The wilderness hunter

About the book

The Wilderness Hunter by Theodore Roosevelt is a collection of hunting narratives and natural history sketches written in the late 19th century. It chronicles the American wilderness, frontier hunters, and big-game animals through firsthand adventures and reflective essays drawn from ranch life and long hunts across the West. Readers can expect vivid landscapes, practical hunting lore, and portraits of species such as bison, elk, deer, antelope, sheep, and moose. The opening of this work surveys America’s varied wild lands—eastern hardwoods, northern forests, plains, deserts, and the Rockies—then sketches the rise and decline of wilderness hunters and soldiers, from Boone, Crockett, Houston, and Carson to the buffalo hunters and the regular army, as settlement closes the frontier. Roosevelt catalogs the chief game animals and their ranges, names Montana–Wyoming as prime hunting ground, and shifts into first-person scenes of ranch and round-up life: driving saddle bands, cutting and branding cattle, and roping mavericks. He explains how and where to hunt blacktail and whitetail deer, favoring fair still-hunting over unsportsmanlike methods, and relates crisp episodes of drives with hounds in river bottoms, bucking horses, missed chances, and lucky shots, along with the camp routines of wagon trips. This opening section concludes with his ride to join a post–round-up crew on the open plains, pronghorn scattered across the grasslands, and the setting of the night guard in cow-camp.