Pope and Young in Africa
In February of 1925, Saxton Pope and Art Young joined Steward Edward White, a hunter and writer on a trip to Tanganyika, Africa at the request of Leslie Simpson, an ex-mining engineer and now hunter.
They would leave their homes in the Western US in February, travel across the continent and sail from New York for Cherbourg, France on March 6th. Having reached France, they sailed from Marseilles, passing through the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, arriving at the town of Mombasa on April 6th.
From Mombasa, they traveled by rail 400 miles inland to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, which is at an altitude of 5,000 ft. From Nairobi, the group traveled about 240 miles south by automobile to their permanent camp on the Sironera River, arriving on April 14th. This last part of their journey took them through the Sarangeti Plains and the Masai Reserve. It was from here that they went forth on their many hunts over the next five months.
Dr. Pope writes about their experiences in his book: The Adventurous Bowmen....consists of some half dozen bows apiece.......each archer carries a hundred or more arrows...
Besides this outfit we have in our baggage, arrow shafts, feathers and steel arrowheads sufficient for two thousand more arrows, ....
Our bows are made of yew wood or osage orange. Their length is five feet six or eight inches and each pulls from sixty to ninety pounds when the bow is full drawn. The strings are made of Irish linen, well waxed. The arrow shafts are of birch, three-eights of an inch in diameter and twenty-eight inches in length....
Short biographies of Pope and Young can be found at the Stickbow Web Site