Click here to download the catalog as a PDF file. To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. a HalF century WitH sixguns The .44 Magnum. he year was 1955. Ike was in the White House, Elvis was in T Heartbreak Hotel, and I was in the beginning of my last year of high school. That same year, Elmer Keith’s monumental work, Sixguns appeared, and little did Keith know he was about to have great material for a supplement. Beginning in the late 1920s Keith started writing about the heavily loaded .44 Special as the best sixgun cartridge available. He tried over and over again to get ammunition manufacturers to bring out his 250-grain, 1,200 fps .44 Special Load but no one would listen. They were afraid of the strength of some of the older guns, so he took a different tack and asked them to lengthen the case, call it a .44 Special Magnum, and even bring out a new sixgun. Keith did not think anyone was listening, however they were and in the early 1950s Smith & Wesson started collaborating with Remington on the gun and ammunition. In the closing days of December 1955 Elmer Keith received a phone call to let him know he would get one of the first three new Smith & Wesson .44 Magnums. You can well imagine he was ecstatic! When he got his first Smith & Wesson 6-1/2" .44 Magnum he quickly discovered he had gotten much more than he had asked for. Instead of 1,200 fps, the first factory loads were over 1,500 fps. He felt the loads were too heavy and the bullets were too soft. So he came up with what will forever be known as the Keith .44 Magnum Load consisting of his 429421 bullet cast 1:16 tin and lead loaded over 22 grains of 2400. This load was much more to his liking as he said it had less pressure, less tendency to leading, and about 1,400 fps velocity. When he reported on the new .44 Magnum he said it did not kick as bad as .38 Specials in the S&W Chief’s Special. Wanted No Part Major Julian Hatcher of the NRA staff also got one of the first three .44 Magnums and his perception was much different than Keith’s saying shooting it was much like getting smacked in the palm of the hand by a baseball bat. My introduction to the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum was more in line with Hatcher’s except even more so. By now it is late 1956. One of the local gunshop/outdoor shooting ranges had one of the first of the 4" .44 Magnums and rented it out to anyone brave enough to try it. Teenagers, of course, will normally try anything so my friends and I went to Shell’s Gun & Archery Farm on a Saturday afternoon and we each paid the freight to shoot six rounds. Every one of us shot and every one of us lied and said: “That’s not bad!” Well, actually we didn’t lie; it wasn’t bad, it was awful. I decided right then and there I wanted no part of the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. A short while later Shell’s received one of the first 6-1/2" .44 Magnums from Ruger. It carried a $96 price tag and right next to it in the case was an older .45 Colt SAA engraved and fitted with adjustable sights for only $150. Over the years I’ve wished many times I had purchased that Colt, but the extra $54 was awfully hard to come by, so I bought the Ruger. This time shooting it would be different! It was worse. When I fired the first round that Blackhawk recoiled upwards and the hammer took a chunk of skin out of the back of my hand. For the next couple years the Ruger hung on pegs in my bedroom until I decided it needed to be conquered, but I still had an awfully lot to learn. The barrel was first cut back to 4-5/8" and was used for many years until I needed that barrel for a .44 Special project so I sent it back to Ruger and had it rebarreled to 7-1/2". Now Wants More I finally added a 6-1/2" S&W .44 Magnum, as well as the 4" version and also a Ruger Super Blackhawk to my shooting collection. The first article I ever wrote appeared in 1967 and it was about shooting these four .44 Magnums. The addition of custom grips helped me to handle them as I still stayed with the continued on page 89 History repeats itself! fifty years separate this 50th Anniversary S&W Model 29 from the pre-29. Custom stocks are by eagle grips and roy fishpaw. 90 WWW.GUNSMAGAZINE.COM • DECEMBER 2009