Simpson-Roosevelts Asiatic Expedition

The James Simpson-Roosevelt Asiatic Expedition was a 1925 expedition sponsored by the Field Museum of Natural History and organized by Kermit Roosevelt and his brother Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.

In 1924, the Roosevelts decided they wanted to organize an expedition through Asia for the purposes of scientific achievement. They gained the interest of Field Museum President Stanley Field and Director Davies who were able to secure funding from science enthusiast James Simpson for their trip focusing on exploring the Pamirs, Turkestan and the Tian Shan Mountains. ... The Roosevelts would be the first to procure a collection of the wildlife in this region for an American museum. At the end of their journey they had collected over two thousand specimens of small mammals, birds and reptiles, along with seventy large mammals, including Ovis Poli, the great wild sheep.

James Simpson (1874–1939), a Field Museum trustee who had first been elected to that position in 1921, financed the expedition but remained in Chicago. The expedition's main participants were the two Roosevelt brothers, the naturalist George K. Cherrie, the photographer C. Suydam Cutting, two experienced hunters from Bandipur and several other Hindustani-speaking men who joined the expedition in Srinagar. The Roosevelts secured permission from the Chinese government to cross the Himalayas into Chinese territory.

George Cherrie went by freighter with the expedition's equipment, along with four cougar hounds, to Karachi. Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt with Suydam Cutting departed from New York City on 11 April 1925 aboard SS Leviathan. In England they secured, with the help of the Soviet envoy Rakovsky, permission to enter the Russian Pamirs. Stopping in Paris to buy presents for Asians they might encounter, the three Americans went by rail to Marseilles and then by ship to Bombay, arriving on May 11th. On May 19th the expedition left Srinagar with a caravan of 60 ponies. Via the Zoji Pass they reached Leh about June 1st and then collected several specimens of the barhal and the Tibetan antelope. For more than 2 weeks, the expedition journeyed through the high Himalayas and lost 14 of their 60 ponies, before reaching Sanju Bazaar in eastern Turkestan on July 5th. A few days later the party reached Yarkand, where they split up. Cutting went northwest to Kashgar; Cherrie collected birds, small mammals and reptiles in central Turkestan; the Roosevelts with the two Bandipur went to the Tian Shan Mountains for big game hunting.

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