Smithsonian–Roosevelt African expedition

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Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition
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Smithsonian–Roosevelt African expedition
Smithsonian Institution Archives
Date1909–11
ParticipantsTheodore Roosevelt;
R. J. Cunninghame;
Frederick Selous;
Kermit Roosevelt;
Edgar Alexander Mearns;
Edmund Heller;
John Alden Loring.

The Smithsonian–Roosevelt African expedition was an expedition to tropical

African Game Trails
.

Participants and resources

The group was led by the hunter-tracker

Winchester 1895 rifle in .405 Winchester.[8] Roosevelt also brought his Pigskin Library, a collection of 59 classic books bound in pig leather and transported in a single reinforced trunk.[9]

Timeline and route

Frederick Courteney Selous, a longtime friend who was traveling to his own African safari, traversing many of the same areas.[11] Throughout the expedition, the party traveled by train and steamboat, and sometimes even horse or camel.[12]

The party landed in

British East Africa (now Kenya) on April 21, 1909, and traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) before following the Nile to Khartoum in modern Sudan. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and by his own proposed writings, Roosevelt's party hunted for specimens for the Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the San Francisco Museum.[13][14]

Roosevelt returned to the United States in June 1910.[15]

Results

Roosevelt and his companions killed or trapped approximately 11,397

Karamoja Bell, had killed over 1,000 elephants each, and the Roosevelts between them killed just eleven. In making that comparison, it must be remembered that the hunters were not collecting specimens for museums but were occasionally employed by landowners to clear animals from land that they wanted to use for plantations and frequently as ivory hunters with or without hunting permits or licenses.[citation needed
]

Although the safari was conducted in the name of science, it was as much a political and social event as it was a hunting excursion. Roosevelt interacted with renowned professional hunters and landowning families, and met many native peoples and local leaders, which he

National Rifle Association of America, as President, in 1907 after he paid a $25 fee.[17] He later wrote a detailed account in the book African Game Trails in which he describes the excitement of the chase, the people he met, and the flora and fauna he collected in the name of science.[12]

Roosevelt greatly enjoyed hunting, but he was also an avid conservationist. In African Game Trails, he condemns "game butchery as objectionable as any form of wanton cruelty and barbarity" although he notes that "to protest against all hunting of game is a sign of softness of head, not of soundness of heart". As a pioneer of wilderness conservation in the US, he fully supported the contemporary British government's attempts to set aside wilderness areas as game reserves, some of the first on the African continent. He notes (page 17) that "in the creation of the great game reserve through which the Uganda railway runs the British Government has conferred a boon upon mankind." Roosevelt helped establish a conservation attitude that eventually resulted in the form of today's game parks in East Africa.

See also

Further reading

  • TheodoreRoosevelt.com's account of the trip and review of African Game Trails with photos
  • John Alden Loring (1914). African adventure stories. C. Scribner's sons. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
  • On Safari With Theodore Roosevelt, 1909 from Eye Witness to History.com

References

  1. PMID 17743798
    .
  2. ^ a b "Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition". National Museum of Natural History: Celebrating 90 Years. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History. Archived from the original on 12 April 2013. Retrieved 20 June 2013.
  3. ^ Brian Herne, White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris (Henry Holt, 1999), pp. 8–9.
  4. ^ Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, 2010), pp. 8–9.
  5. ^ Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, 2010), p. 9.
  6. ^ a b Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (Random House, 2010), p. 8.
  7. ^ Darrin Lunde, The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History (Broadway, 2016), pp. 193–194.
  8. ^ Dan Aadland, In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 64–65.
  9. ^ Darrin Lunde, The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History (Broadway, 2016), p. 194.
  10. ^ Darrin Lunde, The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History (Broadway, 2016), p. 195.
  11. ^ Darrin Lunde, The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History (Broadway, 2016), pp. 195–196.
  12. ^ a b c Theodore Roosevelt (1910). African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-naturalist. Illustrated. Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
  13. ^ "Theodore Roosevelt and the Environment". American Experience. Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved 5 December 2023.
  14. ^
    Smithsonian Institution Archives
    . Retrieved 10 April 2012.
  15. ^ "Research Guides: Theodore Roosevelt's Africa Expedition: Topics in Chronicling America : Introduction".
  16. ISBN 0-684-86477-0
  17. ISBN 978-0-8131-2408-7
    .
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