmer Keith called their secant ogive. So I pulled one and sectioned it--and not so oddly it had an Interlock ring inside the shank of the jacket.