Items related to Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter

Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter - Softcover

Roosevelt, Theodore

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9781420934649: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter

Synopsis

There may be no better example of American individualism and rugged outdoorsman than the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. In this volume we find two of Roosevelt's works on hunting, "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" and "The Wilderness Hunter", combined into one volume. Roosevelt, who as President would bring some 230 million acres of land under the protection of the National Parks and Forest Services, was a great naturalist and his love of the outdoors is evident in the depictions of these books. Careful attention is devoted to the sport of hunting as these books work as both nature travelogues and practical treatises on how to bag game both big and small. Roosevelt recounts numerous hunts in this volume which will thrill and delight the hunting and nature aficionado alike.

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Review

It's no secret that America's most bully president was also its most bully outdoorsman and conservationist; what's often forgotten was how beautifully and authoritatively he wrote about the wilderness and his considerable experiences there. These two pre-White House narratives--Ranchman was originally published in 1885, Wilderness eight years later--are rich and vivid. The former chronicles Roosevelt's sojourns in the Dakota Badlands; the latter is an extended love letter to the pleasures and challenges of outdoor life. So what if some of his 19th-century ideas seem politically incorrect by the standards of the next century--magnificent prose is still magnificent prose. "Nowhere, not even at sea," writes the future First Hunter in one haunting passage, "does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching seemingly never-ending plains ... [but] after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him." By comparison, the isolation and weight of the Oval Office must have seemed like an afternoon stroll in the park.

From the Inside Flap

Written during his days as a ranchman in the Dakota Badlands, these two wilderness tales by Theodore Roosevelt endure today as part of the classic folklore of the West. The narratives provide vivid portraits of the land as well as the people and animals that inhabited it, ever underscoring the author's abiding concerns as a naturalist.

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