Some of his famous clients included Baron Rothschild, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught and actor Gary Cooper. He worked with pioneer filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson and George Eastman and was a great friend of explorer/naturalist Carl Akely.

One of his early partners in the safari business was Bror Blixen, husband of Karen Blixen (Out of Africa). In later years he mentored a whole generation of professional hunters, including Sid Downey and Harry Selby. He was acknowledged by his peers as the Dean of Professional Hunters and was elected to thirty-four consecutive terms as president of the East African Professional Hunters Association.

J.A. Hunter hunted in Africa for more than fifty years, taking as many elephant as any of the greatest ivory hunters--and more rhino than any man before or since.

JOHN ALEXANDER HUNTER 1887-1963
J.A. Hunter also guided a mixture of people, from titled Europeans and wealthy industrialists to others who scrimped and saved to afford their one safari. Like Percival and Selby, Hunter was very good at his trade, but probably no better than dozens of others. He, however, was not made famous by one of his clients.

It happens that J.A. Hunter was as good a storyteller as he was a hunter. His timing was also perfect. Even the very best hunting book today will only be published by a specialty publisher, and its readership will be limited to the hunting community. Mainstream publisher Harper & Brothers published J.A. Hunter's second book, Hunter, in 1952. It was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection that year, and just a few years later, in my school library, it gave me my first taste of Africa.

J.A. Hunter (center) weighing ivory for the market. Hunter served as a professional hunter for more than twenty years, but should be equally well remembered as a game control officer and ivory hunter.

J.A. Hunter arrived in Kenya from Scotland in 1908. His father had intended for him to be a farmer, but by his own account he grew up far more interested in hunting than farming. Following a wee scandal with a local lass, he landed in Mombassa with his father's old Purdey shotgun and a 7x57 Mauser. Farming didn't work for him any better in Africa than it did in Scotland. After a couple of fits and starts, he made his living as a PH for fifty years.

Hunter started out shooting lions for their hides (a British pound each in Mombassa) and later hunted elephants for their ivory. He is credited with more than 1,400 elephants, which puts him on a very short list of the great ivory hunters along with Jimmy Sutherland and Karamoja Bell. Throughout much of his career, Hunter was a game control officer called upon to handle some of the most difficult assignments, but he also spent twenty years taking clients on safari.

J.A. Hunter (right) and his client with an exceptionally fine bull elephant.

He has the dubious distinction of taking more rhinos than any man before or since. This was largely because of an assignment to clear the great beasts from a huge tract of rhino-infested thornbush in Kenya's Machakos District to make way for farming. He regretted the necessity, but he accomplished the mission and lived to tell of it.

Captain A.T.A. Ritchie followed Blayney Percival as the second game warden of Kenya, from 1923 to 1949. He wrote the forward to Hunter, affirming that the most dangerous jobs were consistently given to J.A. Hunter: