Ruger's powerhouse .454 Alaskan: a Pert-near perfect packin' pistol

Guns Magazine, Oct, 2005 by John Taffin

I fired my first sixgun, a top-break .22 Harrington & Richardson double action revolver, in 1948. Over many joyous summer days spent on my uncle's Homerville farm we were often rewarded after hard days work with the .22 plinking session. As far as I knew the .22, be it in rifle or pistol, was the caliber of the common man. It seemed every farmer in the area had two firearms, a .22 rifle and a shotgun. I was privileged to have an uncle taking it one step further with the .22 pistol. When I was old enough to buy my own firearms it was only natural for the first purchases to be a Marlin Mountie and a Ruger Single-Six, both .22s. In those days money was not all that easy to come by and .22s simply made good sense to everyone.

Ultimate Power

From time to time "rich" shooters would be encountered who actually had .38 Special revolvers and .45 Automatic pistols. I was in awe of anyone who had enough money to actually buy a box of ammunition costing so much more than the 50 rounds of inexpensive .22s. Then there were the really rich he-men actually owning and shooting .357 Magnum revolvers. Only the rich, the robust, and the FBI dared venture into the realm of the overly powerful .357 Magnum. Remember this was in the days before I discovered Elmer Keith and the only information I could gather on handguns was from Pete Kuhlhoff, gun editor of Argosy magazine and Lucian Cary in a similar post at True, The Man's Magazine. The term man's magazine had a much different connotation in the early 1950s than it does today.

I well remember the stern warnings from Cary about even thinking about actually buying and shooting a .357 Magnum. It just seems like yesterday I read his words of wisdom. "The most widely publicized achievement of Smith & Wesson is their .357 Magnum revolver. The .357 cartridge is the most powerful one ever made commercially for a revolver. Measured in foot-pounds of energy it is more than twice as powerful as the .45 caliber army automatic ... Nevertheless, I do not want a .357 Magnum. The gun is necessarily heavy having too much recoil and too much muzzle blast to score with at the target" (Lucian Cary, 1952). Actually it was yesterday as I looked up this old article in my file of old Fawcett books and remembered once again how Cary scared me away from the .357. Of course, I was too young to buy one anyway.

Real Ultimate Power

In spite of Cary's warning, when I first saw a picture of the Ruger .357 Blackhawk, I had to have one, and I ventured into the frightening realm of the .357 Magnum shortly after my 17th birthday. It was absolutely awesome to my then relative inexperience, and when the .44 Magnum started showing up about a year later it was definitely everything Cary had said about the .357 Magnum.

Anyone with any sense knew we had not only reached the peak of sixgun power, we had actually gone over it. It was very common in the late 1950s to find "used" .44 Magnums fired only six times or less. If the .357 Magnum was too much for mere mortals in just what category did that place the .44 Magnum? As a budding big-bore sixgunner I had to have one, of course, even if I couldn't handle it. The first one I ever fired was the 4" Smith & Wesson and the recoil and muzzle blast was so much more than I cared to experience, I purchased the 6 1/2" Ruger Blackhawk .44 instead. The muzzle blast was less but the recoil was even worse.

To conquer the .44 Magnum we all had a lot of learning to do and learn we did. In the process, we knew there was no way we would ever have a more powerful revolver than the .44 Magnum. Even as late as the early 1990s when I visited Bill Ruger he shared the same basic sentiment and saw no reason for chambering anything more powerful in a revolver.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, revolvers became more and more powerful beginning with the .454 Casull from Freedom Arms and custom revolvers chambered in the wildcat .475 and .500 Linebaughs. Now the barn doors have been thrown completely open and the horses are running wild. The .475 Linebaugh is now a factory cartridge and chambering. Smith & Wesson brought out the large X-frame .500 S&W Magnum and .460 Extreme. At the same time, S&W's line of lightweight Magnums would have seen them locked up for insanity a half-century ago. So in addition to having more powerful revolvers, we also have very light sixguns thanks to the use of titanium and scandium. What would Lucian Cary say today?

Tougher DA

For years, the fact single-action sixguns were simply stronger than double-action revolvers was accepted. That is until Ruger entered the big-bore, double-action market with the .44 Magnum Redhawk in 1979. Now suddenly we had a double action at least equal in strength to any single-action revolver then offered. Most shooters consider the Redhawk stronger than the Super Blackhawk. The Redhawk was the first factory produced double action to lock the cylinder both at the back and front of the frame since the demise of the Smith & Wesson Triple-Lock in 1915.