The archive, unprecedented in scope, parts the curtain on TR the naturalist, hunter, explorer and outdoorsman / observer
PHILADELPHIA, PA – November 14, 2016 – The Raab Collection, the nation’s leading dealer in important historical documents, announced today that it has acquired and will be offering a large archive of letters of Theodore Roosevelt to outdoorsman and naturalist John Burroughs. The archive, which altogether contains more than 40 historical documents, shows TR’s remarkable skill at observation in the wild and are all written as President.
Excerpts of the collection:
• The Hunting Behavior of Big Cats: The Lynx and Bobcat: “In the course of many expeditions to, and much time spent in regions where our American lynxes of different kind were found – both lucivees and bob cats – and after puzzling over hundreds of their trails in the snow, and watching and sometimes shooting and hounding the animals, have never seen anything that remotely suggested courses of conduct like those.”
• The Evolutionary Advances of Humans: “Wide and deep though the gulf is between even the lowest man and an anthropoid ape or some carnivore as intelligent as a dog, there are in both the latter animals and in a good many other higher animals intellectual traits and (if I may use the word very loosely) moral or ethnical traits, which represent embryonic or rudimentary forms of such intellectual and moral traits of our own, and perhaps prefigure them, just as the little skin-covered bony knobs or knob-like epidermal growths on the heads of the animals which, ages ago, were the ancestors of the doer, the antelope, the rhinoceros of to-day, prefigured the extraordinary horn and antler growth of the existing forms.”
• A Bear Hunt, and the Dedication of His Book: “Outdoor Pleasures of an American Outdoorsman.” “I wish you could have been along on our bear hunt. I think the coyote hunt would have had too much rapid galloping and too little walking to suit you.
About The Raab Collection: The Raab Collection has handled many of the most important historical documents to reach the market and worked with the families of famous Americans in the sale and preservation of their family treasures, among them Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Henry Harrison, and Ronald Reagan. Nathan Raab, a member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, is also a contributor to Forbes.com. To learn more visit www.raabcollection.com or follow @raabcollection on Twitter.
