Elmer Keith: American Firearms Legend

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 young Elmer with UMC cartridges and Elmer would furnish the family with small game for table meat.  His father did not believe in wasting ammo on practice, indeed he made Elmer account for each cartridge fired with a squirrel or rabbit.  Elmer learned early to make every shot count.

By age 10 his family was back in Montana, settling on Ninth Avenue in Helena.  Weekends were spent exploring the sagebrush flats surrounding town.  Father liked the wing shooting and Elmer would try for jackrabbits with a slide action 1906 Winchester .22.  He later traded that rifle for a Model 1890 Winchester in .22 Winchester Special and said he “got pretty good” on the tough, moving targets.

In 1911, the family relocated to Missoula. Upon arrival the family could not find an available hotel so settled into a rooming house.  There were no rooms together, so Elmer and his brother were put up on the third floor.  After a few nights there, the building caught fire.  

Elmer’s brother was able to escape, but Elmer was trapped.  

His father got a fireman’s ladder and rescued his son, who was badly burned over much of his body.  He was not expected to live.  He survived, though the next years of his life were sheer agony. It was later determined to be arson, the fire started by the building’s owner trying to collect the insurance payout. Many people in town encouraged Mr. Keith to shoot the man, but he preferred to let the court take its course. The man was convicted and sentenced to nine years in the state penitentiary at Deer Lodge.  After the trial, the family was ready to forget Missoula.  

They moved back to Helena and bought a house at 1012 Billings Avenue. Elmer described himself as “still considerable of a wreck” at this point, with a left hand severely crippled and turned back on itself like a claw, and the right side of his face pulled down toward his shoulder.  No doctors would consider surgery and thought he wouldn’t live to see age 21 anyway. Elmer convinced his father to undertake the task of fixing the hand. His descriptions of this episode are gruesome.  This risky homespun doctoring was ultimately successful, and Elmer regained use of the hand.

To keep his mind off his problems, his father taught him to ride horses.  Elmer soon got a job delivering the newspaper on horseback and discovered he loved riding so much that he determined to become a bronc rider someday. Life was getting back to normal for teenage Elmer Keith. He returned to hunting with his father, and soon traded into a Remington 1854 .58 caliber brass-mounted smoothbore.  This became his first shotgun.  The extreme spread made it effective only at close range, but he once got a covey of teal with it. Ducks being plentiful in Helena, he was determined to get a better shotgun.  During summer vacation from school in 1916 he got a job working for National Biscuit Company making $10.80 per week.

He saved his money, wrote to the Ithaca Gun Company, and bought a No. 3 double hammerless 16 gauge. This was his first fine shotgun.

Around the same time, his father presented him with a Winchester 1894 in .25-35, with which Elmer killed his first deer.  It took four shots to down the deer, and he switched to a trapdoor Springfield in .45-70 that had been given to him by an old stage driver.  His opinions on big bore versus small were beginning to form. Keith soon joined the Helena Rifle Club, which held matches every Sunday at the Fort Harrison Range. He bought a Krag rifle for $1.50 through the NRA and began practicing.  With it, he shot the qualification course from 200 yards to 1,000 yards and qualified as Expert. He soon got an ‘03 Springfield in .30-06 from the Civilian Marksmanship Program for $18.43 and added a Stevens scope for another $10.  He and a friend began handloading for these rifles and found they could get better accuracy than what they achieved with government ammo.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show did its last tour in 1916, the year before Bill passed.  During the stop in Helena, they offered a $50 prize to anyone who could rope, throw, saddle, and ride a jenny mule until she quit bucking. Keith and his pal, Jake Jackson, asked if they could have a go, and they won.  Keith took his half of the prize money and bought his first real sixgun, a Colt SAA in .32-20 for $18.75, with three boxes of ammo at 60 cents each.  The rest went for a belt and holster.

As the doctors had always said Keith wouldn’t live to see 21, he was allowed to do pretty much as he pleased.  He pursued bronc busting, trapping, hunting and local shooting competition, and would work in the local logging businesses to feed his hobbies.

He was still in school at this point but missed two weeks that winter after freezing his feet on a hunting trip.  He got in arguments with his algebra teacher over it and quit school.

In 1917, his father bought a ranch about 20 miles east of Helena near the town of Winston.  He took a job in town, leaving Elmer to run the ranch pretty much on his own. Between chores, he continued to experiment with every kind of gun he could get in his hands.

Keith began a correspondence with Chauncey Thomas in Denver, who was editor of Outdoor Life magazine, which was located there in those days.  Keith bought several Sharps rifles from Thomas, who taught him a great deal about loading the ammunition for them.

In the fall of 1918, he went to Helena to enlist for the fighting in WWI.  The hard work he had forced on himself to recuperate from his burns had made him into a wiry 147 pounds of muscle. He passed his physical and was set to head out to Camp Lewis, Washington, for basic training on November 10. The next morning, the war ended.

In 1923, his father, tiring of the long Montana winters, traded the Winston ranch for 1,200 acres of grass range near Weiser, Idaho. Keith couldn’t help with the move because he’d joined the Montana National Guard. He hoped to get into match shooting and maybe make the team for Camp Perry.  He was quickly promoted to corporal and then sergeant and shot well in the matches that summer. The Governor of Montana came out to make the team announcements and Sgt. Keith was the second name on the list.  In September 1924 the team headed to Ohio to practice for the National Match in October. Keith met many people there with whom he would remain friends throughout their lives.  Men such as Col. Townsend Whelen, Major (later General) Julian Hatcher, James V. Howe of Griffin & Howe, Harry Snyder of Hoffman Arms. Co, the famous barrel maker Harry Pope, and J.H. FitzGerald of Colt’s.  There is a passage Keith’s autobiographyand also in Fitz’s book about an impromptu quickdraw demonstration they performed.

At the conclusion of the National Matches, Keith caught a train to Idaho to check in with the family.  He spent a few months around the new place, fishing and hunting, helping with the 300 head of cattle they had.  It was at a ranch dance near there he met Lorraine Randall for the first time. Deciding to stay that next summer of 1925, Keith joined the Idaho National Guard hoping for another chance to go to the National Matches.  At the regional matches, he showed his rifle prowess and again made a team headed for Camp Perry.  Keith performed well and was able to reconnect with many of the men he’d met the year before.  

This 1925 trip also marks the first year he appeared in print, in the NRA’s monthly publication, American Rifleman. The article describes the blowing up of his .45 Colt SAA with one of his hotrod handloads.  

It was that experience that started Keith on the path as a writer, but perhaps more importantly to adopt the .44 Special for his experiments with high-power handgun loads. He spent a lot of time at Perry hanging around the Hoffman Arms Company exhibit area and became even more friendly with Snyder and Howe.  For Christmas that year, Jim Howe presented Keith with his first modern elk rifle, a .400 Whelen with a barrel featuring serial number 1.  He kept it his whole life.  That winter back in Idaho, Keith helped get the fall crops in and the 113 head of cattle gathered up.  When spring came, Keith proposed to Lorraine Randall, she accepted, and they settled on a little ranch in nearby Durkee, Oregon.

In 1927, Harry Snyder of Hoffman Arms Company contacted Keith and asked if he was any sort of camp cook.  Snyder was taking a group of ten hunters into British Columbiafor a two-month hunting trip down the Peace River.  The pay was $5 per day and Keith accepted.  He ended up doing as much tracking and guiding as he did cooking.  

Returning home, Keith began writing more, especially about his experimenting with sixguns.  He sold articles to American Rifleman and Outdoor Life magazines.  One of these articles was on long-range handgun shooting. That article certainly raised eyebrows, with some readers writing letters to the editor admonishing the magazine for publishing such nonsense, essentially calling Keith a liar. Harold Croft., a reader from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was very interested by the article and wrote directly to Keith. He told how none of his pistol club members believed the article, and asked if he could travel to Idaho to see such shooting in person.  Keith invited him out.  Croft promptly shipped a crate of ammo, packed a suitcase full of revolvers, and bought a train ticket.

When Croft arrived at the Oregon ranch, Keith nailed together a four-foot square of boards and loaded it in his Model T.  They drove it across the meadow and placed it on the mountainside at a measured 700 yards.  Keith asked if that would do and Croft said, “sure, you couldn’t hit that with a howitzer, let alone a sixgun.” Keith dropped a saddle on the ground against a tree, lay down using it for a headrest,and held a gun between his knees.  He hit the target with each of Croft’s guns before the cylinder was empty, though there was one 2-1/2-inch .45 Colt slip gun that required 11 shots to hit.  With some of the 4-, 5- and 7.5” guns he got three to four hits per cylinder full.  That display convinced Harold Croft.  

They became lifelong friends.  Keith’s famed Revolver No 5 – the fifth iteration of he and Croft’s idea of the perfect single action sixgun – resulted from this friendship.  The revolver was written up in the April 1929 American Rifleman piece titled The Last Word.

In 1930, Keith found a fine piece of land in Idaho on the North Fork of the Salmon River, about 30 miles from town.  He sold off the Durkee ranch and moved.  The Keiths would stay in the Salmon, Idaho, area for the remainder of their lives. That same year, Keith made the decision to dedicate his life to writing about guns, supplementing the income with guiding hunters and fishermen in the game-rich area surrounding their new home. For most of the 1930s, Keith made his living from guiding and writing.  His reviews of new firearms were especially well regarded as he did his testing in the real-world environment of his ranch.  

The 1930s were also a very productive decade for his designing work.  He had already done some terrific bullet designs for mold makers such as Lyman, Ideal, and Hensley & Gibbs.  

His 250-gr .44 bullet, Lyman 429421, designed during Harold Croft’s first visit, was and is a superbly accurate bullet. Validation of those designs was furthered when Smith & Wesson utilized his 160-grain hollow-point for the testing that led to the .357 Magnum cartridge.

He developed holsters such as the Lawrence #20 and the Berns-Martin speed rig.  His holster designs were some of the most popular of the era.

He experimented with his gunsmith friend Charley O’Neil and their backer Don Hopkins to develop the OKH line of wildcat cartridges.  They tested duplex loading to ignite the front of the powder charge and made custom cases with flash tubes to do it.  This testing led to the development of many fine cartridges, and the .338 OKH is today known as the .338 Winchester Magnum, with the .340 Weatherby Magnum being even closer to the original power factor.

It was also during this era that Winchester took the ideas of Keith and four others to create the famed Model 70. Yep, – Elmer Keith helped invent the Model 70.  Keith, Don Martin, Col. Jay Williams, Cinque Thompson, and Oscar Waterrood, each spent a year and a half shooting with Winchester’s Model 54, corresponding by mail all the while.  They submitted their findings and recommendations to Ed Pugsley, head of Winchester, in 1935. A prototype model was built and when it was shown to Frank Dufresne, head of the Alaskan Game Commission, Pugsley told him: “We have over $200,000 in this pilot model.  If it don’t sell, there’s four Alaskan sourdoughs and one Idaho cowpoke that had better hunt their holes.”

The rest is history as the Model 70 went on to become the finest production American rifle of its time, known forevermore as the Rifleman’s Rifle, and still made today.

In 1936, Keith published his first two books: Sixgun Cartridges and Loads, a small handbook, which he dedicated to Harold Croft, and then Big Game Rifles and Cartridges later in the year. He was also named Gun Editor for The Outdoorsman magazine, a position he held for the next 12 years.  Keith made hunting trips to Alaska and Mexico in the 1930s, documenting the trips. He and Lorraine started a family, too, and Keith was well on his way.

Keith was on a train coming home from a hunting trip when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor.  He wanted to get in and do his part, and promptly wrote to the Army and Marines to offer his services as a rifle instructor. He was declined. Keith ended up assigned by his old friend Major Hatcher to the Ogden Arsenal in Utah, inspecting and proofing small arms. 

Keith and his staff of 25, mostly women, would inspect, clean, and proof fire up to 500 rifles per day.  Rifles stamped with Keith’s proofmark on the stock are sought after and prized by collectors today. After the war, Keith went back to the ranch and resumed his writing and guiding pursuits. He published his next book, Keith’s Rifles for Large Game, in 1946.

In 1948 he resigned from The Outdoorsman magazine and joined the technical staff of NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, working with such men as Phil Sharpe and Julian Hatcher. That year, as he approached age 50, he gave up guiding, rented out the ranch, and bought a house in town at 130 Lombard Street. The book Elmer Keith’s Big Game Hunting was published that year. In 1950, Keith published Shotguns by Keith, an instant classic.  He dedicated the book to Major Charles Askins, Sr and the introduction to the book was written by Col. Charles Askins, Jr. In 1955, his seminal handgun volume was published: Sixguns by Keith: The Standard Reference Work.

In December of ’55 Carl Hellstrom of S&W contacted Keith to tell him that all his years of pestering had come to fruition.  Remington Ammunition and Smith & Wesson had taken his advice and his hot .44 Special handload recipe and the .44 Magnum was now a reality.  Keith received the second revolver produced by the company in January1956.  It never left his hip for the rest of his life.  There was also a second engraved one he got later in the year.

For over ten years, Keith had enjoyed his time with American Rifleman, where he published many articles and answered 300-500 letters per month.  By this time, he was widely known in the American gun community and thoroughly enjoyed his fame.

Then, in 1957, Guns magazine asked him to pen a column for them.  He accepted, but the new editor of American Rifleman balked at the move and dropped him from Technical Staff to Contributing Editor.  They had words, and Keith resigned.  He picked up a gun editor job with a little magazine in Denver called Western Sportsman, and promptly booked his first African safari. Keith’s African battery featured his old favorite .338 OKH for plains game, and his .476 Westley Richards double rifle for the big stuff.

Keith’s love of old English double rifles was well-known, and his collection was exceptional.

Upon his return from Africa, he was approached by Bob Petersen of Petersen Publishing to join the staff of his new Guns & Ammo magazine, where he spent the rest of his professional life. His monthly column, Gun Notes, was one of the most popular monthlies in the field, and he also produced regular feature pieces for the magazine. Petersen published Keith’s book Guns & Ammo For Big Game Hunting in 1965.

In the 1990s, Safari Press compiled all the Gun Notes columns into two volumes.  This is the best of Keith on technical firearms advice and are required reading for shooters, hunters, and handloaders. One of the highlights of these books is the collection of letters and correspondence included. For the last 25 years of his life, Keith enjoyed his renown as the great American firearms authority. When Townsend Whelen passed in 1961, Keith assumed the mantle of Dean of American Firearms Writers.

In 1964, S&W introduced the Model 57 chambered in .41 Magnum.  Keith had advocated for this cartridge, midway between the .357 and .44, as the optimal police sidearm.  He was given the first two guns produced. Keith did another African safari in 1969 with Truman Fowler, who acted as publisher of Keith’s book Safari.  Copies of this book are one of the more difficult titles to acquire, but worth the effort.  Keith would ship these from his home, and many are signed.  Additionally, he handwrote corrections on photo captions.

In 1973 Keith was presented with the first Outstanding American Handgunner award. He produced two more books during the 1970s, his autobiography in 1974 and an expanded edition titled “Hell, I Was There!” in 1979. He remained a gun designer all his life.

As they aged, the Keiths hunted together while they still could, and did many trips pursuing big game. As he approached his 80^th birthday he wrote: “I have no intention of retiring. “You retire, you become a vegetable and usually last six months to three years. I don’t care for that kind of an end. I’d rather keep working and die with my boots on if necessary.”

Though there is no known film footage of Elmer Keith, there is a little-known prize out there for Keith fans: We can hear him speak. The Library of Congress once had a project sending linguistic researchers out to record aged Americans and their dialects.  In September 1981, a researcher visited Salmon, Idaho, and recorded Elmer for an archive entry.  Lorraine also speaks. (We will link both segments below)

Elmer Keith passed away February 14, 1984, at age 84.  He is buried in the cemetery at Salmon, Idaho. It’s an inarguable fact that he did more research and experimentation to benefit the American firearms industry than any other man.

Listen to The Library of Congress recordings of Elmer and Lorraine Keith here: https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000166/

https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000167/

View our Elmer Keith video and all of our Vintage Firearms Series on YouTube

His was an American life the likes of which we will never see again.