African Game Trails eBooks

This book reads like a loping conversation with our 26th president. He has just returned from his year-long safari in east Africa at the turn of the last century and he is full of stories about hunting and native life. He is also full of dated opinions about the native peoples and what should be done about them (for their own good, of course). The graphic (and endless) hunting scenes are also not for the vegans amongst us. But all this said, this is a bully adventure book.

Theodore Roosevelt declined to run for reelection as President of the United States in 1908. Partly as a vacation, partly to avoid the press as his friend Taft set up a new administration, (and partly for self-promotion), T.R. set out for Africa to hunt big game and collect specimens for a future exposition at the Smithsonian. Scribner's magazine underwrote the trip by paying $50,000 for twelve articles. It is these articles that eventually became African Game Trails. In April 1909, T.R. and his son Kermit arrived in Mombasa. With an entourage of 250 porters and guides, the Roosevelts spent a year snaking across British East Africa, into the Belgian Congo and back to the Nile, ending in Khartoum. This narrative is a straightforward chronicle of the trip, laced with tips on tracking and hunting African big game, and observations and opinions about Africa and its peoples, many of which are politically incorrect by today's standards. T.R. believed in the inferiority of most African peoples and recommended they be civilized by European rule. For the most part, however, African Game Trails is a book about big game hunting. Over the course of the year, the Roosevelts collected (i.e. shot) 1,100 specimens, including eleven elephants, twenty rhinoceroses, seventeen lions, twenty zebra, seven hippopotamuses, seven giraffes, and six buffalo. This was a different era, to be sure. In a way that makes the account all the more valuable. African Games Trails is well-written and rolls along easily, like a good, long, after-dinner story. It is also a striking record of early 20th-century African culture and natural history. It is great fun and highly recommended for the non-squeamish.

African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt - Get eBooks