In Closed Territory

"CLOSED TERRITORY" is a phrase that inspires longings and expresses conditions of the sort that, in one form or another from the days of Adam, have served out to mankind most of the sweetest pleasures and bitterest pains experienced between earliest sentient childhood and feeblest senile age. Never are we so old or so young that we are entirely safe from the allurements it suggests, the novel charms and new intoxications with which our imagination close hedges every twisted turn of forbidden paths. The pitfalls it holds, alike for toddling infancy, firm-treading prime, and halting, stumbling age, we never think of until into them we are deeply and more or less hopelessly plunged.

This newest of British Colonies comprises 400,000 square miles of territory. It has a native black population of 4,000,000, divided among something over a dozen different tribes, each widely differing in language and tribal customs from all the others, all warrior races perpetually battling with each other until brought under measurable discipline by British authority, the most powerful being the Kikuyu, the Masai, and the Wakamba.

"His descriptions of the experiences he had in the wilds of the African bush are thrilling...one of the few Americans who were admitted to the closed territory before the coming of Roosevelt." -El Paso Herald, March 10, 1910

"Bronson obtained the permission of the British Government to make a journey through its 'closed territory' in search of big game...not only a sportsman but an excellent writer... a highly entertaining book of adventure." -San Francisco Bulletin, March 19, 1910

"Bronson has been a cowboy, Indian fighter, and ranch owner...Bronson's description of his elephant hunting is very vivid, his experiences being thrilling in the extreme." -Washington Herald, March 20, 1910

"Bronson is the type of strenuous American hunter of big game, and like Roosevelt got his first inspiration in following the wild animals of the West while a ranchman in Wyoming...combines good hunting with good writing." -St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 27, 1910