16 JANUARY 1886, Page 14

BOOKS.

HUNTING-TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN.*

SOMETHING like a growl escaped us on our first glance at this superb volume—a royal quarto, printed in grand type, on thick, creamy, rough-edged paper, two-and-a-half-inch margin, lavishly illustrated, and bound in grey canvas, gold lettered—that a setting so costly, and yet in such perfect taste, should be thrown away on the chronicles of revolting butchery which are so apt to fill up sporting books. Our ill-humour soon vanished.. There are two types of the sporting book,—the one to which we have just alluded, than which scarcely anything calling itself" book" can be more odious to us, and of which Gordon Cummings's African butcheries may be taken as the leading sample ; the other, in which the animal-killing is only a peg or skeleton for the lover of Nature, the botanist, geologist, humourist, to hang his sketches or finished pictures on ; the book which, perhaps, strikes its top-note in Water ton's Wanderings,. and of which Isaac Walton's Complete Angler, and the late W. Bromley-Davenport's Sport, are, each in its own way, favour- able specimens. Mr. Roosevelt's Hunting-Trips of aRaneltman may claim an honourable place on the same shelf with these latter worthies, and has, besides, a special claim to our- gratitude in this generation. Ever since the English race- came into distinct existence on this planet (we beg Mr. Roosevelt's pardon for the phrase "English," but "Anglo-Saxon," to which he would, perhaps, not object, would not "fill the bill," and there is no other that we know of), it has been singularly prolific in "adventurers," in the old sense,—men with, a shrewd eye to the main chance, but with a dash of the old Bersirkir blood in their veins, who loved to collect their wealth in the little-known quarters of the globe, round which some mystery still clang, and where was danger to be faced, and hardness to be overcome, in the gleaning. The best illustration of what we mean is the Elizabethan age, when the most daring of the youth of England swarmed out after Drake and Hawkins, and Grenville and Raleigh, to sail the Spanish Main and the newly-discovered Pacific, in search of bigots of gold, bars of • Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. By Theodore Roosevelt. Putnam s Rnieker- b)eker Press. 1885.

silver, and Prester John's kingdom. But what the Spanish Main and the Pacific were to the Amyas Leighs of the sixteenth, "the Great West" has become to their counterparts in the nineteenth. If we may judge, at least, from our own limited -experience, there are few of our more vigorous boys (omitting, of purse, the born students) whose hearts are not somewhere in the Rockies or on the prairies, and who would not jump at the chance of exchanging desk for saddle, and quill for pickaxe and revolver, on "Poker Flat" or "the Big Divide," however little they might relish them were they actually there. These last-

named localities, representing the prospecting and mining sides of life in the Great West, have found their vafes sacer in Bret Harte ; and what he has done for the miners and their surroundings we see no reason why Mr. Roosevelt should not do for the far manlier and more useful folk of the plains,

the ranchmen and their cowboys. Indeed, in the present volume he has given us a good instalment of the work ; for he must be a hopeless reader who does not rise from it with a new and vivid sense of "the fascination of the vast- ness, loneliness, and monotony of the prairies," and of" the sad and everlasting unrest of the wilderness," of the Big Horn Mountains, in addition to pleasant familiarity with their flora and fauna. Here is his opening sketch of the men who have succeeded the old hunter and trapper, now, Mr. Roosevelt tells us, almost extinct

"In the place of these heroes of a bygone age, the men who were clad in buckskin and carried long rifles, stands, or rather rides, the bronzed and sinewy cowboy, as picturesque and self-reliant, as dashing and resolute, as the saturnine Indian fighters whose place he has 'taken; and, alas that it should be written ! he in his turn must at no distant time share the fate of the men he has displaced. The ground over which he so gallantly rides his small wiry horse will soon know him no more, and in his stead there will be the plodding grangers and hnsbandmen. I suppose it is right and for the best that the great cattle country, over which the ranchman rides, as free as the game that he follows or the horned beasts that he guards, should be in the end broken up into small patches of fenced farm and grazing-land; bat I hope against hope that I myself shall not live to see this take place, for when it does one of the pleasantest and freest phases of Western American life will have come to an end."

While it lasts we will hope for other books as bright and fresh, and full of good reading, as this, to keep us in touch with it. The district in which Mr. Roosevelt's two ranches are situate is the vast watershed of the Upper Missouri, stretching from Central Dakota to the Rocky Mountains. This was the last great Northern hunting-ground of the Indians, and

• the scene of their last general stand against the advancing whites, which came to an end some seven years ago, when the district was thrown open. Great herds of buffalo still ranged over it then, but in 1883 were already almost destroyed. -The inrush of hunting butchers—no longer fearing the Indian, and with new and easier markets for their robes at the not too- distant stations of the North Pacific Railway, and who never left -the skirts of the herds from year's end to year's end—has .driven the buffalo clean off the plains to the spurs of the mountain-ranges. The disappearance of the buffalo and his butcher made famous room for the cattle-man. The Texans drove up large herds over 2,000 miles of the wastes, from the Southern ranches, on which all the breeding had been done in -the earlier years of the business, and Eastern men, Mr. Roosevelt himself amongst the number, brought out stock to the nearest accessible point by rail, till the whole country is now occupied by herds which show more shorthorn than longhorn blood. All the good cattle-lauds are taken up, and there is no room for new men, 'though most of the ranches are as big as small English counties. The extraordinary profits of some years back will never be made again, though, in our author's judgment, the business of the established ranchman will continue to be profitable as long as it lasts. For the dress, equipment, and habits of the ranchmen and their cowboys, we must refer readers to the book, if we are to glance at the hunting-trips which form its staple.

As already said, the charm about this ranchman as author is that he is every inch a gentleman-sportsman. "I have never made big bags myself, for I rarely hunt, except for a fine head, or when we need meat." (p. 165). Again, he is a careful observer of the characters and individualities of animals,—(" by .degrees I grew to feel as if I had a personal interest in the 'different traits and habits of the wild creatures,")—and he is a pleasant and graphic describer of them. In the whole range of his bags, from teal and wild-goose up to "Old Ephraim," as the grizzly is called on the Big Horn range, where he takes us in search of bear and elk, there is not a bird or beast that we do not feel really better acquainted with. Moreover, one gets introduc-

tions to other creatures besides the game, to which this writer, at any rate, was a stranger,—for instance, the " pack " rat, a pretty beast and very tame, larger than the house-rat, with soft grey fur, big eyes, and bushy tail, who gets his name from the verb "pack," to carry, and has a bad habit of dragging to his hole everything he can move, (" from the hole of one I saw taken a small revolver, a bunting-knife, two books, a fork, a small bag, and a tin cup"); and the "pocket gophers," shaped like moles, but with rats' teeth and great cheek-pouches, whose "long, rambling tunnels" seem to be as troublesome to the cowboys as those of the prairie dogs.

The hunting-trips rise artistically, from grouse and teal to the excursion to the Rockies in search of "Old Ephraim," with which the book winds up. Leaving out the birds, the ranch- man places the game of the plains in the following order as regards difficulty of getting at them,—" Big-horn, antelope, white-tail, black-tail, elk, buffalo ;" while if you prefer, as a test, the amount of manly sport furnished by each, the white-tail deer must take its place at the bottom of the list, below the stupid buffalo, and the elk and black-tail would be bracketed equal with the antelope. (p. 139). After each of these, in succession, we can accompany our guide, and share, in imagination, his hardships, excitements, triumphs. He hunts either alone or with one companion, generally a foreman of the cowboys, Merrifield by name, who came out from the East only five years ago, but is now "daring and self-reliant, a good rider, a first-class shot, and a very keen sportsman." Old Manitou, his hunting-horse, grows on the sympathetic reader with every chapter. A horse is worse than useless unless he will let a man jump from his back and fire at once, and few such horses can be found. But " Maniton can be left anywhere at a moment's warning, while his rider leaps off, shoots at a deer from almost under his head, and perhaps chases the wounded animal for a mile or over ; and on his return, the good old fellow will be grazing away perfectly happy and contented, and not making a movement to run off or evade being caught." It is with these two, and a cowboy to look after the camp and spare ponies, that the expedition to the Big Horn range after bull-elk, mountain-sheep, and the grizzly is made, which we will defy any man who has ever felt the oropyl) of sport to read without some stirring of enthusiasm and longing. To pitch camp in that wonderful wilderness, with glorious hunting all day, and at night, before falling asleep in the moonlight under the pines, to listen to the forest sounds, and especially the bull-elk's "whistling," "very much the most musical cry uttered by any four-footed beast," having "the sus- stained, varied melody of some bird's song, with a hundredfold greater power" (p. 289), with an occasional pitying thought on the dweller in cities who "has but a faint idea of how we ate and slept," is an experience which can fall to few of us on this side of the "happy hunting-grounds." Perhaps the thing that strikes the Old-World reader most is the perfect equality of the relations between the two sportsmen. Nothing can be kindlier, for instance, in its way than the intercourse between Mr. Bromley Davenport and Ole the Norwegian, and Donald the Highlander; but the notion of their handling rod or gun by his side and straining every nerve to beat him, doubtless never crossed the brain of that most staunch and witty sportsman. But here ranchman and cowboy are fairly pitted against each other, and the emulation adds zest to the narrative, as it must have done to the chase. The only instance of the exercise of anything like authority occurs at the death of the last grizzly, a huge male, feeding on an elk's carcass, twenty yards from the spot to which the hunters had contrived to creep without alarm- ing Bruin. It had been agreed that Merrifield should take first shot, as he had not slain one yet to his own gun ; who, before taking aim, "whispered gleefully, 'I'll break his leg, and we'll see what he'll do.' " To which uncanny suggestion the ranchman bad just time to interpose an emphatic veto, and Merrifield had to aim, "with rather an injured air," at a vital spot (p. 312). Thankful we are that the veto was emphatic and successful, or we should probably never have spent many delightful Christmas hours over The Hunting-Trips of a Ranchman.

In parting from Mr. Roosevelt —with lingering regret that we cannot treat our readers to some of his descriptions of scenery, e.g., "the Medicine Buttes" (p. 215), or the favourite haunts of the black-tail in "the Bad Lands" (p. 143)—we would venture to suggest, in the interest of reading people here, who, not being Americans, cannot face the prodigality necessary to make them the happy owners of his book, that he should publish a cheap octavo edition, which need retain nothing of the luxuries of the present volume except the illustrations, which are as indis-

pensable as they are beautiful. In that case, we believe he may safely reckon on a wide and permanent popularity with English readers, even with those of them who, like the writer, have long since laid aside rod and gun, and learnt Wordsworth's grand lesson,—

" Taught by what Nature shows, and what conceals, Never to blend our pleasure or our pride

With anguish to the meanest thing that feels."