In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt Embarked on an Ambitious Expedition to East Africa. Here’s Why His Trip Still Matters Today
The 26th U.S. president is both lauded as a conservationist and condemned as a big-game hunter. A new book recounts the historic journey on which he helped form a significant collection of animals at the National Museum of Natural History
In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt Embarked on an Ambitious Expedition to East Africa. Here’s Why His Trip Still Matters Today
The 26th U.S. president is both lauded as a conservationist and condemned as a big-game hunter. A new book recounts the historic journey on which he helped form a significant collection of animals at the National Museum of Natural History
Roosevelt stands between the Sister of Rev. W.F. Bumsted, at that time mother superior of the convent, and the young King Daudi of Uganda, and is surrounded by members of the king's court at St. Mary's Convent, near Kampala, December 22, 1909
Unidentified photographer / Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
On a frigid day in March 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt rode slowly through the streets of Washington, D.C., his horse-drawn carriage navigating nearly a foot of snow and slush on the way to the inauguration of his successor, William Howard Taft. The short trip marked Roosevelt’s exit from the White House, but his thoughts were already on the next great journey of his life.
Before the month was over, Roosevelt again found himself surrounded by cheering throngs at another historic departure. This time, in New York, Roosevelt was boarding the Hamburg to embark on an adventure that captivated people all over the world: the Smithsonian expedition to British East Africa.
Eager to escape the responsibilities of the presidency and give Taft space to govern, Roosevelt longed to get away, enjoy camp life and take to the field with his gun. Roosevelt and his son Kermit would bag elephants, rhinoceroses and lions—but theirs was no simple big-game safari. The 1909-1910 expedition, through parts of what is now Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, included leading scientists. It produced a written and photographic record of an Africa that few in the West had seen, and it diligently described and preserved hundreds of African animals that became a foundational collection for the newly minted National Museum of Natural History.
In a new title from Smithsonian Books, Theodore Roosevelt and the Smithsonian Expedition to British East Africa, 1909-1910, readers can experience the expedition in Roosevelt’s own words, written during evenings in his camp tent. The book features 28 excerpts from his chronicle of the trip, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist. It’s illustrated with more than 100 fascinating expedition photographs, many taken by Kermit Roosevelt, that capture East Africa’s landscapes, fauna and people. Author Frank H. Goodyear III provides thoughtful historical context and commentary on the expedition’s enduring scientific significance, while exploring how the endeavor reflects the era’s colonial imperialist attitudes toward Africa and its people.
“He saw a long tradition of exploration and seeking out new knowledge, and trying to connect worlds together,” Goodyear says. “Of course, exploration is also part of empire building, so that’s a part of the legacy here as well. But I think he very much saw himself as participating in this history of Western exploration.”
Accompany Theodore Roosevelt on his Smithsonian safari to East Africa with new context and perspectives.
Key takeaways: Theodore Roosevelt's trip to East Africa
In 1909, just after his presidency ended, Roosevelt and his son Kermit journeyed to East Africa to collect specimens for the Smithsonian's new National Museum of Natural History.
The museum opened to the public in 1910, and the many animal and plant species that Roosevelt and fellow naturalists brought back from the trip helped form a significant collection for the museum of today.
It was a crucial time for such a trip. Roosevelt saw how railroads and settlers had forever altered the wild landscape of the American West. In Africa, such change was happening quickly. Roosevelt knew it, as did many others who were scrambling to collect and document African species and ecosystems that were on the brink of radical transformation or extinction.
“It’s a real transitional moment in the history of East Africa,” Goodyear says. “Colonization is really beginning to take hold. You have the construction of the Uganda Railroad that literally opens up the territory; you have the beginnings of large-scale ranching and farming; you have colonial settlements being established throughout the land. So it was clear that the impact on indigenous ecosystems was going to be profound.”
Roosevelt presents Kermit to King Daudi of Uganda, December 21, 1909
Charles W. Hattersley / Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Roosevelt’s environmental legacy remains complex. He’s been celebrated as a conservationist and criticized for being a big-game hunter, especially by those who had recently witnessed the destruction of the buffalo and the native ecosystems of the American West. “It was controversial in its own day, and it remains controversial. What some perceived as the wanton destruction of wildlife offended many people,” Goodyear says. But Roosevelt was aware of this criticism and determined that this trip would not be an exercise in “game butchery.”
“I would a great deal rather have this a scientific trip, which would give it a purpose and character, than simply a prolonged holiday of mine,” he explained in a letter to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge.
Roosevelt’s passion for the natural sciences was real and lifelong, notes Darrin Lunde, mammals collections manager at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Yes, he liked big-game hunting,” Lunde says. “But he was so much more than a hunter. It genuinely was a scientific expedition led by a former president who himself could hold his own as an ornithologist and a mammalogist.”
He was an eternal naturalist who collected specimens and started his own museum as a child. “He was one of those guys who liked to get out with his gun, collect things, do taxidermy, describe new species,” Lunde says, noting that Roosevelt originally went to Harvard University to be a naturalist, a part of him that always remained. He kept correspondence with leading naturalists and curators throughout his life.
For Roosevelt, this trip “started out as a hunt and very quickly became a museum expedition,” Lunde says. “Because this was a chance to live that boyhood dream of being this great, classical kind of museum naturalist.”
Roosevelt on his favorite horse, Tranquillity, in Nairobi, Kenya, July 26, 1909
Paul Thompson / Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Planning the trip in the White House, Roosevelt proposed an intriguing partnership to Secretary of the Smithsonian Charles Doolittle Walcott. If Walcott would provide naturalists who could identify, describe and catalog the species of Africa, and prepare specimens for transport, Roosevelt would donate them as a collection for the new National Museum of Natural History.
“Now, it seems to me that this [trip] opens the best chance for the National Museum to get a fine collection not only of the big-game beasts, but of the smaller mammals and birds of Africa; and looking at it dispassionately, it seems to me that the chance ought not to be neglected,” Roosevelt wrote, asking to except only “a very few personal trophies of little scientific value which for some reason I might like to keep.”
The deal also had a financial angle. Roosevelt was adamant about paying for his own expenses, but the extensive scientific aspects of the expedition needed funding. Walcott, thrilled at the prospect of securing a landmark collection for the museum and publicizing it by partnering with a former president, was willing to help. The Smithsonian pledged $30,000, all raised by private subscription, avoiding the need to ask Congress for funds, which Roosevelt found ethically and politically distasteful. The museum got more than its money’s worth.
Three naturalists—Edgar Mearns, co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union and a former military surgeon; Edmund Heller, an expert in large mammals and African game; and J. Alden Loring, a small mammal specialist with experience on Smithsonian scientific expeditions—worked tirelessly collecting mice, bats, birds and shrews, as well as pressing plants and stockpiling interesting insects. Roosevelt’s Life-Histories of African Game Animals chronicled the collection—which includes thousands of mammal, bird and plant specimens. Each one was measured, cataloged and painstakingly preserved for travel. Many were photographed, and expedition members recorded the time and place of collection habitats, the subjects’ behavior in the field, and other details.
The effort produced a collection of enduring value.
“All of those Roosevelt specimens, for the most part, are still here,” Lunde says. “We have the best collection of East African mammals anywhere, in large part because of the contributions of the Roosevelt expedition.” The collection is irreplaceable, he notes, because it occurred at a time when scientists could get not just the little mammals still collected today, but the elephants, rhinos and other megafauna still prevalent at the time. Even now, Lunde notes, scientists study the collection: “It’s all represented here, and people are coming in all the time and using those specimens, to this day, and publishing on it.”
Mammals Exhibits, Natural History Building, Square-Lipped Rhinoceros Group, 1913
Unidentified photographer / Smithsonian Institution Archives
Because Roosevelt was one of the world’s most famous people, countless reporters hoped to accompany the expedition and scoop its stories of African adventure. He rejected them all, preferring to control the narrative and tell the story himself—while earning cash to help fund his personal expenses.
Scribner’s paid $50,000 for Roosevelt to write 12 articles from the field, set to appear in Scribner’s Monthly, and the publishing house also agreed to print African Game Trails, which would bring the series together in one volume.
Kermit, who had trained as the expedition’s primary photographer, and others supplemented this with an incredible array of pictures. These had scientific value; showing African fauna in their native habitats gave a fuller picture of Africa’s ecosystems. They also helped to promote the trip abroad and enhance Roosevelt’s hale and hardy image.
“The photography is what first drew me into this project,” says Goodyear, a former curator of photography at the National Portrait Gallery. “They are absolutely extraordinary: extraordinary in the story they tell and extraordinary in their depth. There are more than 1,000 of these photos, and they comprise an incredible record of the people, places and fauna of East Africa.”
(Though not part of the expedition, British photographer and filmmaker Cherry Kearton was also in Africa at the time and crossed paths with Roosevelt at several points, shooting footage that would become the 1910 film Roosevelt in Africa.)
A herd of elephants in an open forest, 1909
Kermit Roosevelt / Smithsonian Institution Archives
Kenyan entomologist Dino Martins has written a valuable afterword to Goodyear’s book. In it, he stresses that, like other African expeditions and collecting trips, Roosevelt’s group depended on support and knowledge from a wide range of individuals and communities, including traders, local leaders, porters and guides who knew how to travel and survive in a challenging landscape.
“Though often unacknowledged, that local knowledge and support made it possible for Western explorers to undertake these journeys, for without them their expeditions would certainly have failed,” Martins writes.
Despite their importance to the journey, African people are largely absent from Roosevelt’s narrative in African Game Trails.
“Outside of himself, Kermit and a few heads of game, nearly all other figures in the book are shadowy, and even Africa itself does not stand out very clearly. The book is avowedly Rooseveltian,” a reviewer from the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote of Roosevelt’s work in 1910. Although the critic dubbed this trait the “greatest charm” of African Game Trails, today, this narrow focus seems like a lost opportunity.
“Some of the Kikuyu assistants and guides did become really close to Roosevelt,” Goodyear says. “But you can only kind of tease out the nature of these relationships by a few passing comments.”
Tohan with a Marabou stork, 1909
Kermit Roosevelt / Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
The expedition has also contributed a lasting scientific legacy in Africa; it was one of the first to extensively collect and document animals and plants beyond the classic big-game species.
In 2015, a “Roosevelt Resurvey” expedition included Kenyan scientists and naturalists co-leading fieldwork and research programs that retraced the footsteps of the Roosevelt expedition. It found a rodent species on Mount Kenya that had been described by the Smithsonian naturalists during the original expedition, then “lost” for more than a century afterward. “Two data points on this little rat, over a century apart: a lesson on how much we still need to learn about the world around us,” writes Martins.
And while the Roosevelt expedition literally put a site called Rhino Camp on the map by shooting white rhinos there, its work studying the many smaller species and their interactions has since proved very valuable. “They documented the fauna of that region when it was intact, when it still had white rhino roaming around, so we have an accurate picture before it was perturbed in any serious way,” Lunde explains.
More than a century later, that landscape has changed dramatically, with rhinos and other animals wiped out and people moved in. But the Uganda Wildlife Authority is working at the Ajai Reserve to restore the ecosystem and its megafauna, including the iconic white rhino. Doing so successfully is a complicated endeavor, but it’s being informed by the time-machine-like snapshot gathered by the early 20th-century expedition.
“Without it, efforts to create these parks would just be guesswork,” says Lunde, whose team at the museum is aiding the effort by surveying existing species to contrast with the past. “Now, the Ugandans are actually doing it, and thanks to the Roosevelt-Smithsonian expedition they are able to refer to a record of what these habitats were like in their natural state.”
From left to right: Theodore Roosevelt, R.J. Cuninghame and Edgar A. Mearns, on the way to Kijabe, Kenya, June 3, 1909
Unidentified photographer / Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University
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