Jack O'Connor: Outdoorsman, Writer, and Big-Game Hunter
- Evan Lee
- Feb 17
- 8 min read
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. Jack’s parents divorced when he was five, and his mother relocated Jack and his younger sister, Helen, to Tempe to be nearer her family.
Jack’s maternal grandfather, James Wiley Woolf, and his uncle, Jim O’Connor, would become surrogate father figures to Jack. Born of pioneer stock themselves, they soon impressed their love of hunting and the outdoors on young Jack. It was on Uncle Jim’s Box O Ranch that Jack bagged his first game animal, a javelina, at age 10 with a Winchester Model 92 in .25-20. Two years later, he bagged his first mule deer buck with an old .30-40 Krag. By 1919, Jack had graduated high school and was becoming a devoted hunter of the wary and wily little southwestern desert whitetail known as a Coues deer. It would be some years before he would actually get one. Jack spent that summer after high school shooting deer to feed the crew at his uncle’s sawmill in Sinaloa, Mexico. He used a Winchester 94 in .30-30 and a Savage 99 in .250-3000. The effectiveness of that fast Savage .25 caliber on deer was an observation not lost on Jack and would color his future cartridge considerations. That fall he started college at Tempe Normal, which is today’s Arizona State University. In the autumn of 1923, shortly after he’d transferred to University of Arizona in Tucson, he finally took his first Coues deer.
In 1924 he moved to the University of Arkansas to finish his degree. Upon graduation in 1925 he returned to Arizona, and that summer bought one of the first Winchester Model 54 rifles chambered for their brand-new .270 W.C.F cartridge. He also received a Griffin & Howe Springfield sporter in .30-06 as a graduation gift. Those two rifles would help inform his hunting and ballistic observations for the next 10 years. He immediately took numerous deer and three black bears with them before heading to the University of Missouri for his graduate degree.
Upon receiving his master’s in journalism in 1927, Jack hired on as a college professor at several different schools in Texas and Arizona, ultimately becoming the first professor of journalism at the University of Arizona in 1934. That same year, he sold his first freelance article to Outdoor Life magazine, which ran in the May issue. He also sold articles to Sports Afield and Field & Stream magazines, supplementing his thin Depression-era salary of just $2,000 per year. By 1936, Jack was becoming well-known as an expert author on firearms, hunting, big game, and natural history. At the end of that year, Outdoor Life gave him an exclusive contract, and by 1939 he became its gun columnist. In 1941, he was given the role of Arms & Ammunition Editor, and by 1945 he resigned his role at University of Arizona and began his full-time role as the magazine’s Shooting Editor, a position he would hold for the next 31 years.
While Jack’s knowledge, expertise and writing excellence are all what made him so popular, part of his widespread recognition can be attributed to the fact that the U.S Government selected Outdoor Life as the sole magazine to be distributed monthly to all armed forces personnel serving in all theaters of operations in World War II. Each month, these young men would read of rifles and Jack’s adventures using them, dreaming of peacetime and their own return to America’s hunting fields. At the end of WWII, Arizona’s population exploded and Jack, finding the newly arrived crowds intolerable, soon relocated. His good friend Vernon Speer, of the Speer Bullet Company, was instrumental in Jack’s decision to move his family to Lewistown, Idaho, where he would live to the end of his days. From his home at 725 Prospect Avenue overlooking the Snake River, Jack would produce over 1,200 feature articles and columns for the magazine, and author 12 hardcover books on big game hunting and rifles.
Outdoor Life became the most popular magazine for sportsmen in America, in large part due to Jack’s efforts. At one point, the volume of Jack’s incoming mail seeking advice on guns and hunting exceeded 3,000 letters per month and required a team of four secretaries to handle. While Jack was well-versed in all firearms, he was a rifleman through and through. As he said in the introduction to The Rifle Book in 1949: I like a handgun. I hold a shotgun in high regard; but rifles – well, I love the darned things…to me they stand for wilderness, mystery, romance … the brown bighorn ram high on a rocky comb, the flash of a whitetail’s fan as he bursts out of his cover and dashes for safety. The big hulking moose stalking on long, stilt-like legs through the spruce timber … high mountain passes, timberline basins, green, lush, smooth as an English lawn, where a grizzly bear digs for marmots and the soaring eagle whistles. As that passage demonstrates, Jack was a romantic and his love of the game fields and rifles is best enjoyed through his writings. His books are mandatory for any reader and collector of hunting and firearms literature. With today’s internet marketplace available at the click of a mouse, one can build a collection of his works and enjoy his timeless and insightful writing.
Jack owned a tremendous number of rifles over his lifetime, so many that they can’t be cataloged here. Anyone interested in a detailed account of them should seek out Robert Anderson’s excellent O’Connor biography. Additionally, one can actually see many of the important rifles he used on display at the Jack O’Connor Hunting Heritage & Education Center near Lewistown at the Hell’s Gate State Park. Jack’s thoughts on hunting rifle designs and features are still being utilized by many gunmakers. With the plethora of choices available today it is easy to forget that a good bolt action rifle with a well-designed stock didn’t arrive on the scene until the Remington 30-S came out in 1935 and Winchester introduced the Model 70 in 1936.
One of Jack’s first pieces written under his contract with Outdoor Life in 1937 was titled “Building Your Dream Rifle.” Variations of that article appeared over the next 40 years and had profound influence on rifles designed and produced by the major manufacturers and many custom gunsmiths. Perhaps the finest illustration of Jack’s idea of the perfect hunting rifle is his Number 2. Jack’s favorite custom gunmaker was Al Biesen of Spokane, Washington, who made many guns for O’Connor over the years. Number One was produced on a Winchester Model 70 action with a graceful and conservative stock featuring Biesen’s signature fleur-de-lis inset checkering pattern in European walnut, the pattern that was also Jack’s favorite. Jack hunted with this rifle for many years and decided to have Biesen make a second – Number 2. This rifle proved to be even more accurate, and O’Connor used it until the end. Both rifles, among others from his collection, can be viewed at the aforementioned O’Connor Education Center in Idaho.
What cartridge were these rifles chambered for? One of Jack’s longest-lasting legacies and the one for which he is most well-known is the advocacy of the .270 Winchester. Even today, with its 100-year anniversary coming in 2025, it is still one of the most popular hunting rounds. While Jack had experience with the fast magnums, he believed that the .270 was sufficient for all North American big game – including grizzly and moose – and that the mildly recoiling cartridge provided better accuracy for those hunters sensitive to recoil. He forever advocated for proper bullet placement and believed it as important as caliber consideration. While still a very popular cartridge, there were and are detractors who scoff at the notion of using the old .270 on game larger than deer. Jack’s confirmed hunting bag with the .270 is the stuff of legend, and speaks to the effectiveness of a 130-grain .27 caliber bullet at 3,160 fps.
Sheep: Jack O’Connor was the consummate sheep hunter. It was the driving force of his hunting life and his most favored big game animal to hunt. A Grand Slam on North American Sheep is a hunter taking one each of all four species: Rocky Mountain Bighorn, Desert Bighorn, Dall, and Stone. We know that Jack achieved this goal two to four times, depending on who you ask, but there are those who knew him claiming he did it seven or eight times. We will never know for sure, but we may rest assured nearly every sheep he took was with the .270 as described in his many stories and books on the subject.
Grizzly Bear: of his 13 grizzlies, two were taken with the .270.
Caribou: 25 taken, most killed with the .270 and all but two were one-shot kills.
Mountain Goat: three specimens, two of which were with the .270.
Moose: 12 moose taken, unknown how many with the .270 but on the mixed-bag hunts where he took them, most kills were with one of his three .270 rifles he had along.
Elk: Jack took 21 elk over 40 years. Seventeen of these were shot with the .270.
Deer: He never stated an exact number but did say it was over 100 and that he took more deer than any other big-game animal.
Considering he adopted the .270 in 1925, it is safe to estimate a high percentage were taken with the cartridge. Pronghorn: It’s not known how many pronghorn Jack took, though it was likely around two dozen across numerous Western states. The bigger picture concerning these wonderfully speedy North American animals is that Jack was instrumental in conservation of the Arizona pronghorn. In fact, his very first Outdoor Life article in 1934 was titled “Arizona’s Antelope Problem” and by the 1940s an experimental hunting season was introduced. From under 1,000 animals in the 1920s, today Arizona has over 10,000 and produces some of the largest specimens known.
Jack’s hunting life was not confined to North America. He did six safaris in Africa, hunting in countries, taking the Big Five of lion, leopard, Cape buffalo, rhino and elephant. He took many plains game, including kudu, eland, sable, zebra, addax, oryx, aoudad, and gazelle. Jack also did two shikars in India and three more in Iran, taking tiger, ibex, boar, and Urial sheep. He also hunted Scandinavia and Scotland mainly on driven grouse shotgun expeditions. These hunting experiences and his results further propelled him to worldwide recognition as one of the greatest big game hunters the world has ever known and one of the most knowledgeable of riflemen and ballistics experts.
His many books and stories of these adventures make him the uncontested greatest gunwriter of all time, and he is widely regarded as such today, nearly 50 years after his death. He inspired millions of hunters to the field and left a lasting legacy of conservation and education that will never expire. Much can be learned from reading O’Connor’s works.
In 1972, he was selected by a poll of more than 5,000 outdoor writers and conservationist to receive the prestigious Winchester-Western Outdoorsman of the Year award recognizing his lifelong contributions to conservation.
Jack O’Connor passed away from heart failure on January 20, 1977, aboard the SS Mariposa on its return to California from a Hawaiian cruise. He was just two days shy of his 76th birthday.
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