Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and its Chase with Horse, Hound, and RifleRoosevelt, Theodore
History
Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle
Roosevelt, Theodore
Hunting -- United States
In a few wild spots in the East, in northern Maine for instance, here
and there in the neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes, in the
east Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and the swamps of Florida and
Mississippi, there still lingers an occasional representative of the old
wilderness hunters. These men live in log-cabins in the wilderness.
They do their hunting on foot, occasionally with the help of a single
trailing dog. In Maine they are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear
and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an occasional cougar or wolf,
are the beasts of chase which they follow. Nowadays as these old hunters
die there is no one to take their places, though there are still plenty
of backwoods settlers in all of the regions named who do a great deal of
hunting and trapping. Such an old hunter rarely makes his appearance at
the settlements except to dispose of his peltry and hides in exchange
for cartridges and provisions, and he leads a life of such lonely
isolation as to insure his individual characteristics developing into
peculiarities. Most of the wilder districts in the eastern States still
preserve memories of some such old hunter who lived his long life alone,
waging ceaseless warfare on the vanishing game, whose oddities, as well
as his courage, hardihood, and woodcraft, are laughingly remembered by
the older settlers, and who is usually best known as having killed the
last wolf or bear or cougar ever seen in the locality.
Generally the weapon mainly relied on by these old hunters is the rifle;
and occasionally some old hunter will be found even to this day who
uses a muzzle loader, such as Kit Carson carried in the middle of the
century. There are exceptions to this rule of the rifle however. In the
years after the Civil War one of the many noted hunters of southwest
Virginia and east Tennessee was Wilber Waters, sometimes called The
Hunter of White Top. He often killed black bear with a knife and dogs.
He spent all his life in hunting and was very successful, killing
the last gang of wolves to be found in his neighborhood; and he slew
innumerable bears, with no worse results to himself than an occasional
bite or scratch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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