Big Game Hunting in the Rockies and On the Great Plains. Comprising “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman” and “The Wilderness Hunter.”

ROOSEVELT, Theodore.

$6,000.00

Item Number: 145341

New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons; The Knickerbocker Press, 1899.

Signed limited first edition of this fascinating account of every species of big game in temperate North America Roosevelt has hunted. Quarto, bound in full three-quarter morocco over marbled boards with gilt titles and ruling to the spine in six compartments within raised bands restored by J. MacDonald Company, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers, original silk ribbon laid-in, 55 tissue-guarded illustrations by Frederic Remington, A. B. Frost, J. Carter Beard, Swain Gifford, Henry Sandham and other well-known artists throughout. One of only 1000 copies signed by Roosevelt beneath the tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of himself in Rough Rider’s uniform, this is number 507. In very good condition with some rubbing to the extremities and an abrasion to the front board, presentation bookplate to the front pastedown. A nice example.

Theodore Roosevelt noted, “My object in writing these books was not only to give a full account of the chase of every kind of big game proper to the United States, but also where possible to touch on their life histories… I write for my fellow ranchmen and fellow hunters, and for the young men of America, in whose veins the red blood of life runs lustily, and who joy in the strenuous pleasure that comes only as the prize of toil and exposure in the open.” “Midway through Roosevelt’s third term [in the New York State Assembly] in 1884, his wife died after giving birth to a daughter. He immersed himself in legislative matters to the end of the session, then sought solace on his ranch in western Dakota—‘a land of vast silent spaces, a place of grim beauty… For a while the 25-year-old widower considered a life of ranching, hunting, and writing” (ANB).