How a Single Magazine Article Turned Sheep Hunting Into a Rich Man's Game
There is a moment in the history of American hunting when a pursuit defined by solitude, physical hardship, and a genuine love of wild places became something else entirely — a scoreboard. That moment arrived, quietly enough, in the pages of a 1949 issue of True magazine, when a New York writer named Grancel Fitz put a name to the act of collecting all four varieties of North American wild sheep. He called it a Grand Slam. In doing so, he set in motion a half-century of consequences that the great outdoors writer Jack O'Connor would later describe with unmistakable regret.
The story that captures this tension most clearly, "The Grand Slam Caper," first appeared in the January 1973 issue of Outdoor Life. It is a remarkable piece of self-examination from one of the men who helped popularize sheep hunting — a man who watched, with increasing dismay, as his beloved pursuit was hijacked by a culture of status-seeking and competitive trophy collecting. Decades later, his critique lands harder than ever.
The Birth of the Grand Slam: One Article, One Phrase, One Unintended Consequence
The term "Grand Slam" was fastened to the feat by Grancel Fitz — a New York writer, Outdoor Life contributor, advertising photographer, big wheel in the Boone and Crockett Club, trophy hunter, record compiler, and student of hunting literature. In about 1949, Fitz wrote an article called "A Grand Slam on Sheep" for True magazine, which concerned a successful hunt he had made for Dall sheep in the mountains surrounding Kusawa Lake in the Yukon.
The Grand Slam of North American Wild Sheep concept has been around since Grancel Fitz coined the phrase in 1949, and not quite a decade later, the Grand Slam Club was founded by Bob Housholder in 1956. The institutional machinery of prestige had been assembled with startling speed. What began as a writer's admiring nod to an extraordinary personal accomplishment became a formal competition, complete with record keepers, membership criteria, and, eventually, the kind of social cachet that turns a hunt into a transaction.
O'Connor was there at the beginning. One afternoon in August 1946, he was riding along the bottom of a canyon cut into the rolling tundra of northern British Columbia by a little creek named after Billy Nevis, an old trapper. With him was his outfitter, the late Frank Golata, described as the dean of the Stone-sheep guides, and beside him rode a rather plump little doctor of exactly his age, who practiced medicine in the small Illinois town of Carlyle. O'Connor was on his first hunt for Stone sheep. He didn't know it at the time, but that trip would place him among the first handful of men ever to complete what would later be called the Grand Slam.
That Nevis Canyon ram made O'Connor the fourth or fifth hunter ever to collect all four varieties of North American sheep — bighorn, desert, Stone, and Dall. At the time, he had no idea whether he was the fifth or the five hundredth, but he did know that he was fascinated by sheep and by sheep hunting. That distinction — between genuine fascination and the competitive impulse to collect — is the fault line at the center of the entire debate.
O'Connor's Inner Circle: The Early Slammers and Their World
The early history of the Grand Slam reads like a close account of a very specific American social world. O'Connor's old pal, the late N. Myles Brown — a pneumatic-tool tycoon from Cleveland, Ohio, and a beloved companion on several fine hunts — was the seventh man to complete the slam. He got his desert sheep in the Sierra del Chino in Sonora on a hunt O'Connor arranged for him.
Number eight was Herb Klein, who completed the slam with O'Connor's old friend George Parker as guide in the Sierra Blanca of western Sonora on a license O'Connor obtained through the influence of George Pasquel, a member of a noted and influential Mexico City family. The late Red Early went along on that hunt with Herb and became the number nine Grand Slammer — all of this in 1951 or 1952. These were men who moved in networks built on genuine friendship, long shared history in the mountains, and personal connections that no amount of money alone could replicate. Their slam completions were byproducts of a lifetime spent in sheep country, not the goal that organized the lifetime.
The contrast with what came after is stark. Some sheep hunters, O'Connor lamented, apparently care little for sheep and even less for sheep country. They are after glory and prestige, and the sooner they get the tiresome business of hunting over with and slap those ram heads on the wall, the better they like it. It took O'Connor well over a decade, and he enjoyed every minute of it. That sentence — the confession that he enjoyed every minute — is not incidental. It is the whole argument compressed into a single line.
Permits, Connections, and the Democratization That Never Arrived
O'Connor was unusually candid about how he obtained access in an era before drawn tags and lottery systems had codified the scarcity. Permits for desert and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep were already difficult to get, sometimes impossible. Back in his desert sheep hunting days, O'Connor could always get a special permit — he had influential Mexican friends. In Mexico, if you know the right people or have a lot of money, you can get a permit to do many things. He didn't have money, but he had friends in Mexico and at the University of Arizona who could put in a word for him.
That honesty is bracing. O'Connor's early access was built on social capital, not financial capital — a distinction that matters, but perhaps less than he would have liked. The uncomfortable implication is that exclusivity was baked into sheep hunting from the very beginning. The Grand Slam formalized it. Once the concept existed, money became the most efficient substitute for the kind of social network O'Connor had spent decades cultivating.
As shooting editor of Outdoor Life, O'Connor received many letters every year from hunters who wanted a Grand Slam. He had to discourage most of them. The feat, he wrote, becomes tougher and tougher to accomplish. Permits for desert and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep are difficult to get, sometimes impossible. The irony is that his own magazine — the platform on which he built his career and his reputation — was simultaneously fanning the flames of Grand Slam ambition with every issue it published.
When the Trophy Race Invited Criminals Into the Hills
The darkest chapter in the Grand Slam story is not the price inflation or the permit scarcity — it is what the pressure to complete a collection drove some hunters to do. The most famous example of barefaced poaching of desert sheep was revealed by what became known as the Swanson case in California. Swanson, a California taxidermist, took trophy-hungry hunters out to poach rams in the Anza-Borrego State Park and other isolated areas in the California desert. His fees were high. Swanson pleaded guilty, and he had meticulous bookkeeping records — a considerable number of hunters had their desert-sheep heads seized and paid fines.
One of Swanson's clients, who had just completed a Grand Slam, was about to receive a prestigious award given to outstanding big-game hunters. It was learned that state as well as federal authorities were going to confront him at the award ceremony. He landed in California, but he had been warned — and turned around and went back to where he had come from. That unnamed hunter's near-arrest at what was supposed to be his moment of triumph is one of the most damning vignettes in American hunting history. The status machine had ground its gears so hard that it had produced a poacher with a trophy wall and a flight itinerary.
This was not an anomaly. It was the logical endpoint of a culture that had come to value the credential over the experience. Once the four ram heads on the wall meant membership in a prestigious club, the wall became the point. The mountains became an obstacle between the hunter and his certificate.
The Modern Price Tag: A Slam Beyond Reach
The Sheep Grand Slam is the hunt that commands the most respect — and requires the most resources. Those words, written for a modern hunting audience, could have come from O'Connor's nightmares. What the Grand Slam concept promised — democratic access to an extraordinary pursuit — it has spectacularly failed to deliver.
The current price structure makes a mockery of the phrase "everyman hunter." Current market prices for guided sheep hunts list Dall's sheep in Alaska at $40,000, Rocky Mountain Bighorn in British Columbia at $65,000, Desert Bighorn in Mexico at $65,000, and Stone's sheep in British Columbia at $125,000. Add those numbers together and the guided hunt component of a full Grand Slam runs to $295,000 before a single airline ticket is booked, a single boot is resoled, or a single preference point is purchased. And those figures assume you can get an outfitter to take your call.
Some of the most reputable Stone's sheep outfitters are booked through the 2028 season, with prices compounding at roughly 10 percent annually for every year leading up to the booked date — meaning a 2029 hunt slot could cost north of $55,000 for the Dall component alone. The waiting lists are not just long; they are financially escalating while you stand in them.
One raffle operator currently values a complete all-inclusive Grand Slam package — covering Dall, Stone, Desert, and Rocky Mountain Bighorn hunts — at over $340,000. That is not a typo. That is the price of a house in much of rural America, spent on four hunts.
The cost and time commitment is immense, running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career and requiring decades of planning — the ultimate long-game goal. For most men, it is not a long game. It is simply not a game they can afford to play at all.
The Permit Lottery: Probability as a Barrier to Entry
For hunters who cannot write a six-figure check to a Canadian outfitter, the draw system offers an alternative — one whose odds are discouraging enough to be their own argument. In Texas, the 2023–2024 Desert Bighorn season drew 9,778 applicants for a single permit. The year before, there were 6,491 applicants for that one permit, up from 5,656 the season before that. The demand is growing every year while the supply of permits stays essentially fixed by biology and conservation science.
The Desert Bighorn can be tough to hunt, but the greatest obstacle is the difficulty of getting a permit — there simply aren't many available. Limited permits are available through drawing in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and a few other states, but few are allotted to non-residents. The easiest place to hunt a Desert Bighorn ram is Mexico, where hunts are operated by the government — but those hunts are very expensive. The lottery is, in theory, egalitarian. In practice, the cost of the guided hunt that follows any winning draw is prohibitive for most working hunters.
A completed Sheep Grand Slam earns membership in a very small club — fewer than 300 hunters in history have done it. O'Connor wrote, from the vantage of 1973, that Bob Housholder, keeper of the Grand Slam records, reported that over 200 people had presumably collected all four varieties of North American wild sheep. After more than five decades of additional effort by thousands of aspiring hunters, that number has barely moved. The ceiling of the possible has stayed stubbornly low.
The Everyman Who Still Dreams
None of this has extinguished the desire. Sheep fever, as it has been called for generations, does not respond to actuarial logic. There remains the everyman for whom sheep hunting is a once-in-a-lifetime hunt. He has saved and dreamed for years, and even if he wants to, he will never go on another sheep hunt. This hunter exists in every generation. He is the man for whom the original appeal of sheep hunting was actually designed — the hunter who loves the country, not the credential.
Like all sheep-hunting obsessives, O'Connor and his companions loved sheep, lofty peaks, high ridges, chill breezes, bright skies, and wild country. In those days, most American hunters could take sheep or leave them alone, and the genuine enthusiasts were members of a very small fraternity. That fraternity has since been absorbed into a much larger and noisier enterprise, one organized less around love of the animal and its terrain than around the completion of a collection.
The guides who work with these once-in-a-lifetime hunters understand the weight of what that means. Those are the hunts that bring the most pressure, one outfitter noted. "They've built the hunt up so much in their mind. Then if the weather is bad, or it's socked in, you can feel the stress rolling off them." That stress is partly the product of the Grand Slam myth — the idea that sheep hunting is a finite set of boxes to be checked rather than a relationship with a particular kind of country that takes a lifetime to develop.
Conservation's Complicated Role in the Scarcity
It would be dishonest to lay the entire blame for sheep hunting's exclusivity at the feet of Grancel Fitz and his memorable phrase. The scarcity of permits exists because the animals require it. After Desert bighorn populations reached the brink of extinction, they have since stabilized due to conservation efforts — their decline caused by overhunting, habitat loss, and disease passed from domestic livestock. The tight permit numbers are a biological necessity, not a bureaucratic cruelty.
The costs associated with sheep hunting are substantial, but a portion of those expenses — especially through tag auctions, lottery permits, and licensing — are reinvested into habitat preservation, species monitoring, and anti-poaching efforts. Many state wildlife agencies and provincial governments use revenue from hunting programs to fund biological surveys, disease prevention, and genetic studies on wild sheep populations. The economic engine that makes sheep hunting inaccessible to most men is simultaneously the engine that keeps sheep herds viable for any men to hunt at all. That tension does not resolve cleanly.
Organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation, Grand Slam Club/Ovis, and regional sheep societies have raised millions of dollars annually through conservation banquets and tag raffles. The institutional structure that codified the Grand Slam as a prestige achievement has, to its credit, also poured enormous resources into the conservation work that makes sheep hunting possible. The problem is not that the institution exists. The problem is what the institution did to the culture of the hunt itself.
What Jack O'Connor Understood That We're Still Learning
O'Connor's critique, written more than fifty years ago, was not an argument against record books or organized conservation. It was an argument about what hunting means — about whether the point of going into sheep country is to come back with something to hang on a wall or to come back changed by the country itself. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent has costs that don't show up on any outfitter's price list.
The man who helped popularize sheep hunting ultimately lamented its corruption by status-seekers and greedy opportunists. His complaint was not that the Grand Slam was too hard. He knew it was hard — he spent more than a decade doing it and relished every day. His complaint was that the hardship had been reframed as an obstacle between a rich man and his trophy, rather than as the point of the whole endeavor. The sheep, the peaks, the ridgelines in early morning light — all of it reduced to logistics between a wire transfer and a wall mount.
The hunting world has never fully reckoned with what O'Connor put on the table in 1973. In the intervening decades, sheep hunting has only grown more expensive, more exclusive, and more entangled with the kind of competitive collecting he despised. The Grand Slam Club now keeps meticulous records of completions in the same spirit that the Boone and Crockett Club keeps score on antler measurements — as though the defining question about a sheep hunt is whether it can be ranked against other sheep hunts.
What Needs to Change — And What Can't
The biology of wild sheep imposes hard limits on what can change. The permit numbers are not going to multiply without damaging the herds that make the whole enterprise worth caring about. The terrain is not going to get cheaper to access. The outfitters are not going to work for less as their own costs — fuel, gear, horses, insurance, staff — continue rising.
What can change is the culture. The hunter who goes to Alaska for a Dall sheep because he loves alpine country and wants to test himself against genuine wilderness is not the same animal as the hunter who goes because he needs the first leg of a four-part collection. Those two hunters may book the same outfitter and sit at the same camp table, but they are on fundamentally different trips. One of them is doing what O'Connor described — enjoying every minute of a decade-long passion. The other is executing a purchasing plan.
The Grand Slam, in its original conception, was an act of tribute to an extraordinary kind of hunting. Grancel Fitz was not trying to build a prestige ladder. He was describing something he loved, in the idiom of a man who knew baseball and understood what a grand slam meant as a moment of completion. What he could not have predicted was how quickly the name would become a brand, and how thoroughly the brand would come to obscure the thing it was supposed to honor.
Jack O'Connor understood what had been lost, and he said so plainly in 1973. Like all sheep-hunting nuts, he loved sheep, lofty peaks, high ridges, chill breezes, bright skies, and wild country. Not certificates. Not record books. Not the social geometry of who was number six and who was number nine. The country, the animal, and the physical demand of earning a place among them. That was always the point. It still is — for the men willing to love the pursuit on its own terms, regardless of whether the Grand Slam Club ever knows their name.
