Elmer Keith’s #5 is a 10!
Part 1 of 4
Keith’s original No. 5 S.A. compared to the TLA Improved Number Five.
On the Fourth of July in 1925, a young cowboy decided to celebrate the day by firing his Colt .45 Single Action. He was using black powder loads; however, the bullets were oversized and he had ground the black powder to finer granules. The top half of the cylinder and the top strap parted company from that old Colt. This not only caused him to switch from the .45 to the .44 Special, but it also started a writing career that would span six decades.
Elmer Keith (right) and Harold Croft, Durkee, Oregon, 1928.
Special Delivery
From the late 1920s until 1955, Elmer Keith continually promoted the .44 Special as the ideal sixgun cartridge using his personally designed #429421 Keith bullet weighing in at 250 grains with a muzzle velocity of 1,200 fps using Hercules #2400. Over the years, Keith featured his sixguns in his articles, and as a teenager, I purchased a copy of Sixguns By Keith, subsequently spending many hours carefully studying the pictures of his many custom sixguns. After I met Keith for the first time, he supplied me with a list of all of his old sixgun articles from the American Rifleman and I was able to add all of those to my file.
Keith was just a young cowboy trying to survive on his own little ranch but he was also, as he called it, a “gun crank” and as such not being satisfied with stock factory sixguns, he enlisted the help of some of the top gunsmiths and engravers in the country to customize his sixguns. On page 103 of Keith’s classic Sixguns, one finds a picture of four beautiful Colt Single Actions, all of which I have been privileged to handle. Most of his .44 Specials and .44 Magnums as well as his rifles and trophy animals are part of the Keith Collection displayed at the Boise, Idaho, Cabela’s Elmer Keith Museum. It is worth the trip just to see Keith’s No. 5 S.A. as he called it
Keith’s four Colt Single Action .44 Specials were a King short action job, 7 ½” barrel; an original, one of a kind 7 ½” Flat-Top Target; a custom 5 ½” Flat-Top Target with a Keith-designed folding three leaf rear sight; and the No. 5 S.A. Colt, an extensively customized 5 ½” Flat-Top Target Model with a special grip made by combining a Bisley backstrap and Colt SA trigger guard.
John notes, “Every true sixgunner easily recognizes Elmer Keith’s hat and .44 Special No. 5 S.A.”
The Rundown
Colt #1 was an obvious favorite as it shows much use. This short-action 7 ½” .44 Special has ivory grips with a steer head carved on the right grip, a wide hammer, a Smith & Wesson type rear sight, a front sight held on by a barrel band and even though it shows extensive blue wear, it is still quite tight.
Colt #2 has been kept as original since it is the only .44 Special Colt SA Flat-Top Target Model to ever leave the Hartford factory. Its finish is all blue with “eagle-style” hard rubber grips. It also shows much use. Colt #3 is another 5 ½” Flat-Top Target single action made up by Neal Houchins with special one-piece rosewood grips made by Pachmayr. This was Keith’s long-range sixgun as it has a folding rear sight with three different blades for different ranges and it also has a dull blue finish so it would not reflect sunlight.
The 4th Keith Colt came about because one man was skeptical, and it was subsequently written up as “The Last Word” in the April 1929 issue of the American Rifleman. The title for the article comes from the fact that this revolver was designed as the epitome of the single action sixgun. Every possible improvement was incorporated in The Last Word sixgun; Keith tried to interest Colt in making it a factory-offered single action but to no avail.
Keith’s No. 5 S.A. in his favorite #120 Lawrence holster.
Number Five Alive
The seeds for Keith’s #5 were planted by another gun crank, one Harold Croft of Philadelphia. In the late 1920s, Croft had packed a suitcase full of sixguns and took the train all the way across the country to Elmer Keith’s small ranch in Durkee, Oregon. Today that trip would take a few hours of actual flight time; in those pre-Depression days it took several days.
Croft made his long trek because he was curious and skeptical and his friends were also skeptical. Keith had been writing about long-range shooting at several hundred yards with a sixgun; Croft wanted to see it for himself. In his book Sixguns, Keith says: “He brought a suitcase full of good sixguns, mostly .44 Special or .45 Colt caliber and asked me to demonstrate some of the long-range shooting I had been writing about. Seven hundred yards across a dry, dusty field I had a target four feet square. By lying on my back with my saddle used for a head and shoulder rest, and shooting with both hands held between my drawn up knees, I proceeded to lob slugs on that target. I hit it with every gun he brought along before the gun was empty except a 2″-barreled .45 single action slip gun with a Newman hammer. It required 11 shots to find the target with that short-barreled gun…. With the good .44 Special and .45 Colt guns with barrels of four to 7 ½”, it was no trouble to find the target in a shot or two, and with some I hit the four-foot target with three out of five shots. Croft was soon convinced I had been writing facts and not fiction, but was very skeptical before the shooting started. We experimented most of the month and during that time I designed the first of my line of Ideal Keith bullets in caliber .44 Special Ideal #429421.”
Harold Croft had a lot to learn. However, he also had a lot to teach to Elmer Keith. At the time Croft was having lightweight pocket pistols built on Single Action and Bisley platforms while Keith was more interested in full-sized single actions for long-range shooting and everyday packing. Croft’s ideas for perfect sixguns had been turned into reality by Sedgley and Houchins, two well-known gunsmiths of the time. With the former doing all the frame work and the latter doing sights, stocks and action work. Croft took four Featherweight .45 Colts, with numbers M1 and M3 on Single Action frames while M2 and M4 started out as Bisley models, to Durkee. To produce the Featherweights, the recoil shield was hollowed out, the ejector rod was removed, the frame narrowed down in front of the trigger guard, and the loading gate hollowed out. The frames were also flat-topped and fitted with adjustable sights. All of the Croft Featherweights weighed between 30 and 32 oz. and were written up by Keith in the American Rifleman in 1928.
Next month — Number Five Takes Shape.
