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Elmer Merrifield Keith was born in Hardin, Missouri in 1899. The family moved to Montana in 1906 and fell in love with the virgin wilderness.  They stayed two years but returned to Missouri, taking two more years to sell off their land, house, and holdings to move back to Montana permanently. It  was during this time back in Missouri that Elmer’s father determined the boy was old enough for his first gun and bought him a .22 Hopkins & Allen rifle. His father would furnish yo

John Woolf O’Connor was born in 1902 in Nogales, Arizona Territory. These were still wild times in that country, a place very much a part of the Old West.  Just two years earlier, lawman Warren Earp had been shot down in a Willcox saloon, and Three-Fingered Jack Dunlap’s gang had robbed the train at Fairbank. Only a year earlier, the Arizona Rangers had been organized to curb the lawlessness of the area.  Jack O’Connor was born into such a world, ten years before statehood.