Hunting North America, 1885-1911 [Hardcover]

Frank Oppel (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Book Sales; 1St Edition edition (March 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555211550
• ISBN-13: 978-1555211554
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,023,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An underappreciated classic, September 18, 2005

By 

Ryan McNabb (Ooltewah, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hunting North America, 1885-1911 (Hardcover)

Most hunting today is a pale shadow compared to what it used to be like. The game is there, and in droves, but the wilderness is largely now occupied, and more and more hunters compete for less land, and fewer tags for prized animals. Hardly the wild, free experience of our grandfather's and great grandfather's day, when they would take a train to the very end of its track, then hire a guide to take them to the very end of the road, then get in a canoe, and not come back for a month. Noone, no matter how rich, can hunt today the way a common insurance salesman did in 1900.

This is a wonderful anthology of the golden age of American big game hunting. You will find things here you've read about in other places, but could never find anywhere else. Some of them are very famous stories, some are inconsequential letters to the local newspaper about a sheep hunt or a good day in a trout stream, but they are all written from a truly lost era. Pre-Hemingway, pre-Ruark, pre-Boddington, pre-Jack O'Connor even - this is the pure essence.

Do yourself a favor and snag a couple of copies of this - one for yourself and one for a special young person in your life who is at "that age" when the lights start to come on in their mind. "Sports Afield" and "Sporting Classics" are all fine and good, but there is nothing like going back to the pure source for the story of when hunting was truly an adventure, and not just a day's pastime.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hunting North America 1885-1911, June 22, 2010

By 

Reid M. Wilson "scifi memories" (Seminole, Florida) - See all my reviews
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"Grizzly Bear Lore" by Henry G. Tinsley (1902) is an interesting history and study of the grizzly bear in North America; on page 390, it was interesting learning that five professional hunters in 1848 Oregon brought 700 grizzly bear pelts to Sutter's Fort at Sacramento after one year of hunting, showing the large numbers of the bear at the time; on page 395, it was also interesting learning that the bears lived in groups of fifty or more when there were few hunters and that these groups would sometimes stay together for one to two months.

"Still-Hunting The Grizzly" by Theodore Roosevelt (1885) describes the early and later human encounters with grizzly bears, including several bear attacks on armed men; the story's climax is Roosevelt's stalking and shooting a 1,200-pound bear in the Big Horn Mountains.

"Antelope Hunting Thirty Years Ago And To-Day" by George Bird Grinnell (1903) starts by describing the West of thirty to forty years ago when buffalo, elk, and antelope lived in large numbers and then describes Grinnell's experiences in hunting the pronghorn; I particularly liked Grinnell enjoying watching a pronghorn group so that he decided to not shoot the animals and never regretting the decision. At the end of the writing, Grinnell states that the pronghorn should be protected, because "no species of American game is likely to respond more easily to protection than the antelope. It is most at home in many wide stretches of arid land where the farmers' fences can never interfere with it. It can live and thrive among the herds of cattle that feed upon these high plains, and the amount of grass that it consumes will never be large enough for it to be a menace to the stockman." At this date, the pronghorn population is now estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,000,000, showing the larger numbers that have come from protection; in 1908, the pronghorn population was only about 20,000.

In "Hunting The Big Horn" by E.E. Bowles (1900) on pages 478-479, it was interesting reading about the fight between a mountain lion and a big horn ram, which drove away the cat in "a grand fight."

"Bear Hunting In British Columbia" (1896) and "Big Game In The Rockies" (1899) are both more about living experiences in wilderness areas than hunting and animals. "Hunting In British Columbia" (1911) simply describes the presence of various animals in the province. There are also many stories about hunting birds, which I did not read.