This 1885 photo of Theodore Roosevelt decked out in his buckskins and moccasins and holding his beloved Winchester half-magazine .45-70 was taken during the height of his ranching days in western North Dakota. Who would have thought the then-27-year-old hunter would go on to become our nation's youngest president 16 years later at age 43?

During its relatively short span in modern history, the United States of America has had 44 presidents. Without question, our 26th president was the greatest hunting president in the history of our country. But he was much more than an avid hunter.

Theodore Roosevelt, or TR as he is fondly known, was also one of our country's first great conservationists. Not only was he one of the founding fathers of the Boone and Crockett Club (established in 1887), he was also a dedicated student of nature and one of the driving forces behind a sweeping conservation movement that started in the late 1800s and eventually led to the establishment of a national park system that included such American treasures as Yellowstone and Yosemite parks.

Although he lived for only 60 years (1858-1919), TR was a high-energy individual who never slowed down, and he packed a lot of living into that short span of years. In addition to being a prominent president, an explorer, a war hero who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, a conservationist and an avid hunter who traveled the world, he was a prolific writer who penned 42 books and numerous articles. Several of those books are about his hunting exploits.

In 1884, at 26 years of age, TR lost his beloved wife shortly after she gave birth to a daughter. To aid in the healing process, the grief-stricken young man traveled west from his home in New York to the badlands in western North Dakota and lived there off and on for the next three years. He owned and operated two small ranches on the Little Missouri River near the town of Medora. Out of that ranching experience came some of his greatest hunting literature, including stories about chasing gnarly "white-tails" in the Dakota river bottoms.

Amazingly, when you read excerpts from his book about a memorable whitetail hunt that took place in the early 1880s, you'll find that not much has really changed about hunting North America's No. 1 big game animal in the 130 years since those timeless words were written. Whitetails are still the great hunting challenge they've always been, and that will never change. Other than the dress we wear today and the modern high-tech weapons we use, in many ways TR's magical words could have been written last season.

--Duncan Dobie

THE DEER OF THE RIVER BOTTOMS
From Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, by Theodore Roosevelt, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1885
Of all the large game of the United States, the white-tail deer (white-tailed deer) is the best known and the most widely distributed. Taking the Union as a whole, fully ten men will be found who have killed white-tail for one who has killed any other large game.

And it is the only ruminant animal which is able to live on in the land even when it has been pretty thickly settled. There is hardly a State wherein it does not still exist, at least in some out-of-the-way corner; and long after the elk and the buffalo have passed away, and when the big-horn and prong-horn have become rare indeed, the white-tail will still be common in certain parts of the country.

When, less than five years ago, cattle were first driven on to the northern plains, the white-tail were the least plentiful and the least sought after of all the large game; but they have held their own as none of the others have begun to do, and are already in certain localities more common than any other kind, and indeed in many places are more common than all other kinds put together. The ranchmen along the Powder River, for instance, now have to content themselves with white-tail venison unless they make long trips back among the hills. The same is rapidly getting to be true of the Little Missouri.

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