HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN: SKETCHES OF SPORT ON THE NORTHERN CATTLE PLAINS; (Medora Edition, #248 of only 500 copies printed)

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons / The Knickerbocker Press, 1885. Medora Edition. Leather and Cloth. Very Good. Various. Quarto. (11 1/2 in. x 8 1/2 in.). Original publisher's brown cloth with artful, embossed gilt lettering to front board, and image of a cougar within a double gilt circle. Recently rebacked in brown leather with original spine laid down. Scuffing and bumping to corners. Very solidly bound. Top edge trimmed, fore-edge and tail untrimmed. 318 pp.

Tiny remnant of bookseller's ticket to front pastedown. Frontis portrait of author in fringed tunic, holding his hunting rifle. Twenty full-page illustrations by A.B. Frost, R. Swain Gifford, J.C. Beard, Fannie E. Gifford, and Henry Sandham, including seven drawings by J.C. Beard (Japan-Proof impressions, engraved by E. Clement, S.P. Davis, E.C. Held); Title page in red and black. Head and tailpieces at chapters' beginnings and ends, and elaborate drop-caps in contrasting reddish-brown. Green silk ribbon sewn-in. After the inconceivable double tragedy suffered by Roosevelt on February 14th, 1884 when both his young wife and mother died on the same day, in the same house in New York City, the emotionally shattered young legislator headed to the Dakota territory he had first discovered on a buffalo hunt the previous year. There he invested in and eventually established two ranches - one called "The Maltese Cross" and thereafter, another around 35 miles north of Medora, North Dakota, "The Elkhorn", where Roosevelt ran 1000 head of cattle.