Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (B&C Classics)

Follow Boone and Crockett Club founder Theodore Roosevelt during his time in the Dakotas and Montana beginning in 1884. Upon his return from this particular sojourn out west he promptly organized a formal dinner with his friends and colleagues in December 1887 and formed the Boone and Crockett Club. In Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, Roosevelt records his experiences from his hunting adventures, the people and animals that he encounters, the excitement of the round up, to the everyday life on the ranch. TR's delightful prose provides a straightforward and very entertaining read. The book is handsomely illustrated with 95 pen and ink drawings by the premier western artist of the time, Frederic Remington. This edition of Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail is part of the Boone and Crockett Club’s B&C Classics series begun in 2012. Each book in the series was authored by a member of B&C in the late 1800s or early 1900s and was hand-selected by a committee of vintage hunting literature experts. Readers will be taken back to a time when hunting trips didn’t happen over a weekend, but were adventures spanning weeks, months, even years.

Theodore Roosevelt did more for conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of sport hunting than any other person in the history of our nation. He showed a keen interest in nature with his first publication at the age of 20 in 1877 on summer birds in Franklin Co., New York. His experiences in the mid-1880s in the South Dakota badlands gave him a first-hand view of the problems associated with westward expansion, unregulated hunting, and the effects of market hunting. In 1887, he and his closest friends founded the Boone and Crockett Club—the nation’s first conservation organization. He was the Club’s first president and an active member until his death in 1919. Under his direction as Club president and president of the United States, numerous laws and legislative actions protecting wildlife and our natural resources were enacted. The creation of the U.S. Forest Service, National Wildlife Refuge System, and the National Park Service, which are among his most notable achievements, paved the way to ultimately set aside tens of millions of acres for the benefit of wildlife, our nation, and future generations. Theodore Roosevelt was the right person at the right time.

Frederic Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of cowboys, Indians, and the US Cavalry of the American West in the late 1800s. Love of adventure and the great outdoors, especially in the West, were the bonds that sealed the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington. "I wish I were with you out among the sage brush, the great brittle cottonwoods, and the sharply-channeled barren buttes," Roosevelt wrote to the western artist in 1897 from Washington. In 1888, Century Magazine published a series of articles about the West written by Roosevelt and illustrated by Remington.