Camp-Fire on Desert and Lava

Follow Boone and Crockett Club member William T. Hornaday on his month-long expedition in November of 1907 to the uncharted lavascape of southern Arizona and northern Mexico to an area known as the Pinacate region. Hornaday is joined by John M. Phillips who had accompanied him two years earlier in the Great North, chronicled in Camp-Fires in the Canadian Rockies. You’ll once again revel in their adventures with the author’s entertaining prose as they encounter interesting characters, extraordinary craters, amazing cacti, and collect desert sheep for the Carnegie Museum.

An excerpt from Hornaday’s Preface...

Naturally, the animal and plant life of the Pinacate region was as much unknown as its geography; hence our combination of botanist, zoologist, sportsman, and geographer. In any wild country, that is “a good hand to draw to,” and with the three jolly good fellows whose company I shared, I could enjoy exploring any country this side of the Styx. Indeed, I would take my chances with them beyond it.

Ever since it was my good fortune to see the Rocky Mountain big-horn at its culminating point in British Columbia, I had been keenly desirous of studying that species at the point where its progress southward is stopped by fierce heat, and scanty food and water. It seemed to me that in the Pinacate region we might in all probability find one of the jumping-off places of the genus Ovis in North America; which we did.

Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava is a part of the B&C Classics series launched in 2012 by the Boone and Crockett Club. Each book in the series was authored by a member of B&C in the late 1800s or early 1900s and was hand-selected by a committee of vintage hunting literature experts. Readers will be taken back to a time when hunting trips didn’t happen over a weekend, but were adventures spanning weeks, months, even years.