3 thoughts on “February 2020 Newsletter

  1. answer to picture question in newsletter from Fordyce:

    How This Photo of Theodore Roosevelt in Hunting Gear Helped Jump-Start the American Conservation Movement
    A portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) in buckskin, without his trademark glasses. This portrait is dated 1885, the year he retired to his ranch in the Dakota Territory, following the death of his mother and first wife.
    A portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) in buckskin, without his trademark glasses. This portrait is dated 1885, the year he retired to his ranch in the Dakota Territory, following the death of his mother and first wife. Historical/Corbis/Getty Images
    BY PHILIP DRAY MAY 1, 2018
    The studio photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in a buckskin hunting costume, rifle at the ready, remains one of the most iconic images of the American conservation movement. That he looks ready to kill something is no affectation; Roosevelt was a gung-ho hunter all his life. Yet his legacy is so much larger, as was the principled example he lived, of the compatibility of hunting wildlife and the protection of wildlife and wilderness. It was a synthesis that would define not only his efforts, but the nascent conservation movement that he came to symbolize.

    Born in 1858 in New York City, he was the son of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., a founder of the American Museum of Natural History; the museum charter was approved in 1869 in the front parlor of the family brownstone on East Twentieth Street. Theodore’s father, in response to his son’s childhood asthma, urged the boy toward an outdoor, athletic life. The son was duly swept up by the works of James Audubon, William Bartram, and Alexander Wilson, as well as the boy-hunter novels of Mayne Reid, and came to know the books of Frank Forester, although he looked askance at Forester’s aristocratic fussiness about purebred hounds, cognac and the nomenclature for groups of ducklings.

    Roosevelt, by contrast, would cultivate the twin modes of frontiersman and exacting naturalist. To improve his ornithological study and sketching, he sought tutoring in basic taxidermy and, at age 12, shot a number of winged specimens while on a family trip to Egypt. He hunted and developed his expertise as a natural scientist in the Adirondacks, but a truer apprenticeship began in 1884, after his young wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, died in childbirth. Brokenhearted, he put his nascent New York political career on hold and, with no certain date of return in mind, left the East to grieve alone in the Badlands of the western Dakotas.

    As for many a tenderfoot, one of the first impulses Roosevelt acted on was to shoot a buffalo, and over the next several years he added numerous other trophies—a bighorn sheep, a 1,200-pound grizzly bear, as well as a mother bear and her cub. He also invested about $80,000, half of his inheritance, in a cattle ranch, much of which he lost over the hard winter of 1886–87, when tens of thousands of cattle across the region froze or starved to death. While a touring correspondent for the Pittsburgh Dispatch found him “a pale, slim young man with a thin piping voice and a general look of dyspepsia about him . . . boyish looking . . . with a slight lisp, short red moustache and eye glasses . . . a typical New York dude,” Roosevelt was determined to attain a rugged manhood that would require no caveat about his big city origins or his being a son of privilege.

  2. The unit has been sold! I’ll be having more to list before the March Match.
    Happy trails
    Mike

  3. Howdy, all, Well I slowing down a mite so I’ve decided to sell my
    Dillon XL650 which is set up for 38 special. The unit is complete and ready to start reloading at a different ranch. I’m bringing it to the match Sat. 29th. If you’re in a
    hurry you can call me at 661 836-1896 or “E” me at FORD514@sbcglobal.net.
    I’m located in the SW part of Bakersfield. I got it priced at $600.00.
    THIS UNIT WILL LOAD 375 ROUNDS PER HOUR (OLD FOLKS RATE)
    Happy trails & thanks for looking.
    Quick Draw Grandpa 48525
    Alias: Mike

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