Richard Rattenbury has written the definitive book about hunting on the 19th-century frontier.

These tales of hunting expeditions and experiences borrow from contemporary accounts by Warren Angus Ferris, Theodore Roosevelt (founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, which published the book), Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, Lieutenant Henry Carleton, an English traveler writing under the pseudonym “Captain Flack,” Santa Fe Trader Josiah Gregg and many more. Stunning photography and artwork by such masters of the genre as Charlie Russell, Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller, Frederic Remington and George Catlin enhance the vivid text.

The author includes sections on subsistence hunters, sport hunters, market hunters and hunter-naturalists, while chapters entitled “The Arms of the Chase” and “The Image of the Chase” focus on the weapons and art related to frontier hunting. The book has won several awards, including the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction. Rattenbury, history curator at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, is also the author of Art of American Arms Makers and Packing Iron: Gun Leather of the Frontier West. He recently spoke with Wild West about his new book.

‘Subsistence hunting by Indians and Anglo frontiersmen had little, if any, impact on numbers or habitat. However, buffalo hunting by Indians for the robe trade (commercial or market hunting) certainly began reducing bison numbers by the 1840s–1850s’

Which are your favorite early hunting narratives?
In the antebellum period, it would be John Palliser’s Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in the Prairies. Among the foreign hunters, Palliser and George Ruxton (Irish and English) wrote the best narratives in that era. Among Americans, George Catlin’s various vignettes in Letters and Notes are very good, as are the hunting adventures related by Francis Parkman in The Oregon Trail. In the postwar period, the best American in my view certainly was Theodore Roosevelt in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. He perhaps was rivaled by George Oliver Shields in Rustlings in the Rockies and Cruisings in the Cascades and by the Earl of Dunraven in The Great Divide and Canadian Nights.

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Did hunting impact game populations in the West in the early 1800s?
Subsistence hunting by Indians and Anglo frontiersmen had little, if any, impact on numbers or habitat. However, buffalo hunting by Indians for the robe trade (commercial or market hunting) certainly began reducing bison numbers by the 1840s–1850s.

Were early 19th-century Euro-American hunters any more wasteful with the meat of animals they killed than American Indians?
As subsistence hunters, they were much the same in my estimation. Early sport hunters could be more wasteful if they shot for numbers, the obvious example being Sir St. George Gore, who wasted tons of meat on his nearly three-year spree.

What about American hunting inspired Europeans to take weeks-long Western excursions?
America was not unique in this regard during the colonial and imperial eras. Europeans (and particularly Englishmen) hunted as well and as fervently in India and Africa. All such areas offered abundant and diverse big game, often-challenging frontier environments, exotic (maybe dangerous) natives, ample opportunities for adventure and no bag limits on animals killed.

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