The Hunters' Feast

This popular edition of Captain Mayne Reid's adventure serial *The Hunters' Feast* (Volume XVIII, No. 934) concerns a buffalo-hunting expedition organized in 1840s St. Louis. The narrator, a young sportsman, assembles six companions for a prairie expedition: Thompson, a modest English nobleman with an umbrella and double-barreled gun; a tall Kentuckian planter and accomplished deer-hunter; Dr. John Jopper, a jolly but impoverished physician with musical talents; Jules Besancon, a young Creole botanist from Louisiana studying southern flora; an unnamed distinguished naturalist known as Mr. A—— with international scientific reputation; and the narrator himself in embroidered buckskin. Professional guides Jake (a freedman teamster) and Mike Lanty (an Irishman from Limerick) manage the supply wagon. The expedition departs St. Louis seeking buffalo on the western prairies, combining sportsman adventure with natural history collection.