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two Hollywood movies.) With narrative verve and vividness, Patterson’s book told of his quest to track down and kill two male lions that had eaten approximately 140 railroad workers over the course of nine months in the Tsavo province of Kenya. During the 1890s, rinderpest (a bovine disease) had killed millions of buffalo, zebras, and gazelles, the primary food source for lions. Their food supply thus limited, the starving maneless lions turned to humans as prey. Inspired by Patterson’s action-filled prose, particularly his references to weapons like the Martin-Enfield double-barreled rifle and the .303 Lee Enfield, Roosevelt now wanted a lion head for his library wall at Oyster Bay. (Roosevelt, in fact, worked behind the scenes to eventually help the Field Museum of Chicago acquire the stuffed Tsavo lions and put them on permanent display.35) “A year hence I shall leave the Presidency, and, while I cannot now decide what I shall do, it is possible that I might be able to make a trip to Africa,” Roosevelt wrote to Patterson on March 20. “Would you be willing to give me some advice about it? I shall be fifty years old, and for ten years I have led a busy, sedentary life, and so it is unnecessary to say that I shall be in no trim for the hardest kind of explorer’s work. But I am fairly healthy, and willing to work in order to get into a game country where I could do some shooting. I should suppose I could be absent a year on the trip.”36

While Roosevelt hastened to assure Patterson that he wasn’t a “butcher,” he nevertheless hoped to acquire a multitude of specimens for American museums, entering Africa in the Mozambican port of Mombasa and boating down the Nile with shotgun in hand. Roosevelt arrived in Mombasa in April 1909, and departed for home from Khartoum in March 1910. This was no bear hunt in Mississippi and no holiday in Louisiana’s canebrakes. He would be away from the United States for over a year. That letter of March 20, in fact, started an epistolary exchange between the two men that would continue throughout 1908. The president interrogated Patterson repeatedly about the prospects of bagging specimens of zebras, giraffes, and cheetahs. As the tenor of his letters made clear, he could hardly wait to be armed to the teeth and free from the shackles of the White House. The Smithsonian Institution had been eager to officially sponsor Roosevelt and his party in obtaining all types of specimens, from the diminutive Kenia dormouse to the colossal white rhinoceros, for its collection. With a retinue of hundreds, Roosevelt would fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting Kenya and Uganda in the heart of British East African safari land.*

There was nothing odd about Roosevelt’s desire to hunt big game in Africa. Only the Boone and Crockett club’s taxidermist, Carl Akeley, who had constructed the world’s first habitat diorama in 1890 at the Milwaukee Public Museum, had begun to biologically inventory the wildlife along the Nile River with seriousness of purpose. Working out of the Field Museum in Chicago, Akeley had developed a new technique for taxidermy, which did a better and truer job of preserving texture and musculature. Roosevelt truly admired the way Akeley displayed wild-life in a group setting. The gorilla and the elephant were his specialties. Roosevelt thought Akeley could make a very distinctive contribution to the annals of scientific exploration by collecting with him in Africa. Roosevelt and Akeley would risk their lives for the right gorilla. Poets called nature a mother, but Roosevelt knew it was also a grave. Regardless of his worries about exertion by a middle-aged man in the heat, and about sleeping sickness (the primary concern), with proper funding Roosevelt believed he could revolutionize the African exhibits at all of America’s top museums.

It was strange, though, that he was planning to disappear from the American political scene for virtually a full year. In considering Roosevelt’s maverick conservationist agenda of 1908–1909, it is important to remember that the president didn’t foresee a future