The Hunters' Feast: Conversations Around the Camp-fire

The only account of Reid's hunting trip with John J. Audubon from St. Louis to the Osage country, 300 miles southwest of Independence, Missouri. Stories about hunting cougars, squirrels, raccoons, moose, bears, buffalo and more. These tales of hunting and knowledge of a naturalist, combine to tell of life in the far West. Mayne Reid, a pre-eminent and popular writer, was primarily a novelist (1818-1883) who wrote adventure stories from just before the Civil War until his death in 1883. Reid's career included two periods in the U. S: 1840-49 and 1867-70. He had emigrated to the United States in his early twenties, reaching New Orleans in January, 1840, where he pursued a varied career as a shopkeeper, overseer of slaves, schoolmaster, and actor, with occasional forays into hunting and Indian warfare. Reid returned to England in 1849, and embarked upon a successful career as a writer of adventure novels and books for boys. He was a close friend of Poe (though their writings were miles apart), played a gallant role in the Mexican War, worked as a journalist and wrote most of his first novel while in the United States. He was an influence on the young mind of Teddy Roosevelt, as Roosevelt reveals in his Autobiography; while Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his 1890s essay Juvenilia that when young he always kept "Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow;" Robert Louis Stevenson praised Reid in the Vailima Letters, and J. Frank Dobie has said he, "dared convey real information in his romances."