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 11.
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 5.
Cutting went northwest to Kashgar; Cherrie collected birds, small mammals and reptiles in central Turkestan; the Roosevelts with the two Bandipur shikaris went to the Tian Shan Mountains for big game hunting.
After departing the Tian Shan Mountains, the Roosevelts arrived in Kashgar on September 28 and then in the Russian Pamirs successfully shot and collected a museum group of Marco Polo sheep.
[7] The Roosevelt brothers met their wives in Srinagar in early November[8] and then after some more shooting and collecting of specimens in British India, the party returned to the United States.
The foremost collections are those made in the early seventies of the last century by the two Yarkand Missions under T. D. Forsyth, whose ornithological results were reported upon by Henderson and Hume, Scully, and Sharpe.
Other contributions to the ornithology of the Tarim basin are due to Menzbier, Przewalski, and Schalow, while Dr. W. L. Abbott's travels added considerably to our knowledge of the bird-life of the western Himalayas and Eastern Turkestan.