Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail

No other president grew to know and love the West like Theodore Roosevelt.

He acknowledged the great debt that he owed to those years he spent out west when he said, "I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

Following the disappointing 1884 presidential election Theodore Roosevelt decided to move West.

He built his ranch, named Elkhorn, just north of Medora in North Dakota.

It was here that he learned how to trap, hunt and survive in the wilderness like many of the great American adventurers who had travelled west before him.

Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail records what Roosevelt saw, heard and did through the course of the two years that Roosevelt spent in North Dakota.

The book is filled with fascinating tales such as serving for a short time as a deputy sheriff pursuing horse thieves, survive herd-killing blizzards and suffocating heat, hunting mountain goats, antelope and bighorn sheep to survive through the winter, as well as much more.

Roosevelt felt very aware that the world of the far west was changing as the country became more industrialized and so sought to record the lives of the trappers, bronco-busters, desperadoes and mule-skinners, the Indians, horse thieves and vigilantes before their world completely vanished.

“Ranch Life And The Hunting Trail is an evocative souvenir of a simpler America, written by the man who a few years later helped propel the country along the road to Empire.” Kirkus Reviews

“the author carries the reader into the quaint ranch life of the West with an ease that makes him revel, for the time, in the glories of the mud-chinked cabins and humble fare, until the song of the meadow lark is the sweetest sound in the world.” Rollin E. Smith, The Sportsman’s Magazine

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) was the 26th president of the United States and a noted sportsman and naturalist. This book was first published in 1888. He died in 1919.