Smith & Wesson's 50th Anniversary Model 29: S&W set the bar for magnum handgun performance 50 years ago

Guns Magazine, August, 2006 by John Taffin

After he blew the topstrap and cylinder of an old .45 Colt SAA by grinding the black powder into finer granules and putting all he could into the .45 case, Elmer Keith "discovered" the .44 Special, which had been around for 20 years even though he had never seen one, and quickly unlocked its potential. He eventually settled on a load of 18.5 grains of Hercules 2400 under the Keith-designed Lyman No. 429421 250-grain hard-cast bullet in the era's larger-capacity balloon-head .44 Special brass. In duplicating this load in balloon-head brass, I found the muzzle velocity to be just over 1,200 feet per second from a 7 1/2" barrel. When newer solid-head brass arrived in the 1950s, his load was dropped to 17 to 17.5 grains. Keith spent 30 years asking ammunition companies to offer a .44 Special load with a 250-grain bullet at 1,200 fps. He finally got what he asked for, and more, in the new .44 Magnum with a 240-grain bullet at 1,450 fps.

Keith Made It Work

Keith retired his .44 Specials in favor of the new cartridge, carrying a 4" Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum daily until his incapacitating stroke in 1981. While he was happy with the new sixgun and the concept, the actual ammunition offered by Remington left something to be desired. The Lubaloy bullets were too soft resulting in barrel leading and Keith felt the pressures were much higher than they should have been. He soon found a better load, which soon became such a standard it was simply known as the Keith Load--his Lyman No. 429421 hard cast 250-grain bullet over 22 grains of No. 2400 over standard primers. Be informed--it takes about 6 percent less of today's Alliant No. 2400 to produce the same results Keith's load did in 1956. Despite ever more powerful cartridges, such as the .454, .475, and .500, this remains a very powerful load and recoil in a 4" .44 Magnum has not been diminished in any way, shape or form.

Originally, Smith & Wesson 1950 Target .44 Specials were assembled with specially heat-treated cylinders and frames, prototypes of the new .44 Magnum. The 1950 Target with a 6 1/2" barrel weighed only 39 ounces resulting in excessive recoil--to the shooter, not the gun. Weight was added by using a bull barrel and full-length cylinder filling most of the flame window. The weight of the final production 6 1/2" .44 Magnum was 48 ounces or an even three pounds.

The .44 Magnum Is Born

The early Smith & Wesson .44 Magnums were beauty personified. Not only did they carry a beautiful finish known in those days as S&W Bright Blue, they also came very close to, perhaps even equaled, the precision fitting of the 1907 Triple-Lock. The new .44 Smith & Wesson, superbly finished with a magnificently smooth action and trigger pull, sold for $140. As a teenager I was making $15 a week with a paper route and could only dream of great sixguns. I graduated from high school and moved up to big money--90 cents an hour--and it was time to start buying my own sixguns.

One of the first .44 Magnum 4" models to hit my part of the country was rented out by a local gun store/outdoor shooting range. Three of us teenagers stepped forward to shoot, and although the recoil was absolutely awful, none of us would admit it and definitely not to each other.

Lace Panties?

Those first .44 Magnums appropriately resided in fitted wooden cases. Guides and outfitters traded in their .357s for the new .44 and a few handgun hunters began using the Smith & Wesson very successfully. However, soon gun stores had used .44 Magnums for sale with a box of cartridges holding six empties and 44 .44s still intact. One cylinder full was all it usually took for many a shooter to realize this was more pain than desirable. Remember, this was the 1950s when heavy handgun recoil was represented by the 1911 .45 ACP and relatively heavy .357 Magnum. There were no hard-kickin' handguns until the .44 Magnum arrived. A well-respected writer of the time, Major Hatcher of the NRA Staff, likened the recoil of the .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson to being hit in the palm of the hand with a baseball bat. Keith said it was not as bad as shooting a 2" Chief's Special .38, while Col. Askins, always the pot stirrer, countered with anyone who could not handle the recoil should wear lace panties.

Unreal Demand Becomes Real

Only the most serious shooters chose the S&W .44 Magnum before the arrival of Dirty Harry. Clint Eastwood's famous character, whose exploits began in the early 1970s, created an unreal demand for the .44 Magnum not satisfied no matter how much Smith & Wesson increased production. Suddenly .44 Magnums, which had been selling less than retail, were going for double retail and more. The demand created by the movies was unreal and destined to wear itself out, but a real demand was created by two sixgunning activities which really took off in the late 1970s, namely handgun hunting and long-range silhouetting.

With the rise of handgun hunting and heavier sixguns, the reloading of the .44 Magnum changed dramatically. The old standard Keith load had been his 250-grain hard-cast semiwadcutter bullet over 22 grains of No, 2400 was, and remains an excellent hunting load. But as bigger and bigger game, including elephant and Cape buffalo were hunted with the .44 Magnum, the standard hunting load became a hard-cast 300- or 320-grain bullet at 1,300 to 1,400 fps.