American Big-Game Hunting

This collection brings together essays on American big-game hunting, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell for the Boone and Crockett Club, and it captures the spirit of the American frontier at once as adventure, natural history, and conservation. Across vivid firsthand accounts, the book ranges from buffalo, elk, goats, pronghorn, and grizzlies to wilderness travel, wildlife photography, and the literature of the chase, while the club's ideals stress skillful rifle hunting, exploration, observation, and discussion among sportsmen. Yet the volume is equally concerned with preservation. It defends state and national game reservations, celebrates Yellowstone as a refuge for buffalo and elk, praises well-enforced game laws, and condemns unsportsmanlike slaughter as contrary to true wilderness hunting. Roosevelt's own narratives bring the West to life: his first astonished encounters with immense buffalo herds, the final southern migration and the decline of the species, and a grimly comic storm-bound killing that underscores both hardship and loss. Other pieces follow the arduous, often ironic pursuit of mountain goats through remote Washington, where dangerous ridges, rough settlements, and punishing travel test endurance before the hunt becomes a study in patience, judgment, and animal life. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.