By Joel Kolander
Legends deserve remembrance. Plain and simple. Anything less is to accept the gifts they’ve given and spit in their face.
Some legends are well secured, their names recited like books of the New Testament: Corbett, Selous, Ruark and Bell. Others lack such reverential treatment, and require attention lest they share the fate of mighty Ozymandias. Such is the case of John Buhmiller.
His life begins humbly in Indiana. 1892. He lived in various spots around the country, but landed in Montana where he worked as a telegraph operator for the Great Northern Railroad. For a man said to have been long fascinated with hunters, naturalists and explorers, reading the likes of Chauncey Stigand, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Baldwin and others, he led a surprisingly placid life filled with “dits” and “dahs.”
John Buhmiller — Competitive Shooter
This was likely only possible by filling his off-hours with competitive shooting, making the Montana State Rifle Team in 1914, and by 1931 shooting in the 1,000-yard Wimbledon Match at Camp Perry. The next year he joined forces with a fellow shooter, began making gun barrels, and changed his life forever.
Buhmiller’s barrels were good. Damn good. It wasn’t long before his precision rifle barrels were requested by the era’s biggest sportsmen, such as Elmer Keith, PO Ackley, and Jack O’Connor, and his name could be found in national gun magazines. He became so well known that in 1954 he received a letter from a farmer in Tanganyika (today Tanzania) named G. C. Thom. The Englishman wrote asking if Buhmiller would help eliminate pest elephants and Cape buffalo that were razing hundreds of acres of crops. Thom couldn’t pay him, nor afford any product of Buhmiller’s work appropriate for elephants, but could offer him free room and board.
Buhmiller closed his shop.
At 62 years old, he was bound for eastern Africa. For anyone whose blood pumps when reading the great African hunters, it’s an arrangement dropped straight from Heaven. Though for Buhmiller, the trip would serve double duty. After all, he was famous for precision — and a man who had experimented with custom cartridges since his competitive shooting days. Africa would be a perfect proving ground for his big-bore cartridge designs and his own custom rifles that fired them.
He was allowed to buy two elephant permits for $490 and filled them quickly, yet a surplus of elephants remained. In a stroke of genius, Buhmiller then offered to work unpaid for the Tanganyika Game Department. He would receive no pay, nor ivory, but would stay for a few months to bring down the elephant numbers and drive them from the area.
If the words, “That lucky sonofagun,” have crossed your mind, you are in good company.
Buhmiller’s Africa
Buhmiller made eight or nine nearly annual return trips to Africa from 1955-1964, several months at a time, all the while managing wildlife numbers, testing cartridge loads, experimenting with calibers, designing new bullets, and finding which actions performed best with the multitude combinations thereof.
In that time, his totals of game taken are almost inconceivable today. 183 elephants, 71 Cape buffalo, 18 rhino, 41 zebra, 32 gnu, 35 baboons, 33 impala, 23 warthogs, nine hyenas, six waterbuck, five eland, four wild dogs, one giraffe, and a hippo.
Not bad for a barely 5-foot, 127-pound seventy-year-old.
But the most impressive parts of “Uncle John’s” life aren’t his game totals, his age, or his uncanny ability to fall out of the good luck tree and hit every branch on the way down.
For one, most of Buhmiller’s hunts were nearly always solo. At age 62 and beyond, he was his own PH, tracker, and gun bearer, facing down Tembo and Mbogo both in the jungles and the plains at distances frequently measured in feet, not yards.
As mentioned earlier, John was a wildcatter, but his experimentation went far beyond that. He wasn’t just interested in achieving maximum potential, power, and velocity of a cartridge. He wasn’t just pushing limits. He was testing for maximum efficacy in the field — real world experiments with six-ton subjects and very immediate feedback.
His research still affects hunters today, especially those looking for serious stopping power. Buhmiller experimented with bullet shape to avoid total pass-through, create larger wound channels, and penetrate through bone. He tested cup point solids, bonded cores, wad cutter solids, as well as monolithic, lathe-turned solids made from copper and silver nickel — a full 25 years before turned, bronze solids hit the commercial market.
Buhmiller’s .458 Win Mag Rifle
This October, Uncle John’s .458 Win Mag comes to auction. The Mauser 98 action rests in a sturdy wood stock bookended by recoil pad and muzzle break to help tame recoil. It’s a heavy gun, but necessarily so, and never unwieldy. The diamond-shaped wood insets, pistol grip and cheek piece all lend a production gun feel to Buhmiller’s creation.
More importantly, this rifle is accompanied by an extensive archive of Buhmiller’s life. There are his competitive shooting medals, newspaper clippings, magazine articles he wrote or were written about him, but also the much more intimate. His passports, his seven personal journals detailing his hunting trips, patent documents, photo albums, and perhaps most impressively, thousands of feet of 16mm footage from his hunts both in Africa and the American West.
The quotes from his hunting journals alone give Uncle John a place of high respect, and his mentions of the .458 Win Mag are almost daily, as are the details the game taken with this exact rifle. It wasn’t just along for the ride, it was there to work.
While we can all safely hope this gun ends up with a doting collector for preservation (or another adventure), it should be a greater aspiration for said collector to provide these materials to a willing author ready to pen Buhmiller’s long overdue and deserved biography for the hunting and conservation communities…
…because legends deserve remembrance. Pulvis et umbra sumus.
