Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter

by Theodore Roosevelt

Throughout the pioneer stages of American history, big game hunting was not merely a pleasure, but a business, and often a very important and in fact vital business. At different times many of the men who rose to great distinction in our after history took part in it as such: men like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, for instance. Moreover, aside from these pioneers who afterward won distinction purely as statesmen or soldiers, there were other members of the class of professional hunters—men who never became eminent in the complex life of the old civilized regions, who always remained hunters, and gloried in the title—who, nevertheless, through and because of their life in the wilderness, rose to national fame and left their mark on our history. The three most famous men of this class were Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and Kit Carson, who were renowned in every quarter of the Union for their skill as game-killers, Indian-fighters, and wilderness explorers, and whose deeds are still stock themes in the floating legendary lore of the border. They stand for all time as types of the pioneer settlers who won our land; the bridge-builders, the road-makers the forest-fellers, the explorers, the land-tillers, the mighty men of their hands, who laid the foundations of this great commonwealth.

There are good descriptions of big game hunting in the books of writers like Catlin, but they come in incidentally. Elliott’s “South Carolina Field Sports” is a very interesting and entirely trustworthy record of the sporting side of existence on the old Southern plantations, and not only commemorates how the planters hunted bear, deer, fox, and wildcat on the uplands and in the canebrakes, but also gives a unique description of harpooning the great devil-fish in the warm Southern waters. John Palliser, an Englishman, in his “Solitary Hunter,” has given us the best descriptions of hunting in the far West, when it was still an untrodden wilderness. Another Englishman, Ruxton, in two volumes, has left us a most vivid picture of the old hunters and trappers themselves. Unfortunately, these old hunters and trappers, the men who had most experience in the life of the wilderness, were utterly unable to write about it; they could not tell what they had seen or done. Occasional attempts have been made to get noted hunters to write books, either personally or by proxy, but these attempts have not as a rule been successful. Perhaps the best of the books thus produced is Hittell’s “Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter.”

The first effort to get men of means and cultivation in the Northern and Eastern States of the Union to look at field sports in the right light was made by an Englishman who wrote over the signature of Frank Forrester. He did much for the shotgun men; but, unfortunately, he was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports, and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself. He was sincerely distressed because the male of the ordinary American deer was called a buck instead of a stag; and it seemed to him to be a matter of moment whether one spoke of a “gang” or a “herd” of elk.

There are plenty of excellent books nowadays, however. The best book upon the old plains country was Colonel Richard Irving Dodge’s “Hunting-Grounds of the Great West,” which dealt with the chase of most kinds of plains game proper. Judge Caton, in his “Antelope and Deer of America,” gave a full account of not only the habits and appearance, but the methods of chase and life histories of the prongbuck, and of all the different kinds of deer found in the United States. Dr. Allen, in his memoir on the bisons of America, and Hornaday, in his book upon their extermination, have rendered similar service for the vast herds of shaggy-maned wild cattle which have vanished with such melancholy rapidity during the lifetime of the present generation. Mr. Van Dyke’s “Still-Hunter” is a noteworthy book, which, for the first time, approaches the still-hunter and his favorite game, the deer, from what may be called the standpoint of the scientific sportsman. It is one of the few hunting-books which should really be studied by the beginner because of what he can learn therefrom in reference to the hunter’s craft. The Century Co.’s volume “Sport With Gun and Rod” contains accounts of the chase of most of the kinds of American big game, although there are two or three notable omissions, such as the elk, the grizzly bear, and the white goat. Warburton Pike, Caspar Whitney, and Frederick Schwatka have given fairly full and very interesting accounts of boreal sport; and Pendarves Vivian and Baillie-Grohman of hunting trips in the Rockies. A new and most important departure, that of photographing wild animals in their homes, was marked by Mr. Wallihan’s “Camera Shots at Big Game.” This is a noteworthy volume. Mr. Wallihan was the pioneer in a work which is of the utmost importance to the naturalist, the man of science; and what he accomplished was far more creditable to himself, and of far more importance to others, than any amount of game-killing. Finally, in Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” and Irving’s “Trip on the Prairie,” two great writers have left us a lasting record of the free life of the rifle-bearing wanderers who first hunted in the wild Western lands.

Though not hunting-books, John Burroughs’ writings and John Muir’s volumes on the Sierras should be in the hands of every lover of outdoor life, and therefore in the hands of every hunter who is a nature lover, and not a mere game-butcher.

Of course, there are plenty of books on European game. Scrope’s “Art of Deerstalking,” Bromley Davenport’s “Sport,” and all the books of Charles St. John, are classic. The chase of the wolf and boar is excellently described by an unnamed writer in “Wolf-Hunting and Wild Sports of Brittany.” Baillie-Grohman’s “Sport in the Alps” is devoted to the mountain game of Central Europe, and is, moreover, a mine of curious hunting lore, most of which is entirely new to men unacquainted with the history of the chase in Continental Europe during the last few centuries. An entirely novel type of adventure was set forth in Lamont’s “Seasons with the Sea Horses,” wherein he described his hunting in arctic waters with rifle and harpoon. Lloyd’s “Scandinavian Adventures” and “Northern Field Sports,” and Whishaw’s “Out of Doors in Tsar Land,” tell of the life and game of the snowy northern forests. Chapman has done excellent work for both Norway and Spain. It would be impossible even to allude to the German and French books on the chase, such as the admirable but rather technical treatises of Le Couteulx de Canteleu. Moreover, these books for the most part belong rather in the category which includes English fox-hunting literature, not in that which deals with big game and the life of the wilderness. This is merely to state a difference—not to draw a comparison; for the artificial sports of highly civilized countries are strongly to be commended for their effect on national character in making good the loss of certain of the rougher virtues which tend to disappear with the rougher conditions.

In Mr. Edward North Buxton’s two volumes of “Short Stalks” we find the books of a man who is a hardy lover of nature, a skilled hunter, but not a game-butcher; a man who has too much serious work on hand ever to let himself become a mere globe-trotting rifleman. His volumes teach us just what a big game hunter, a true sportsman, should be. But the best recent book on the wilderness is Herr C. G. Schilling’s “Mit Blitzlicht und Büchse,” giving the writer’s hunting adventures, and above all his acute scientific observations and his extraordinary photographic work among the teeming wild creatures of German East Africa. Mr. Schilling is a great field naturalist, a trained scientific observer, as well as a mighty hunter; and no mere hunter can ever do work even remotely approaching in value that which he has done. His book should be translated into English at once. Every effort should be made to turn the modern big game hunter into the Schilling type of adventure-loving field naturalist and observer.

I am not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, or to fail to appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well as to an individual, of such pastimes; but they must be pastimes, and not business, and they must not be carried to excess. There is much to be said for the life of a professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able to be something more, should be that something more—an explorer, a naturalist, or else a man who makes his hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life work. As for excessive game-butchery, it amounts to a repulsive debauch. The man whose chief title to glory is that, during an industrious career of destruction, he has slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges, stands unpleasantly near those continental kings and nobles who, during the centuries before the French Revolution, deified the chase of the stag, and made it into a highly artificial cult, which they followed to the exclusion of State-craft and war-craft and everything else. James, the founder of the ignoble English branch of the Stuart kings, as unkingly a man as ever sat on a throne, was fanatical in his devotion to the artificial kind of chase which then absorbed the souls of the magnates of continental Europe.

There is no need to exercise much patience with men who protest against field sports, unless, indeed, they are logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type. If no deer or rabbits were killed, no crops could be cultivated. If it is morally right to kill an animal to eat its body, then it is morally right to kill it to preserve its head. A good sportsman will not hesitate as to the relative value he puts upon the two, and to get the one he will go a long time without eating the other. No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre which tend to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger. But if sport is made an end instead of a means, it is better to avoid it altogether. The greatest stag-hunter of the seventeenth century was the Elector of Saxony. During the Thirty Years’ War he killed some 80,000 deer and boar. Now, if there ever was a time when a ruler needed to apply himself to serious matters, it was during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and if the Elector in question had eschewed hunting he might have compared more favorably with Gustavus Adolphus in his own generation, or the Great Elector of Brandenburg in the next generation. The kings of the House of Savoy have shown that the love of hardy field sports in no way interferes with the exercise of the highest kind of governmental ability.

Wellington was fond of fox-hunting, but he did very little of it during the period of the Peninsular War. Grant cared much for fine horses, but he devoted his attention to other matters when facing Lee before Richmond. Perhaps as good an illustration as could be wished of the effects of the opposite course is furnished by poor Louis XVI. He took his sport more seriously than he did his position as ruler of his people. On the day when the revolutionary mob came to Versailles, he merely recorded in his diary that he had “gone out shooting, and had killed eighty-one head when he was interrupted by events.” The particular event to which this “interruption” led up was the guillotine. Not many sportsmen have to face such a possibility; but they do run the risk of becoming a curse to themselves and to everyone else, if they once get into the frame of mind which can look on the business of life as merely an interruption to sport.