To Theodore Roosevelt the American Bison was a symbol of wild nature and western culture which he loved. Roosevelt was motivated by his quest to hunt the largest land mammal on the continent. He hunted and killed his first buffalo in 1883 at the age of 24 in Montana at Little Cannonball Creek. After the kill he danced enthusiastically around that buffalo to celebrate his success. Later on his second bison hunt in 1889 Theodore became more sanguine about the loss of the species, reflecting: 'So for several minutes I watched the great beasts as they grazed...mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter was a certain half-melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison, themselves part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race. Few indeed are the men who now have or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of his far-off mountain home'.