The revolver has always had its advocates. But for most of the 20th century, two men in particular defined what a serious sixgun should be, what it should chamber, how it should be carried, and why it mattered. Elmer Keith and Skeeter Skelton never shared a shop bench. What they shared was a platform, a philosophy, and a combined readership of hundreds of thousands of shooters who took their opinions as seriously as any factory specification. Between them, they generated more demand for custom revolver work than any gunsmith could have created on his own.
Elmer Keith: The Experimenter Who Wouldn't Stop
Keith was born in Missouri in 1899 and grew up in Montana, learning to shoot from Civil War veterans and frontier lawmen while ranching and guiding in Idaho and Oregon. From the beginning, his core argument was the same: the guns and cartridges the industry was offering weren't powerful enough.
His method was direct and, by modern standards, operating well beyond what would be considered safe: take an existing cartridge, handload it past accepted limits in a heavy-frame revolver, document what happened, and push manufacturers to commercialize the result. The .357 Magnum arrived in 1935, developed in collaboration with Smith & Wesson and Winchester after Keith had spent years driving .38 Special loads to pressures the factory wouldn't sanction. The .44 Magnum followed in 1956, born from the same process applied to the .44 Special. The .41 Magnum came in 1964.
Keith was credited as "the father of big bore handgunning" — not because he invented the revolver, but because he refused to accept what the industry said it could do.
His 1955 book Sixguns remains in print and in use. He also developed the Keith-style semi-wadcutter bullet, a design still in production and still used for both hunting and defense. For any smith who works on revolvers, Keith's cartridge development work is the foundation under the chamber specifications they're cutting.
Skeeter Skelton: The Lawman Who Could Write
Skelton was born in Hereford, Texas, in 1928. He spent his career in law enforcement — city patrolman, Border Patrol, sheriff of Deaf Smith County, DEA special agent — carrying and shooting revolvers in the field, not on the range. By 1967 he was handgun editor at Shooting Times, a position he held for more than twenty years.
What Skelton had that almost no other gunwriter possessed was the ability to make a reader feel like they were sitting across a fire from an old friend. His monthly column, "Hipshots," ran practical advice alongside borderland stories and the kind of opinion that only comes from a man who has actually had to depend on the tool he's writing about. He never wrote a book in his lifetime. The two posthumous collections of his columns command premium prices today.
Keith lit the sixgunning fire. Skelton fanned the flames. Together they defined what every serious revolver builder was going to be asked to produce for a generation.
Skelton's preferences translated directly into shop work. His love of the .44 Special — specifically a 250-grain Keith bullet over 7.5 grains of Unique, widely known as "Skeeter's .44 Special load" — drove demand for .44 Special cylinder conversions for years. His grip design — a modification of Walter Roper's S&W stocks, narrowed to fit his hand — became so widely reproduced that they are still sold today as Skeeter Skelton Stocks.
What Writing Does to a Trade
The Keith-Skelton pairing is among the clearest examples in firearms history of what editorial opinion does to a craft. Their combined output created a specification — in the minds of hundreds of thousands of readers — for what a serious working revolver should be. Heavy frame. Big bore. Properly fitted grips. Action work that eliminated slack and stacking. A finish that could take field use.
Custom revolver shops that flourished in the 1960s through the 1980s were, in large part, fulfilling orders generated by what these two men wrote. Customers walked in quoting Keith on bullet weight. They walked in asking for something that handled like what Skelton described in last month's column.
A gunwriter who tells a reader what the ideal sixgun should feel like has just written the shop's order queue. Keith and Skelton did that for thirty years running.
- Know your customer's reference point before you quote. A customer who walks in asking for a "Keith-style" build is asking for something specific — heavy-frame, large bore, properly fitted grips, action work oriented toward field use. A customer quoting Skelton on a .44 Special wants elegance and restraint, not maximum power. The writers shaped the vocabulary your customers use. Understanding that vocabulary prevents misaligned builds.
- Action work on revolvers is largely about eliminating stacking. Keith and Skelton both wrote about what a good double-action trigger should feel like. That remains the core of revolver action work: geometry of the hand, trigger return spring weight, cylinder bolt timing. Get those right before touching the mainspring.
- Cylinder-to-barrel gap and throat dimensions are where revolver accuracy lives. Keith's load development exposed the relationship between chamber and bore dimensions years before most smiths were paying attention. When a customer brings in an accurate revolver that shoots inconsistently, measure the cylinder throats before assuming anything else is wrong.