y have always been remembered, and for this reason his books of
hunting and adventure have a real value--a worth not shared by many of
those published on similar subjects. His hunting adventures have not
been mere pleasure excursions. They have been of service to science. On
one of his hunts, perhaps his earliest trip after white goats, he
secured a second specimen of a certain tiny shrew, of which, up to that
time, only the type was known. Much more recently, during a declared
hunting trip in Colorado, he collected the best series of skins of the
American panther, with the measurements taken in the flesh, that has
ever been gathered from one locality by a single individual.
Mr. Roosevelt's hunting experiences have been so wide as to have covered
almost every species of North American big game found within the
temperate zone. Except such Arctic forms as the white and the Alaska
bears, and the muskox, there is, perhaps, no species of North American
game that he has not killed; and his chapter on the mountain sheep, in
his book, "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," is confessedly the best
published account of that species.
During the years that Mr. Roosevelt was actually engaged in the cattle
business in North Dakota, his everyday life led him constantly to the
haunts of big game, and, almost in spite of himself, gave him constant
hunting opportunities. Besides that, during dull seasons of the year,
he made trips to more or less distant localities in search of the
species of big game not found immediately about his ranch. His mode of
hunting and of traveling was quite different from that now in vogue
among big-game hunters. His knowledge of the West was early enough to
touch upon the time when each man was as good as his neighbor, and the
mere fact that a man was paid wages to perform certain acts for you did
not in any degree lower his position in the world, nor elevate yours.
In those days, if one started out with a companion, hired or otherwise,
to go to a certain place, or to do a certain piece of work, each man was
expected to perform his share of the labor.
This fact Mr. Roosevelt recognized as soon as he went West, and, acting
upon it, he made for himself a position as a man, and not as a master,
which he has never lost; and it is precisely this democratic spirit
which to-day makes him perhaps the most popular man in the United States
at large.
Starting off, then, on some trip of several hundred miles, with a
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