Indians For Guns

The Maneaters of Tsavo; even after all these years the subject has not lost ists fascination.
Interest in the subject had been revived with the 1996 movie called "The Ghost and the Darkness"

I found this video on the subject:



I also found this. It seems to be an audio narration of the book by COlonel JH Patterson:

I love the Movie, watched it innumerable times

Awesome movie. Watched it in the cinema with full sound effects quite a few years back. Quite a thriller. One of Val Kilmer better movies.

Best was when he has the Lion in his sights and the borrowed rifle goes “click”.


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An extremely interesting and colorful personality Col J H Patterson. Those of us who are fond of hunting stories may have read Ernest Hemmingways classic African tale - "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". Well the story is based on Col Pattersons personal life. The Wikipedia link refers to it in an oblique sort of way.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henr ... n_(author).

Great movie! Douglas's character was mostly fictional - based very loosely on a real life character called Ryall

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Fascinating stuff. They are said to have developed their taste for human flesh from the bodies left by the slave traders.

From what I read in a short story of the events the rumour was the lions were the spirit's of 2 local tribal chiefs long dead and who were against the railway line being laid.
Don't know if that's in the book though

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I have read this book in which Patterson has mentioned the tribes of Africa and their customs and traditions...... but strangly I could not find any mention about an important part of Massai tribesmen tradition and that is hunting lion with spears

riflemarksman wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 03, 2020 10:08 am

I have read this book in which Patterson has mentioned the tribes of Africa and their customs and traditions...... but strangly I could not find any mention about an important part of Massai tribesmen tradition and that is hunting lion with spears

The Massai, one look at the them you can believe these guys can go head to head with a lion with Spears & Clubs!

Loved Ghost & The Darkness, still watch it, from time to time.

The story is too much hype considering the masais killing the lions with just spears

That is one of my all time favorite movies too. Not only the lions and African landscapes but also loved the period correct firearms that were used.

Pter Capstick's book "Maneaters" has a story about a pair of male lions who were terrorizing a district, and which he and another man were sent to eliminate. He talks of going to a village where a woman had been killed, and then her husband went out and took on the lions. (I can't recall exactly, but I don't think that anyone knew that it was two lions who were doing these raids together.) In the story, Capstick marveled at the bravery of the husband, who would go out and challenge a lion with just a spear.

He ended up tracking the lions to a cave, and when he had one cornered, another on a ledge behind him, which he hadn't seen, leaped at him, which his partner shot in the air. This lion knocked Capstick down, but his partner's shot had killed it. Capstick remarked, in another part of the book, how his house pet was a guinea pig and that he would never have a house cat as a pet.

Ancient literature and art recounts lion hunting as an activity for royalty. It seemed common, if the numerous mentions and depictions are true. We know that such accounts contain some hyperbole, but how much? There's no shortage of books like Capstick's, like the one featured in this thread, or Jim Corbett, or others. These, to me, don't seem like hyperbole.

Capstick's book also talks about a fellow in South America who hunted jaguars with success, often with only a spear.

All I can say is, these things are nice to read about . . .