- Rifles, Chapter 7, page 83 -

Oddly, except for such occasional bouts of rhetorical excess on Elmer’s part, both O’Connor and Keith wrote far more sense than nonsense. They did take occasional potshots at each other (without mentioning names), but this might just have been good business. In his outspoken, posthumous The Last Book (Amwell Press), O’Connor wryly calls Elmer “more knave than fool.” Their “followers” could occasionally get carried away. O’Connor’s fans were likely to sneer condescendingly at Elmer’s style, but Elmer’s fans…well, here’s another quote from The Last Book, from the chapter “Big Bore Boys”:

“… users of big bores always attack the users of small bores…The big bore boys also feel that anyone who doesn’t enjoy getting belted out from under his hat by a hard-kicking rifle is not very masculine, if not actually gay.”

O’Connor’s writing was incomparably more elegant than Elmer’s, though he wrote so many books, it could become repetitive. He also wrote a memoir, Horse and Buggy Days, and two novels, Boomtown (made into a movie starring Clark Gable) and Conquest. Elmer wrote an autobiography, first called simply Keith, then released in an expanded version more aptly titled Hell, I was There! It is exuberant and utterly outspoken, something O’Connor never achieved until The Last Book.

O’Connor never stopped growing intellectually – in his introduction to the 1984 Amwell reprint to his classic Derrydale Game in the Desert, he could apologize for his anti-mountain lion (“I for one will not regret their passing”) attitude of the thirties, while Elmer advocated shooting predators, including eagles and hawks, until the end of his life.

And yet, and yet…without in any way running down O’Connor – who was the one I grew up on, and whose style is closer to my own – I find that the older, more experienced, and just possibly more Western I get, the more I appreciate Elmer. Part of it is simply getting to know the kind of blunt, honest, plain-spoken Westerners (“Hell, I was there”) that he was; part is meeting some of the many fine hunters and writers he befriended in their youth. But part is a sort of ballistic sophistication, the recognition that, day-in, day-out, if you hunt a lot, a big, slow bullet will probably work more consistently than a small, fast one. If you can handle it, it will work better than anything. Remember, Elmer was alleged to have asked about a “too-large” caliber: “You mean it’ll kill too dead?”

Call this the neo-Keithian school if you will; present day proponents include Ross Seyfried, who may have shot more legitimate game than anyone in our generation and who is as sophisticated as O’Connor; and Sports Afield’s Tom McIntyre, as elegant a prose stylist as exists in sporting letters, who states in The Way of the Hunter that, “I am more of a Keithian than an O’Connorite.”

Think of Elmer as a straight shot of sour-mash bourbon and O’Connor as silky-smooth Irish whiskey, and you’ll have it about right. Both writers ended up in Idaho’s Snake River Country, and by most accounts they got along. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see them together in some hunter’s Valhalla, still deafening each other with shots of their happy conflict.


So what does this have to do with whether caliber matters? Quite a bit, at least …