Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & the Wilderness Hunter

Two books on the American wilderness written by the great outdoorsman before he was president are introduced by Stephen Ambrose, bestselling author of undaunted Courage.

In 1884, beset by personal tragedy, the young Theodore Roosevelt left his fledgling political career in New York to live on a farm in the Dakota Badlands. These two books are a result of his sojourn in the West. In Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) Theodore Roosevelt describes the natural beauty of his surroundings as he tracks a massive twelve-hundred-pound bear, and in The Wilderness Hunter (1893) he provides a meticulous account of the habits of the great bear. Each book is full of observations of the West, its animals, landscape, and people. Roosevelt's irrepressible nature shines through as he writes of his love of hunting and nature, which were instrumental in the beginnings of the modern conservation movement.

As Stephen E. Ambrose writes in his introduction: "In these books he introduces us to a West that flourished but briefly, and to animals that are still with us, by telling hunting stories that are timeless".