A 1911 that was Elmer Keith's

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There it is, many of you know what this is, its public record what I paid. I'm 34 this year and the chance to own a weirdly historical gun of Keith's like this is worth all the financial distress it put me through. Mock me if you will, but I've always been a bit too responsible with money, I figure I'm allowed one seriously dumb financial decision in my life right?


Lets step through it starting with what the gun itself started life as.

"A Noted 1911 Expert (a little joke said:
When Colt won the contract to supply pistols to the US government, the agreed upon price was approximately $14 a pistol. The government (as it always does) thought it could produce the pistols faster and cheaper than Colt. So written into the contract was that Colt would allow the US Government to start co-producing the pistol after a certain number had been supplied by Colt. It instructed Colt to deliver blueprints and tooling to the national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts.

...
Springfield thought it could do it better, faster, and cheaper than Colt. It actually took a couple of years for Springfield to get production going. But after it did, it turned out that the government arsenal could neither make them faster, nor cheaper than Colt. In fact, 1911 pistols manufactured by Springfield were over 30% more expensive. To make matters worse, the parts from a Springfield 1911 could not reliably interchange with parts from a Colt.

Springfield made the pistol from 1914 until about 1917, when the US entry into WW1 forced Springfield to focus on making the Springfield 1903 rifle.

...
Around this time (before and after WW1), the "National Matches" were gaining in popularity. One of the most popular categories was the "service category" in which competitors used the pistols and rifles of the armed services. In other words 1911 pistols and 1903 rifles. But Colt had a hard time keeping up with its military orders, so there were very few commercial 1911 models available. The NRA worked with the government to make available 1911 pistols from the government arsenal. Pistols sold through this program were marked "NRA" to signify that they were not stolen from the government.
Click to expand...

Why does the NRA bit here matter? Really good question considering my gun does not appear to have the NRA stamp:



Could be that the reblue removed it, I'm not sure.

If we consult Elmer's 1974 guns.xls on the subject:

pKCXrna.jpg


The subject of the NRA is not mentioned, however, in his other writing he does mention it, for example in this 1969 article about how the automatic is here to stay:

Elmer Keith said:
I have Captain W.R. Strong's old Springfield Armory Model 1911 that he bought through the NRA for the sum of $14.25 before World War 1. Bill, a brother of General George V. Strong, head of the G-2 during World War II, carried that gun through the Chateau Thierry fight. He told me he used seven clips in that fight and did not think he missed a shot as the Germans were coming over the parapet at point-blank range. I modernized the old gun with better, higher sights, short trigger, arched housing, and a long grip-safety spur and it is still a very good .45 Auto.
Click to expand...

Seven clips huh? My first inclination is to chalk that up to a bit of a tall tale, but then again this was The Great War and a reliable 1911 in the hands of a good shooter is not liable to miss at those ranges as he mentions.

So who was this Captain Bill Strong anyway?



That's him and Elmer on the trip Bill died as the captain mentions. It's from this October 15th 1926 piece that Elmer wrote (and looks to have won $200 in doing so) on hunting accidents.






The interesting thing when reading this account later from "Hell, I was there" and his explanation to Bill's brother George which can be found in Letters from Elmer Keith (p. 32), the whole event takes on a very sinister tone. The letter in particular is filled with foreshadowing about uneasy feelings and bad luck.

I think this bit is important for this box thread:

Elmer Keith said:
The trips and its trajedy are one of the blackest pages in my life and had I known at the what was to follow, am afraid I and Will's body would have been all that would ever have come out of the So. Fork that fall. Though I may be wrong, have never been able to reconcile mysel on the accident angle, especially after what followed.
Click to expand...

If you get a chance it's worth doing a bit of reading on the subject, basically Keith thought that there was a conspiracy to murder Strong and that it wasn't an accident. This stuff reads like he played the whole thing in his mind over and over and everything took on a more and more sinister tone as the years passed. For this thread what I think is important is that Bill Strong was very influential on him. Earlier in that same letter he writes:

Elmer Keith said:
Will and I were constant shooting and hunting companions for several years before he went to the Army. Though I was but a kid then he developed a likeing for me and was my constant coach and we were about as close friends as men ever get to be.
Click to expand...

From "Hell I Was There":

Elmer Keith said:
When you have to bend the body of your best friend over a pack horse and throw a diamond hitch on him, it takes a lot out of you.
Click to expand...


My future plans include trying to gather up more about Captain William Strong, see what records there are on him during the War, maybe shooting competition records given Elmer says he bought the gun through the NRA.


This was all stuff I didn't really quite understand when I bought the gun. I bought it because it was one of the few guns in that auction that I thought really reflected Elmer Keith's personality that I might be able to afford, also because of the King work done on the gun as detailed in that 1974 list of his guns. It has the mirror front sight, which I'm guessing may have been a gold bead at one time which has been lost:










On the subject of the grips, I don't really know anything yet.



As you probably noticed they have the Initials EAP, which that 1974 ledger indicates was E.A. Price of Garland City Arkansas, and a wedding gift. My cursory digging hasn't come up with anything, and honestly work is keeping me busy enough brain wise that I haven't yet started digging on the subject. As I understand it there is someone I should be talking to who can detail out all the history of the gun for me, but I haven't been given that guy's number yet. I can keep you guys posted if you are interested.


All in all the gun is everything I had hoped it would be, the trigger is a dream, and I am really looking forward to getting it out to the range to shoot it.

I haven't yet cleaned it (as you likely noticed in the pictures). I'm probably going to have to consult with a 1911 collector I know on the subject. I've never owned something like this.

As to the price, well, that's public record and I will leave you with this: Don't bid on an auction after you have flown across the country and been awake for 27 hours. You may just find yourself in a hole that you have to sell stuff to get out of.

I don't really care though, it's totally worth every penny and scrambling to figure out how to pay my credit card bill. I'll replace the money, I'd never have a chance to buy such a thing again. To me history isn't really real when I read it in books, but when I hold it in my hand that's an entirely different matter. I expect this thing will give me a lot of pleasure just accumulating the books and documents that pertain to it.
 
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Congrats on your purchase. I stopped by Poulin's and Julia's with some friends on 3/14 and saw your gun, along with many others from the Keith collection. It was a truly amazing amount of history in one place.

In fact, your pistol is one of the few that I photographed while I was there. I had assumed that pictures weren't allowed and when I saw someone posing with some guns I asked and was told that taking pictures was fine. Of course, that was just about the time we were leaving so I only got to snap a few shots. The guns was in a glass case, I had no idea the skull and cross bones was on the other side. Here is the pic I took of your gun-

20150314_104805.jpg
 
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Fascinating history and stories about a fabulous old pistol! Just simply fascinating. I love stuff like this.
 
WATCHDOG said:
Fascinating history and stories about a fabulous old pistol! Just simply fascinating. I love stuff like this.
Click to expand...

Me too. I'm kind of bummed I didn't get any of his great S&Ws, but the ones I really wanted to went to good homes from what I can figure.

In other news I was just looking the gun over again and I noticed something:

 
Hey, golly gosh. Look. Elmer Keith ALSO did not know anything about guns.

Look right there in Elmer's gun collection list, in his own hand. Captain Strong fired 7 CLIPS at Germans.

7 clips. Wow. You'd think that someone as well-known as Elmer Keith would KNOW that 1911s didn't use CLIPS. They used MAGAZINES.
 
Here is some info on E. A. Price from Timothy J. Mullins' book "Handbook Of Handguns".

He says Price was a gentleman farmer from Arkansas with an experimental turn of mind. During the 1920s Price wrote a series of articles for "American Rifleman" in which he discussed at length the value of the Colt .45.
Unfortunately, his findings only appeared in magazines, not in books, and they didn't reach as wide an audience as they could have.
 
I googled a bit, and found E A Price advertising to buy "new" Colt .45 and .25 pistols in an outdoor magazine. Not much else yet, but there will be something out there!
 
More Springfields are marked NRA than Colts. The orders went to Springfield Arsenal, and as they were still making the 1911, more often a Springfield was available for shipping when the order came in than a Colt.

Doesn't look like Elmer Keith's 45 has a Springfield magazine in it. The Springfields had the side plates brought down and folded under the floorplate. Like the Colts of the period, they had lanyard loops.
 
Alpo said:
Hey, golly gosh. Look. Elmer Keith ALSO did not know anything about guns.

Look right there in Elmer's gun collection list, in his own hand. Captain Strong fired 7 CLIPS at Germans.

7 clips. Wow. You'd think that someone as well-known as Elmer Keith would KNOW that 1911s didn't use CLIPS. They used MAGAZINES.
Click to expand...

That made me laugh, like the arguments about clip v. magazine always do. My father. who died 1-9-15, was a WWII vet. He, and the other WWII vets I've met some on my own and some thru him and his regimental reunions, never, not once, ever called the bullet holder thingy-ma-bob that goes in the bottom of a "45 automatic" (another source of fake controversy) anything other than a "clip".

So by golly, in their honor, that's what I call it.
 
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