Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & the Wilderness Hunter Paperback - 1998

First line

The great middle plains of the United States, parts of which are still scantily peopled by men of Mexican parentage, while other parts have been but recently won from the warlike tribes of Horse Indians, now form a broad pastoral belt, stretching in a north and south line from British America to the Rio Grande.

From the jacket flap

Written during his days as a ranchman in the Dakota Bad Lands, these two wilderness tales by Theodore Roosevelt endure today as part of the classic folklore of the West. The narratives provide vivid portraits of the land as well as the people and animals that inhabited it, underscoring Roosevelt's abiding concerns as a naturalist.
Originally published in 1885, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman chronicles Roosevelt's adventures tracking a twelve-hundred-pound grizzly bear in the pine forests of the Bighorn Mountains. Yet some of the best sections are those in which Roosevelt muses on the beauty of the Bad Lands and the simple pleasures of ranch life. The British Spectator said the book "could claim an honorable place on the same shelf as Walton's Compleat Angler." The Wilderness Hunter, which came out in 1893, remains perhaps the most detailed account of the grizzly bear ever recorded. Introduction by Stephen E. Ambrose.