Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler

      TR and his son Kermit, who also carried an H&H double Rifle on Roosevelt’s famous safari.

      President Theodore Roosevelt was a man whose life was lived on the stage of world affairs on a grand scale. In a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, on April 23, 1910, he remarked:

       … credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

      TR was a rancher, politician, statesman, soldier, historian, and Nobel Laureate (he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his mediation of a settlement of the Russo-Japanese War), a strong-willed leader of men who lived the credo he preached. Less than three weeks after leaving the White House in March of 1909 after more than 40 years “in the arena” of public life, this vigorous and virile man took up a new challenge: a massive safari to collect specimens of African wildlife for the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Zoological Society. His year-long trek is perhaps the best-known and certainly one of the best-chronicled hunting trips in history, a grand adventure on a scale to suit the tastes and abilities of America’s 26th President.

      Hunting was in TR’s blood, a passion he indulged during his days in the western US, and in more sedate settings in the east. He had an abiding love of the outdoors, expressed in the preface to African Game Trails, the book that describes his safari:

       …there are no words can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides Rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.

      TR’S “BIG (FIRE) STICK”