So. March 23, 1909. You’re a former president of the United States. You’ve just finished seven and a half years of busting trusts, building canals, and speaking softly while carrying a stick the size of Delaware. Most people might retire. Take up painting. Maybe do a speaking tour. But no, not this guy. This guy wakes up one morning, looks at his calendar, and goes, “You know what would be fun? Let’s go shoot every single animal in Africa.”
This wasn’t a weekend camping trip. It was the Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition. Sponsored by the Smithsonian and National Geographic, because apparently in 1909, that’s how you built a museum—by funding an ex-president’s Big Game Murder Safari.
He brought scientists, taxidermists, and even his teenage son Kermit, who must’ve had one hell of a “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay. “While other boys were taking Latin, I was photographing my father gutting a rhinoceros.”
They left New York on March 23 and didn’t even hit land in Africa until a month later. That’s how long it took just to start killing things. They arrived in Mombasa, which is in present-day Kenya, and then they zigzagged through Uganda, the Congo, Sudan—basically, anywhere something could run, Roosevelt wanted to chase it down and mount its head on a wall.
And let’s talk about the numbers here. This merry band of overachievers killed around 11,400 animals. That’s not a typo. Eleven thousand four hundred. At that point it’s not a safari—it’s a plague. Even the lions were probably like, “Jesus Christ, is that guy still here?!”
Now to be fair—yeah, I said it—they weren’t doing it just for fun. They were collecting specimens for science. Museums. Education. The Smithsonian ended up with enough bones and skins to start their own undead zoo. It took scientists eight years to sort through all the bodies. Imagine being the intern who gets assigned “antelope number 372.”
Roosevelt wrote all about the trip in a book called African Game Trails, which is basically a 500-page brag about how many things he shot and how manly it made him feel. “Today I killed a cape buffalo. It charged me. I was not afraid. Also, I sneezed and four giraffes dropped dead from shock.”
And look, in context—back then, people didn’t think twice about this stuff. Hunting was how you “collected” animals. But now, when we read about someone slaughtering 11,000 creatures, it doesn’t exactly scream “conservationist.” It screams, “Maybe this man should not be left alone with a loaded weapon or access to a boat.”
Still, this trip helped lay the foundation for the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. So yeah, thanks, I guess. But also: maybe next time, take a camera instead of a howitzer?
So there you go. March 23, 1909. The day a former president got bored and decided the best use of his post-White House years was going full “Grand Theft Ecosystem” on an entire continent.
And we built a museum around it. Because history is weird.
