By 1971, Jack’s hunting career had spanned four decades and he had hunted big game all over the world. Although he had hunted his beloved Coues deer in the Southwest since boyhood, he had yet to take a nice “Northern” whitetail. In October of that year, while hunting with his good friend Dave Christensen -- an outfitter/rancher based out of Riggins, Idaho, near the Salmon River -- Jack downed this outstanding 11-pointer with a pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 Featherweight .270.

Most folks with an intimate acquaintance with American gun and hunting literature would agree that among 20th century sporting scribes, Jack O’Connor was without peer in those fields. Prolific, knowledgeable, opinionated in a fashion beloved by legions of readers, adamant in his refusal to be an industry shill, and a skilled wordsmith, the college English professor turned writer was and continues to be something of an icon.

When Jack’s name is mentioned, those familiar with the outline of his career normally think of his great love for .270-caliber rifles, sheep hunting, safaris and shikaris to exotic locales in Asia and Africa, or wide-ranging technical expertise as a self-confessed gun crank.

Yet he was also an avid lifelong whitetail hunter. In one of his earliest stories for Outdoor Life, “What, No Whitetails?” Jack wrote about his grand love affair with the diminutive desert whitetail that seems to be styled “O’Connor’s deer” about as often as it is called a Coues deer.

“If I had to pick the American big game animal that has given me more real pleasure than any other, I think I’d choose the Arizona whitetail,” he wrote. “I like the big mule deer, the majestic elk, the great, brown mountain sheep, the gaudy antelope; but for real, deep-seated thrills, little Odocoileus couesi is my favorite. The flash of his big, white fan, the sight of his small, compact antlers, his sleek, gray body scurrying through the brush -- well, they give me, more than any other animal, those moments of high ecstasy which make a man a sportsman.”

Interestingly, for all his many encounters with Coues deer (he wrote dozens of feature stories revolving around the subspecies, with one of his pieces that appeared in numerous anthologies, “We Shot the Tamales,” being among them), Jack did not hunt what he styled “northern whitetails” until quite late in his career. In fact, in today’s hunting world, one in which whitetails have become commonplace over much of the country, it seems remarkable that it was not until the February 1972 issue of Outdoor Life, only a few years before his death in 1978 and just two days short of his 76th birthday, that he wrote his first story on the animal. Ironically, it was about a buck killed in his home stomping grounds, Idaho’s Salmon River, while hunting with his wife, Eleanor, and son Brad.

“Until recently,” he wrote, “the northern whitetail was to me as strange a trophy as the greater kudu, the desert bighorn, and the ibex are to most hunters...The northern whitetail had always eluded me.”

It might be more accurate to say the whitetail had ignored him in person, because such was not the case in print. He mentions whitetails, and not just Coues deer, fairly frequently in his books and articles. For example, there is a chapter on whitetails in Hunting in the Rockies (1947), as well as in his impressive coffee-table-sized book, The Big Game Animals of North America (1961).

Primarily, though, Jack O’Connor was a Coues deer hunter. That was only natural. His birthplace and his sporting roots were in Arizona. He was born on Jan. 22, 1902, in Nogales, a decade before Arizona became a state. His was in some ways an idyllic childhood, thanks to his maternal grandfather, James Wiley Woolf, who was a serious hunter and Jack’s sporting mentor. Sadly, when Jack was only 13 he lost his grandfather (one cannot escape the comparison with Robert Ruark of The Old Man and the Boy fame, who lost his grandfather at the age of 15), and from that point forward he was without a sporting compass.

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