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Scribner's Magazine 
VOL. XLVI OCTOBER, 1909 NO. 4 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS* 
AN ACCOUNT OF THE AFRICAN WANDERINGS OF AN AMERICAN 
HUNTER-NATURALIST 
By Theodore Roosevelt 
I.—A RAILROAD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 
HE great world movement 
which began with the voy¬ 
ages of Columbus and Vasco 
da Gama, and has gone on 
with ever-increasing rapid¬ 
ity and complexity until our 
own time, has developed along a myriad 
lines of interest. In no way has it been 
more interesting than in the way in which 
it has resulted in bringing into sudden, vio¬ 
lent, and intimate contact phases of the 
world’s life history which would be normally 
separated by untold centuries of slow de¬ 
velopment. Again and again, in the conti¬ 
nents new to peoples of European stock, we 
have seen the spectacle of a high civilization 
all at once thrust into and superimposed 
upon a wilderness 6 of savage men and sav¬ 
age beasts. Nowhere, and at no time, has 
the contrast been more strange and more 
striking than in British East Africa during 
the last dozen years. 
The country lies directly under the 
equator; and the hinterland, due west, 
contains the huge Nyanza lakes, vast in¬ 
land seas which gather the head-waters of 
the White Nile. This hinterland, with its 
lakes and its marshes, its snow-capped 
mountains, its high, dry plateaus, and its 
Special Notice.—T hes. 
?s Sons, New York, 
forests of deadly luxuriousness, was utterly 
unknown to white men half a century ago. 
The map of Ptolemy in the second century 
of our era gave a more accurate view of the 
lakes, mountains, and head-waters of the 
Nile than the maps published at the begin¬ 
ning of the second half of the nineteenth 
century, just before Speke, Grant, and 
Baker made their great trips of exploration 
and adventure. Behind these explorers 
came others; and then adventurous mis¬ 
sionaries, traders, and elephant hunters; 
and many men, whom risk did not daunt, 
who feared neither danger nor hardship^ 
traversed the country hither and thither, 
now for one reason, now for another, now as 
naturalists, now as geographers, and again 
as government officials or as mere wand¬ 
erers who loved the wild and strange life 
which had survived over from an elder age. 
Most of the tribes were of pure savages; 
but here and there were intrusive races of 
higher type; and in Uganda, beyond the 
4/ictoria Nyanza, and on the head-waters 
of the Nile proper, lived a people which had 
advanced to the upper stages of barbarism, 
which might almost be said to have de¬ 
veloped a very primitive kind of semi¬ 
civilization. Over this people—for its good 
fortune—Great Britain established a pro¬ 
tectorate; and ultimately, in order to get 
copyright law in effect July ist, 1909, which imposes 
■e penalty for infringen 
Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. All rights 1 
jmAA * 3 
Vol. XLVI.—45 
