CHAPTER TEN

THE WILDERNESS HUNTER IN THE ELECTRIC AGE

I

Ever since Roosevelt arrived in the Dakota Territory in 1883 to ranch cattle, the very idea of Texas enthralled him. Many of the Badlands cowboys he encountered spoke of the Hill Country as a hunter’s paradise teeming with big-bodied deer. So in the spring of 1892, as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, thirty-three-year-old Roosevelt hatched a plan. Officially, he was going to Texas to investigate the dismissal of a few U.S. postal employees solely for partisan political reasons. But he also arranged for a six-day collared peccary hunt in the South Texas Coastal Plain, which would enliven The Wilderness Hunter, the outdoors memoir he was writing. Furthermore Roosevelt was hoping to anchor future installments of The Winning of the West on Lone Star history. “The next volumes I take up I hope will be the Texan struggle and the Mexican War,” Roosevelt would write his friend Madison Grant. “I quite agree with your estimate of these conflicts, and am surprised that they have not received more attention.”¹

Killing a peccary (or “javelina,” the term preferred in Texas) during the Gilded Age wasn’t easy. In addition to being elusive, peccaries were fierce fighters who traveled in packs, known to slash horses’ legs with their daggerlike tusks and stampede over dogs in dense thickets of chaparral and scrub oak. “They were subject to freaks of stupidity, and were pugnacious to a degree,” Roosevelt wrote. “Not only would they fight if molested, but they would often attack entirely without provocation.”²

Roosevelt had imagined Uvalde, Texas—where his friend John Moore ranched—to be a temperate prairie like North Dakota. But the area’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico meant there was a wide range of varied habitat to study. Three different types of rail—King, Clapper, and Virginia—were found in the brushlands. Around giant cypress trees or pecan groves Roosevelt discovered uncommon species such as greater pewee and Rufous-capped warbler. Bustling insectivorous redbirds and flycatchers, moving together in concert, abounded. Around wild fruit fields were frugivorous birds, including many whose genera Roosevelt was uncertain about.³

After discovering no peccaries along the Frio River, the Roosevelt paty headed south along the Nueces River toward the oak-motte prairies of the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. The spring air was mild at Choke Canyon, and Roosevelt was delighted to see so much unexpected greenery. Little brown swifts dashed in front of his horse at regular intervals as they moved seaward avoiding the stinging ants. The horseflies were the biggest he had ever seen. The insects were such a serious problem for Texas settlers that screens covered house windows and smoking coils were lit to ward off the swarms. Those in shacks smoked fern rollups to ward them off. Roosevet copiously noted the lilac-colored flowers and wide bands of purplish wildflowers that carpeted the unobstructed Texas prairie. “Great blue herons,” he wrote, “were stalking beside these pools, and from one we flushed a white ibis.”⁴

Once Roosevelt had absorbed the Nueces River area in exacting detail, the expedition went onward with trophy-hungry determination. At sunrise the hunt party was greeted by the Texas nightingale (the mockingbird) and at sunset by the howls of coyotes. But no javelinas. Just when the hunting looked bleakest of all, however, Roosevelt suddenly stumbled upon his mark. A sow and a long-tusked boar turned their huge heads toward the Roosevelt party, grinding their teeth so loudly it produced a sound like Mexican castanets. Their needle-sharp eyes had that dark, calmly menacing look of a great white shark as it circles prey. Roosevelt shot them both at point-blank range.⁵

That evening the hunt party feasted on peccary and Roosevelt shipped his trophy heads back to New York. More than anything else, it seemed, Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed the tough-talk style of his Texas compa-dres. Like a mynah bird, Roosevelt had picked up a lot of sayings and brags which he now constantly repeated back in Washington. He admired, for example, the story of a Texan who carefully studied a tenderfoot’s 32-caliber pistol and said: “Stranger, if you ever shot me with that, and I know’d it, I would kick you all over Texas.” As a corollary, Roosevelt decided that when it came to peccary hunting, guns weren’t the armament of choice. “They ought to be killed with a spear,” Roosevelt wrote his British friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice. “The country is so thick, with huge cactus and thorny mesquite trees, that the riding is hard; but they are small and it would be safe to go at them on foot—at any rate for two men.”⁶

Texas put a ruddy color back in Roosevelt’s cheeks; and his brow, though creased, now showed few traces of stress. The fresh air had once again purged his bureaucratic fatigue, and the open country had given him time to relax and think. The spare campfire meals had thinned him down quite a bit. Once back in Washington, he remained so enchanted with Texas cowboy lore, in fact, that he made plans to visit Deadwood in August to see with his own eyes where Wild Bill Hickok died. (He went and deemed it “a golden town.”⁷)

That journey to the Black Hills of South Dakota, however, had a civil service objective: to investigate graft and inhumane conditions on various Sioux reservations following the massacre at Wounded Knee. Roosevelt rode to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where more than 7,000 Sioux lived, largely in squalor, to investigate what had happened twenty months earlier when the Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull was murdered by U.S. troops while under house arrest.⁸ That killing had triggered the massacre of December 29, 1890, when 500 cavalrymen surrounded an encampment of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. Four rapid artillery-fire Hotchkiss guns were brought in and—after a sharp disagreement with a deaf tribesman who refused to surrender his rifle—more than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children lay murdered in the bloodied snow. “They gathered up the frozen dead in wagons at Wounded Knee,” The American Heritage Book of Indians later lamented, “and buried them all together in a communal pit.”⁹

Naturally, at the time of Roosevelt’s inspection, tension between the Sioux residents and white guards at Pine Ridge remained high. Complaints that the Sioux were now being given poisoned food had traveled back to Washington, D.C., and landed on Roosevelt’s desk; ¹⁰ he was looking into allegations that U.S. officials were diluting and stealing foodstuffs directed toward the Great Plains reservations. (As president, Roosevelt, after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, famously took on the Chicago meatpacking industry for selling rancid beef and pork. Now, fourteen years before the Meat Inspection Act was passed, he sided with the discontented tribes who claimed they were being sold poison pork at commissary stores on the reservations.)

As it turned out, Commissioner Roosevelt sided with the Indians on most of the issues. No American, he maintained, should be deliberately served rotting meat and given poor medical attention. Roosevelt’s host, Captain Hugh C. Brown, boldly issued a meat recall at Pine Ridge, defying his military orders. The stealing of U.S. supplies directed for the reservations, Roosevelt thundered, had to stop at once. Breaking with General William T. Sherman’s philosophy that all Native Americans had to “be killed” or else “maintained as a species of paupers,” Roosevelt wanted the tribespeople fully integrated into the fabric of American life.¹¹ To Roosevelt, the properly maintained reservations were merely a way station to fuller integration, which could be accorded in due time.

At the time of Roosevelt’s reservation tour, the number of Indians in the United States was only 250,000, drastically decreased from estimates of the population in 1492, which were in the millions. The surviving Native Americans had overcome disease, conquest, genocide, and assimilation, but Roosevelt worried that the spoils system could do them in. “The Indian problem is difficult enough, heaven only knows,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1891 to a friend who advocated Indian rights, “and it is cruel to complicate it by having the Indian service administered on patronage principles.”¹²

From Pine Ridge Roosevelt headed south to meet the humanitarian Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Organized in 1882, the IRA believed in the immediate and direct acculturation of Native Americans into the mainstream of U.S. society. The energetic Welsh knew how to lobby effectively on behalf of Indian welfare (or, at least the IRA’s vision of it).¹³ The IRA believed serious changes needed to be made in state and federal government to create a pathway to full citizenship for all Native Americans.¹⁴

Roosevelt deemed Welsh the most effective advocate fighting on behalf of Indians in America. Together, they toured the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. They also visited George Bird Grinnell’s old stomping grounds in Nebraska (where he had once befriended the Blackfoot and North Cheyenne while working on Buffalo Bill’s ranch near North Platte). In his capacity as civil service commissioner, Roosevelt inspected the Missouri River Indian agencies in South Dakota and Nebraska—Yankton, Santee, Omaha, and Winnebago—pausing at all the old Lewis and Clark campsites for curiosity’s sake. Although he stumped for President Harrison’s reelection along the way, he also denounced the abuses Native Americans were suffering in Nebraska’s reservations at the hands of a delinquent U.S. government. During this inspection trip Roosevelt didn’t keep a South Dakota–Nebraska diary, but he did write an official report as civil service commissioner, one that was considered too inflammatory to be published in family newspapers. It was pure Roosevelt, playing the role of muckraker in the style of Lincoln Steffens or Jacob Riis. Point by point he analyzed why Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribespeople weren’t getting a fair shake. The federal government didn’t disseminate Roosevelt’s final report, but Welsh printed 3,000 copies and distributed them to leading legislators and philanthropists. “By the time of Roosevelt’s departure from the Civil Service Commission in 1895,” the historian William T. Hagan has noted, “he had earned the admiration of many friends of the Indian.”¹⁵

Although Roosevelt was enough of a social Darwinist to write that the Pawnee and Cherokee were far superior to the Sioux, he was more fair-minded in his assessment of the U.S. government’s failings in its Indian policies than most other leading politicians of the era. Exactly why Roosevelt behaved so decently to Indians is paradoxical but simple. Never one to romanticize Sitting Bull or Geronimo (deeming both dangerous rabble-rousers), he had invested so mightily in the U.S. Army’s western triumphs that he wanted to make sure the defeated Indians were not treated badly or as inferiors. This basic moral premise put him in the IRA camp. Just as presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant forgave the Confederates after the Civil War, welcoming them back into the Union fold, Roosevelt believed that now that the West was won, the vanquished Indians should be brought into the constitutional democracy with the same God-given rights as everybody else. Roosevelt’s Americanism—that is, the need for the country to act as one—far outweighed his mistaken interest in armchair eugenics.

Yet there was another factor in play. Tickled to be called the Great White Chief by some Native Americans, Roosevelt truly respected the central role bison continued to play in the culture and religion of the Sioux (and other tribes). Unlike Euro-Americans, the pragmatic Sioux tribes used every part of the buffalo: hides were made into clothing and tepees; horns were eating utensils and cups; and muscles provided glue and bowstrings. After killing a buffalo, the Sioux would first eat the fresh meat and then preserve the rest as sun-dried jerky strips. A positive auxiliary effect of repopulating the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions with buffalo, Roosevelt believed, was to properly honor the folkways of the Plains Indians. George Bird Grinnell was in full agreement on this point. Like the Plains Indians, the Boone and Crockett Club hoped, as an Indian once told Grinnell, that someday the prairie lands would once again be “One Robe.”¹⁶

In a kingmaking mood following his successful appearances at the Deadwood Opera House and the Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas reservations, Roosevelt continued to give last-minute speeches back East championing President Harrison’s reelection whenever the Republican National Committee asked. His voice, however, wasn’t persuasive enough. On November 8, 1892, the Democrat Grover Cleveland easily defeated Harrison by 277 electoral votes to 145.¹⁷ As Cleveland took office on March 4, 1893, Roosevelt offered his resignation from the civil service. The incoming president refused, deciding that having a high-profile Republican reformer like Roosevelt in his administration was a good thing.

His job secure, Roosevelt forged ahead with more outside activity. He wanted the Boone and Crockett Club to have a log cabin exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, opening in May 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (as well as Chicago’s moment to present itself as a world-class city). There were more than 200 European-designed buildings going up on the fairgrounds alongside Lake Michigan, so Roosevelt had focused on displaying the vernacular frontier home, the log cabin, as a point of national pride. The humble birthplaces of Lincoln and Grant were far more impressive, he believed, than Buckingham Palace or the Vatican. (Both replica presidential cabins were exhibited in Chicago under the slogan that the ingenuous American “cuts his coat according to his cloth.”¹⁸) Roosevelt assumed the role of exhibit designer, and his archetypal western log cabin was packed with Davy Crockett relics and old-time hunting and trapping equipment.¹⁹ It was situated on a man-made island called the Wooded Island, in a man-made lagoon, and was next to the Japanese pavilion. The “cabin” staff hired a long-haired hunter as host. Schoolchildren could watch him perform public demonstrations that included curing venison jerky and constructing a box trap.²⁰ Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett cabin had to compete with an exact replica of the Old Times Distillery of Kentucky, which gave out free whiskey samples. A New England cabin was also on the grounds, providing “good old-fashioned” seafood stews for the tasting. Still, owing to the Crockett memorabilia, Roosevelt’s cabin was a popular tourist destination.

The very announcement that Roosevelt was erecting a frontier cabin at the Chicago Exposition brought him a lot of mail. One was from an old hunting friend and guide on his trip to the Bighorns. In spite of its clearly anti-Indian, illiterate tone Roosevelt relished in the letter’s colorful slang:

Feb 16th 1893; Der Sir: I see in the newspapers that your club the Daniel Boon and Davey Crockit you Intend to erect a fruntier Cabin at the world’s Far at Chicago to represent the erley Pianears of our country I would like to see you maik a success I have all my life been a fruntiersman and feel interested in your undertaking and I hoap you wile get a good assortment of relicks I want to maik one suggestion to you that is in regard to getting a good man and a genuine Mauntanner to take charg of our haus at Chicago I want to recommend a man for you to get it is Liver-eating Johnson that is the naim he is generally called he is an olde mauntneer and large and fine looking and one of the Best Story Tellers in the country and Very Polight genteel to every one he meets I wil tel you how he got that naim Liver-eating in a hard Fight with the Black Feet Indians thay Faught all day Johnson and a few Whites Faught a large Body of Indians all day after the fight…Johnson was aut of ammunition and thay faught it out with thar Knives and Johnson got away with the Indian and in the fight cut the livver out of the Indian and said to the Boys did thay want any Liver to eat that is the way he got the naim of Liver-eating Johnson.

“YOURS TRULY” ETC., ETC.²¹

Another Rooseveltian scheme for the Chicago World’s Fair was to commission the artist Alexander Proctor to design and erect life-size sculptures of American wildlife on the bridges connecting the fairgrounds and lagoons. At Roosevelt’s behest Proctor, who had been raised in Denver, created life-size polar and grizzly bears, elks, cougars, and moose for public display. To Roosevelt, Proctor’s naturalist work, influenced by Darwin, was the highlight of the entire exposition. Both Roosevelt and Proctor insisted onexactness of animal composition. Wanting to honor his sculptor friend for a job well done, Roosevelt held a salutatory dinner for him at the Boone and Crockett cabin display in Chicago. In between toasts declaring Proctor the greatest sculptor of the American West, a man who understood the intersection of nature, wildlife, and science, the wildlife artist was asked to join the club. In coming years Proctor achieved some degree of renown for his bas-relief Moose Family, commissioned by the forester Gifford Pinchot in 1907 after Roosevelt became president.²² “For the men of the Boone and Crockett Club,” the historians Jesse Donahue and Erik Trump wrote in Political Animals, “Proctor was representative of the vanishing West, both through his work and in his person.”²³

Roosevelt also got into the fair’s futuristic spirit by offering advice on the Forestry Building interpretive center, constructed with a rustic wraparound veranda made solely out of indigenous wood. He also found the Idaho pavilion impressive: this three-story western cabin was made of basaltic rock, volcanic lava, and stripped cedar logs; with large chimneys, an arched stone entranceway, and a reception room fitted out like a trapper’s den, it became a prototype to be emulated in future national parks for information centers or lodges.²⁴ What Roosevelt appreciated in the Idaho Pavilion was a new type of western architecture, which easily blended into the natural setting. (Little did Roosevelt know that in 1893, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright constructed Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois, considered the first of his free-flowing prairie-style homes, which brought the natural world directly into the hearth instead of blocking it out.²⁵)

Although 27 million people streamed into the exposition between May and October 1893, the two biggest attractions in Chicago—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Ferris wheel—operated outside the gates. It has long been speculated that Roosevelt adopted the name Rough Riders for his Spanish-American War outfit from watching William “Buffalo Bill” Cody perform there, with live buffalo herds and cowboy-and-Indian re-creations.^{* 26} Most of the Forest and Stream crowd disdained Buffalo Bill for his “skinning” career—he slaughtered bison for the railroads—but Roosevelt admired the “steel-thewed and iron-nerved” showman for his “daring progress [to open] the Great West to settlement and civilization. His name, like that of Kit Carson, will always be associated with old adventure and pioneer days of hazard and hardship when the great plains and the Rocky Mountains were won for our race.” ²⁷

The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition looked to the future, even as it celebrated the past. In fact, it became a showcase for the revolutionary marvels of harnessed electricity. Everything from the first phosphorus lamps to the first neon lights was on display. Virtual shrines to the wonders of alternating-current power were opened to the public courtesy of Brush, Thomas Edison, Western Electric, and Westinghouse.²⁸ And there, in the shadow of the electrical exhibit, was Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club log cabin, a throwback to a distant era, lit up only on a few chilly autumn nights by a newly trimmed fire. While America was abuzz about the electrical wonders of tomorrow, Roosevelt, with retro satisfaction, busied himself promoting the gospel of rustic renewal. Still, he was extremely proud that American ingenuity—from the log cabin to the electric mansion—was being showcased to the world. “Indeed Chicago was worth while,” he wrote in June 1893. “The buildings make, I verily believe, the most beautiful architectural exhibit the world’s ever seen.”²⁹

For the history of U.S. wildlife conservation, something else occurred at the fair—something far more important than electricity on parade, or an obscure history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison eulogizing the American frontier, or schoolchildren touring log cabins. The National Game, Bird, and Fish Protection Association (NGBFPA) was created that year in Chicago. Going forward, the Boone and Crockett Club, the Audubon Society, and other wildlife preservation organizations would work together, sharing lobbyists and coordinating strategies. By January 1895, the NGBFPA had adopted resolutions to encourage federal propagation of game birds and federal interdiction of interstate game traffic. Even though wildlife didn’t have the economic importance of timber or water, more and more Americans were starting to care about species survival.³⁰

II

As president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt edited American Big-Game Hunting, a volume of essays about hunting and conservation, to be published in the fall in time for the fair’s last gasp. As fate would have it, this was not a propitious time for selling an expensive book. The Panic of 1893 had brought hard times to most Americans. Unemployment was high; wages were low; money was tight. Speculative finance and laissez-faire capitalism squeezed the wallets of ordinary Americans, from immigrants to workers in urban sweatshops to Midwesterners desperate to redeem silver notes for gold. Many banks failed, as did railroad companies like the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe. According to the journalist J. Anthony Lukas in Big Trouble, in Colorado alone 435 mines and 377 related businesses closed because of the panic.³¹ Western cities like Denver—known as the Queen City of the Plains—which had relied on the silver mining boom were particularly hard hit. Bitter and broke, many settlers in Pueblo and Durango, Colorado, deemed the uncut Rocky Mountain forests now designated as “federal reserves” a serious insult to their inbred sense of manifest destiny economics.³²

As the Panic of 1893 gripped the Midwest and West, there were clamorous demands that the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 be revoked. The only people the reserves benefited, their opponents said, were “nature cranks” and the “athletic rich.”³³ In this uncertain financial climate, the high price of Big-Game Hunting—ten dollars—meant it would appeal only to the well-off or antiquarians. “We thought,” Grinnell recalled, “that perhaps there were enough big game hunters in the country to make it possible to publish the book without too great a loss.” The idea of the Boone and Crockett Club’s publishing venture had originated with Roosevelt. Grinnell recalled that Roosevelt financed the first printing of 1,000 copies with a personal check of $1,250. “He never said anything about this,” Grinnell recalled, “and I never asked about it.”³⁴

Personally immune to the Panic of 1893, Roosevelt and Grinnell recruited stories for American Big Game Hunting from founding club members. Roosevelt carefully edited and pruned the prose of the submissions, proving to be well suited for the task. Always ready with red pencil, Roosevelt actually asked Grinnell to send an overwritten submission his way so he could “slash it up” by a third.³⁵ This presented a delicate problem in the case of one submission.

Back in 1887, Roosevelt had tapped the famous landscape painter Albert Bierstadt to become a member of the Boone and Crockett. Bierstadt’s sublime paintings of the Rockies and the Mojave Desert, in which settlers were shown (if at all) as dots dwarfed by the vast American West, promoted the inherent value of wilderness. In addition, Bierstadt, whose notebooks are filled with sketches of American wildlife, had killed a huge moose along the New Brunswick–Maine line.³⁶ With a rack sixty-four and a half inches wide, it was determined to be the eighth-largest set of antlers ever recorded.^*

Bierstadt had realistically painted this triumph in Moose Hunter’s Camp, so Roosevelt was eager to get a first-person account from him for the book. “At the last meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club it was decided, subject to the approval of the rest of the members or of a majority of them, to see if we could not produce a volume to be known by some such title as that of the Boone and Crockett Club, and to consist of various articles on big game hunting, etc. by members of the Club,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt in February. “We intend to issue it annually if we find it reasonably successful. To do this would need some money, probably five or ten dollars annual dues for each member being sufficient. I hope you approve of the scheme and that if we decide to get out the book you will give us an article on moose hunting. I should greatly like to have in permanent form one or two of your experiences. Have you ever published an account of the way in which you got your big head? If not, do write it out for us at once.” ³⁷

Of course, the fact that Bierstadt was an excellent painter didn’t necessarily mean he wrote well. The artist’s mother tongue was German, and his English was only passable. Nevertheless, as requested, Bierstadt wrote an accurate, lively account of his Maine–New Brunswick moose hunt. In reading the essay, Roosevelt discovered a bigger problem than atrocious spelling or awkward syntax: Bierstadt hadn’t actually shot the moose; his Indian guide had. This ran afoul of the Boone and Crockett Club’s eligibility rules—its members had to have killed a big-game animal personally, in a “fair chase.” Worse yet, Bierstadt’s submission expressed his disdain for the violence associated with hunting; he wrote that it was wrenching to pull the trigger on such a lovely North Woods moose: “I took the rifle then and ended his misery; he reeled, staggered, and tried to lean against a smaller tree which bent over as he gently breathed his last. My sketch book was in use at once. I have as you will see one big head; but I have made up my mind that I don’t want to kill any more moose, but to go and see them in their own haunts is a pleasure.” ³⁸

The situation seemed clear: either the Boone and Crockett’s constitution would have to be rewritten or the sixty-nine-year-old Bierstadt would have to be expelled from the club. But Roosevelt found a third way to handle the problem. He adeptly edited the story to make it seem as if Bierstadt had, in fact, bagged the animal himself. This “benign deception,” as two scholars later called it in the New England Quarterly, was uncharacteristic of the usually up-front Roosevelt. By recasting the death scene in the passive voice—“This bull was killed”—he excised the Indian guide’s marksmanship.³⁹ Initially, Roosevelt’s creative edit achieved his overriding goal of preserving Bierstadt’s integrity by allowing this story to be published in American Big-Game Hunting while also adhering to the club’s constitution. However, Bierstadt wouldn’t agree to these artfully truthful but misleading edits. If he accepted Roosevelt’s solution, his article would, in fact, have degenerated from nonfiction to fiction. The painter suggested a compromise—the Boone and Crockett Club could publish his essay without using his byline or signature.

Unwilling to compromise any farther, Roosevelt now balked. As civil service commissioner, he was busting lying scoundrels right and left. If the press discovered his cover-up of Bierstadt’s story, it would have a field day at his expense. He wasn’t going to risk what reporters call a blind item for the sake of somebody else’s problem. “Grinnell and I both feel that it would not do to put in any non-editorial article unsigned, and moreover that when we get a piece of yours it ought to be purely yours, and without emendations from us,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt on June 8 from Washington, D.C., unburdening himself of the whole ordeal. “So I shall have to trust to the hope that for our second volume we may persuade you to write a piece needing no emendation, over your own signature.”⁴⁰

There were some wonderful pieces in American Big-Game Hunting. Grinnell’s one contribution, “In Buffalo Days,” is arguably the most elegant meditation on buffalo ever written. Truly worried that the species was headed toward extinction, Grinnell expressed his love for the animal by describing every twitch and tail flap he had ever noticed as a naturalist. “It was in spring, when its coat was being shed, that the buffalo, odd-looking enough at any time, presented its most grotesque appearance,” he lovingly wrote. “The matted hair and wool of the shoulders and sides began to peel off in great sheets, and these sheets, clinging to the skin and flapping in the wind, gave it the appearance of being clad in rags.”⁴¹

Among the other prominent contributors to American Big-Game Hunting were T.R.’s old Harvard friend Owen Wister (“The White Goat and His Country”). Living in Philadelphia but writing about the West, Wister had become a member of Boone and Crockett Club at Roosevelt’s invitation. After Harvard the two enthusiasts of the West grew close, frequently discussing the Rockies, buffalo repopulation, and the frontier cowboys. In 1893, Wister had visited Yellowstone and met Frederic Remington there. He and Remington decided to help in Roosevelt’s crusade to protect wildlife at Yellowstone. Known for encouraging rows, launching into diatribes, and harboring a sycophantic admiration for Ulysses S. Grant (of whom he published a biography in 1900), Wister was the kind of Harvard man Roosevelt could call a true brother in arms. The two struck up an informal pact in 1893 or 1894: Roosevelt would continue writing about the West as a historian, while Wister would write a great novel about a Rocky Mountains rancher, using the working title The Virginian. Along with Remington they would constitute a club of three amigos determined to popularize the American West along the Atlantic seaboard. They even wore the exact same outdoors clothes.⁴²

Others whom Roosevelt and Grinnell asked to participate in American Big-Game Hunting were Winthrop Chanler (“A Day with Elk”), Archibald Rogers (“Big Game in the Rockies”), and F. C. Crocker (“After Wapiti in Wyoming”). As coeditor of the book, Roosevelt had diligently corresponded with contributors, making suggestions about how to improve their manuscripts and struggling to create an overall unity of effect. Roosevelt, in fact, oversaw the physical look of the volume, choosing deep red cloth and a big-game head for the cover. The first fifth of American Big-Game Hunting explained the conservationist objectives of the Boone and Crockett Club to readers. The West Pointer Captain George S. Anderson, superintendent of Yellowstone, for example, led off with the hunter’s lament “A Buffalo Story.” Picking up the saga in the 1870s, Anderson traced the demise of the buffalo as a species in a longing, heartfelt way. Nevertheless, he gloated over killing a “lonesome George” just for its tongue. A veteran of the Indian Wars with the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Commanche, Captain Anderson was known as the premier “saddle officer” in the West. That was in the 1870s and 1880s. As of 1890, in a complete reversal, Captain Anderson’s enemies were no longer Native Americans in war paint but white settlers around Yellowstone engaged in poaching, vandalizing, and overgrazing.⁴³ His conservationist evolution from buffalo skinner to buffalo protector was indicative of a new consciousness developing in the American West of the 1890s, one which Roosevelt was instrumental in promoting.

Not wanting to be left out, Roosevelt took up the Great Plains in American Big-Game Hunting. His “Coursing the Prongbuck” (lifted, in tone and emphasis, from Hunting Trips and Ranch Life), again expressed his enthusiasm for the Badlands. He explained that pronghorn herds were thinning out from the Dakotas to Texas because of the pronghorn’s own curiosity; they were always investigating prairie schooners or human camps too closely. All a westerner had to do was wave a colored rag from behind a rock or sage, and the antelope would slowly head toward it—and, invariably, be shot as a result. “The pronghorn is the most characteristic and distinctive of American game animals,” Roosevelt wrote. “Zoologically speaking, its position is unique. It is the only hollow-horned ruminant which sheds its horns. We speak of it as an antelope, and it does of course represent on our prairies the antelopes of the Old World, and is a distant relative of theirs; but it stands apart from all other horned animals. Its position in the natural world is almost as lonely as that of the giraffe.”⁴⁴

Roosevelt also contributed “Literature of American Big-Game Hunting” to the volume, enthusiastically touting his all-time favorite naturalists and sportsmen. “The faunal natural histories, from the days of Audubon and Bachman to those of Hart Merriam, must likewise be included,” Roosevelt advised fellow hunters, “and, in addition, no lover of nature would willingly be without the works of those masters of American literature who have written concerning their wanderings in the wilderness, as Parkman did in hisOregon Trail, and Irving in his Tour on the Prairies; while the volumes of Burroughs and Thoreau have of course a unique literary value for every man who cares for outdoor life in the woods and fields and among the mountains.”⁴⁵

One conservationist from whom Theodore Roosevelt didn’t solicit an essay was Robert B. Roosevelt. Every time T.R. and his freewheeling, unpredictable uncle tried to collaborate on anything there was a clash of wills. The group R.B.R. had founded, the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG), had shifted its focus from an early triumph—saving quail—to a new craze for trapshooting.⁴⁶ Ever since the Interstate Trapshooting Association was formed in 1890,⁴⁷ NYAPG’s members were using the association more or less as a rod-and-gun club for blasting plates on manicured fairways. Even the New York Times, not immune to the fad, started covering trap tournaments as if they were premier sporting events.48 But plates were the good part of the fad. Unfortunately, some clubs started using live pigeons instead of clay ones. Although not an animal rights advocate, Grinnell vehemently denounced the shooting of birds as both cruel and unsportsmanlike. In an editorial in Forest and Stream he lambasted not only the shooters but also the commercial netters who sold boxes of the pigeons to trapshooting clubs.⁴⁹

There is no record of whether R.B.R. felt hurt about not being tapped for the Boone and Crockett. Spending the late 1880s abroad as ambassador to the Netherlands during President Cleveland’s first term, R.B.R. let the conservationist mission of NYAPG slip away; preoccupied in The Hague, he had scant time to seriously challenge poachers in upstate New York. Seizing the opening, T.R. and Grinnell had created the Boone and Crockett at an appropriate time, entering the void left by the NYAPG’s slack course. Most important, instead of being a statewide organization like NYAPG, the Boone and Crockett Club was national in scope. Owing to his celebrity Roosevelt was able to attract the best people to his club. With apparently no sense of betrayal NYAPG’s lawyer, Charles E. Whitehead, for example, instead began doing pro bono work for T.R.’s Boone and Crockett Club.^* “It was, in other words, an opportune time for a new organization,” the historian John F. Reiger has explained in American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, “one that would have a scope, as well as the self-discipline to stay focused on what was important.”⁵⁰

Following the publication of American Big-Game Hunting, it was becoming clear that Roosevelt was among those Americans best equipped to exert, as his sister Corinne put it, a “potent influence for good in Western affairs.”⁵¹ Coincidentally, Roosevelt’s The Wilderness Hunter reached bookstores around the same time; it included twenty-four full-page engravings (some drawn by Remington). To a modern-day reader, the book smacks of the influence of John Burroughs, starting with epigraphs from Walt Whitman and Joaquin Miller. Boasting like Moses in the Old Testament, Roosevelt declared in his preface that for a “number of years much of my life was spent either in the wilderness or on the borders of the settled country.”⁵²

Roosevelt’s preface goes on to explain that his firsthand outdoors experiences taught him that besides the thrill of the fair chase there was an aesthetic value in nature. Merely soaking in grand scenery and studying woodland creatures united the naturalist’s body and soul. “In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun,” Roosevelt wrote, sounding like Katherine Lee Bates’s 1895 patriotic anthem “America the Beautiful,” “of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.”⁵³

Carefully studying Burroughs had taught Roosevelt to make the most minute and detailed observations of nature, from a blade of bunch-grass to a nagging gnat, from a dead fly on a windowsill to the highest branch of a towering redwood tree. Even when Roosevelt was stalking a wapiti (round-horned elk) in the Bitterroots, he now paused to note fallen timber, scolding chickadees, slippery pine needles, and loose gravel. One chapter of The Wilderness Hunter, ostensibly about hunting elk, evolved into an informed field study of Rocky Mountain birds modeled on Burroughs’s beliefs about the backyard as a universe.

In The Wilderness Hunter Roosevelt no longer focused on “manly” bird sounds like eagles’ screams, loons’ cries, or owls’ hoots. There was a softening of presentation in this new book that harked back to the surging memories of his boyhood diaries. He was downright pastoral about celebrating land where the horses didn’t boss the streets. “The remarkable and almost amphibious little water wren, with its sweet song, its familiarity, and its very curious habit of running on the bottom of the stream, several feet beneath the surface of the race of rapid water, is the most noticeable of the small birds of the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote. “It sometimes signs loudly while floating with half-spread wings on the surface of a little pool.”⁵⁴

On August 6, 1893, a red-letter day, the New York Times hailed The Wilderness Hunter as a five-star delight. Roosevelt’s western hunting stories, filled with picaresque and sometimes gory detail, were written, the anonymous reviewer said, from a genuine love of the outdoors, told “without romance and with admirable clearness.”

The Hay-Adams circle may have scoffed at Roosevelt’s obsession with wildlife, but to the Times this biophilic enthusiasm sprang from the same American grain as the Transcendentalists. The reviewer even applauded the influence of Whitman and Miller on the book (unaware that Burroughs was the secret lurking muse). Being a cheerleader about bison and beaver in an age of species eradication, the Times implied, was a good thing. “The Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt is not that of the old-fashioned Fourth of July orators,” the review noted. “He is a sound-hearted, sound-minded patriot who has realized that in the present day there is no lack in his country of men of learning and influence always too keenly alive to the most trivial faults of our social and governmental systems and ever ready publicly to deplore them, and has wisely set for himself the opposite task of stimulating a love of country in the rising generation. Americanism is not a good-looking word, and it is one that has been sadly misused. Yet we can think of none better to apply to Mr. Roosevelt’s creed and practice.”55

That the review concluded with this approving recognition of Roosevelt’s vision—equating the western wilderness with nationalism—must have bolstered his self-confidence immeasurably. Without an iota of equivocation, Roosevelt instructed the outdoors community in The Wilderness Hunter that the killing of a female moose or deer was reprehensible. Over and over again, Roosevelt maintained that real hunters honored the game they shot, and that the opposite attitude (“butcher spirit”) was evil incarnate. Empty-headed hunters, Roosevelt insisted, those who shot wildlife just to kill, were to be rejected by their communities as pariahs. Forest and Stream, in a largely positive review, likewise pointed out that Roosevelt was unique among big-game hunters because the “blood and the killing” weren’t central to his wilderness reportage. “We can get enough of that,” the magazine sniffed, “by interviewing an employee at a slaughter house.”⁵⁶ Even The Youth’s Companion, a widely popular boy’s magazine, praised Roosevelt’s book for lashing out at cold-blooded market hunters who shot moose stuck in snowdrifts, taking the fair chase out of the hunt and making it one-sided.⁵⁷

Besides overlooking his inherent conservationist attitude in The Wilderness Hunter, recent environmental historians have mocked Roosevelt as a weekend warrior, an urbanite with money to burn who bought himself a ticket to the wilderness for a few weeks and then returned home. At face value this analysis is true. But from the perspective of 2009 Roosevelt’s desire to connect with nature to rejuvenate himself has proved ahead of its time. Today only 1.9 percent of Americans are living in rural areas, compared with 40 percent when The Wilderness Hunter was published, so Roosevelt was anticipating a modern trend. As of 2008 Jefferson’s agrarian vision and the homesteading of the West were kaput. Even Thoreau’s back-to-nature ethos, based on self-reliance, which had a revisionist run in the 1960s, had become cultish at best, a matter of a few survivalists holed up in forlorn mountain cabins in the Sierra Nevada or Appalachians. But Roosevelt’s notion of extreme wilderness experiences in short fixes has become widespread. Shooting the rapids, mountain climbing, rappelling—Americans crave an extreme fix from nature in hundreds of different ways. Whole cities such as Boulder, Eugene, and Asheville cater to consumers of nature like Roosevelt: claustrophobic city dwellers and suburbanites desperate to encounter a rare bird or cypress grove or desert ecosystem before it all vanished.

III

With the commercial success of The Wilderness Hunter, Roosevelt had enhanced conservationist stature. Using a civil service issue as a pretext to open a dialogue with Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith, he tried in April 1894 to influence U.S. government policy on law enforcement in parklands protection. “I am very glad of the position the Interior Department has taken in reference to the Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt wrote to Smith. “The next time we give a dinner I shall ask you to be our guest, as we much appreciate the stand you have taken in forestry matters and in the preservation of these parks. It will be an outrage if this government does not keep the big Sequoia Park, the Yosemite, and such like places under touch.”⁵⁸

Roosevelt respected Smith, who was then thirty-eight years old and the publisher of the Atlanta Evening Journal. A tall, pickle-nosed, big-bellied Cleveland Democrat, Smith was a shrewd anticorporation lawyer bent on promoting the “New South.” President Cleveland believed Smith would “stand fast against land grabbers and exploiters of the public domain.” As a corollary, Smith was unafraid to lambaste the Populist Party (or People’s Party, founded in 1891 to lobby for free silver coinage), scoffing at its membership as essentially a beehive of charlatan hayseeds.⁵⁹ Although Roosevelt was from the opposition party, he respected Smith as a tough, honest, no-nonsense yellow-dog Democrat with the admirable glare of a battle-tested Confederate veteran. Smith was a snappy dresser, always seen wearing a frock coat and slouch hat; there were no wrinkles in his wardrobe. Often he would sport a handkerchief in his jacket pocket as an affectation. Roosevelt, who denounced the Populists as the type of men who didn’t wear “under shirts,” admired Smith’s sense of style. Furthermore, Smith’s wife was the daughter of the legendary General Howell Cobb—a Confederate so gray his image should have been chiseled onto Stone Mountain, and also a former secretary of the treasury, having served under President Franklin Pierce. Cobb, it was said, calculated every waking hour in the service of Georgia’s greatness.⁶⁰

Shrewdly, Roosevelt used the fact that his own mother had lived in Georgia—as a Bulloch from Roswell—as an ice-breaker with Smith. Peaches, pine trees, and red clay were part of his heritage, and many of his first-prize items assigned to his boyhood Roosevelt Museum had come from just north of Atlanta. For his part, Smith, who would go on to serve as a U.S. senator from Georgia, told Roosevelt that he welcomed any strategic wisdom from the Boone and Crockett on how to deal with policing Yellowstone and the California national parks.

Roosevelt’s friendship with Smith became extremely important in the bipartisan effort to vex the relentless lobbying of western anticonservation legislators. From the outset of his second term, President Cleveland, using Smith as his megaphone, made it clear he was on the side of the forestry movement. Only weeks after his inauguration Cleveland, in fact, threw down the gauntlet: he “deplored” the grim fact that the western timberlands, which his predecessors Grant and Harrison had saved, were being destroyed by “timber depredators.”⁶¹ Scolding Congress, particularly the senators from Colorado and South Dakota, President Cleveland, under Hoke Smith’s sway, called for immediate protective legislation.⁶²

With the Panic of 1893 giving economic reasons to fight the new forest preserve system, the timber lobby in the West was pushing back against the conservationists. Led by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado (himself the secretary of the interior in Chester Arthur’s administration, a man who now advertised himself as the “defender of the West”), this group wanted the reserves reduced in size if not abolished completely. To repeat, however: from the outset of his second term, President Cleveland had made it clear that he was on the side of the forestry movement.

In April 1894 Roosevelt was preparing to testify before the Senate Committee on Territories, chaired by Charles Faulkner of West Virginia, in favor of giving Yellowstone Park’s U.S. Army soldiers real authority to deal with trespassers; he also testified against the redrawn, smaller boundaries of the park that the timber lobby was championing. An incident in the park the previous month added fuel to Roosevelt’s cause.

Captain George S. Anderson—the superintendent of Yellowstone and a member of the Boone and Crockett Club—tracked a suspected poacher, Edgar Howell, for a few days in the Pelican Valley region of the park. At one abandoned campsite Captain Anderson found six buffalo scalps and skulls. On March 13, he stumbled on Howell along Astringent Creek skinning a buffalo that had just been shot. Nearby were the bodies of five other kills. The superintendent arrested the poacher red-handed and immediately wrote to Secretary of the Interior Smith from Cooke City, Montana, recommending that this arrest “be made the occasion for a direct appeal to Congress for the passage of an act making it an offense…for any one to kill, capture, or injure any wild animal in the Park.”⁶³

By chance, Emerson Hough was on assignment for Forest and Stream in Yellowstone at the time of the arrest, and the official Yellowstone photographer, Jay Haynes, using his new portable Eastman Kodak camera, was able to take pictures of the dead buffalo. This firsthand evidence was the basis for a stinging editorial in Forest and Stream: George Bird Grinnell urged “every reader who is interested in the Park” to write to his “Senator and Representative…asking them to take an active interest in the protection of the Park” before America’s last great buffalo herd was gone forever. Meanwhile, with righteous indignation, Roosevelt publicly lashed out at Howell, claiming that the sleazy marauder should, at the very least, be “sent up for half a dozens years” Roosevelt personally preferred a stiff rope and a short drop.⁶⁴ In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Territories, Roosevelt milked the Howell case for every possible drop of sympathy, resorting to both shaming and tongue-lashing.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt acquired a new Yellowstone ally on the other side of the U.S. Capitol. Representative John F. Lacey of Iowa was the principal sponsor in the House of the administration’s Yellowstone Game Protection Act; it would “protect the birds and animals in Yellowstone National Park, and to punish crimes in said park, and for other purposes.”⁶⁵

Lacey was born in Virginia in 1841, and his family moved to Iowa when he was a teenager. The Laceys homesteaded along the Des Moines River, where John was immediately mesmerized by the open prairie and amazed by the endless sea of tall grass and the abundance of songbirds.⁶⁶ He enrolled at college in nearby Marshalltown, but after the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The combat he saw, against Confederate forces in northern Missouri at the Battle of Liberty on September 17, 1861, turned him against war forever.⁶⁷ He returned to college, studied law, and by 1870 was elected to Iowa’s House of Representatives, where he became known as an avid advocate of wildlife conservation.

By the spring of 1894, Lacey was in his second of eight terms representing Iowa in the U.S. House of Representatives. He took fact-finding trips around the West (unusual for a congressman representing the Midwest at the time), assessing timberlands that might well be considered future forest reserves and growing angry at the smoking lumber mills and the stump-dotted slopes that he passed. He always harbored a primal urge, a yearning, to be around nature. According to his daughter Berenice, he was “pained” to see the “wanton destruction” of forests and wildlife.⁶⁸

On May 7, 1894, the president’s team of Hoke Smith, John Lacey, and Theodore Roosevelt secured the passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act (otherwise known as the Lacey Act of 1894). At long last the federal government could take poachers like Howell to nearby courthouses in Cooke City and Livingston for legal prosecution, instead of merely having them escorted off the park premises.⁶⁹ The Act also ensured protection by the U.S. Army against timber harvesting, mineral extraction, and the defacing of geysers or rock formations for the foreseeable future. If you were caught carving your initials in rock—the way William Clark had done in 1806 at Pompey’s Pillar in Montana—you could end up in jail. The U.S. Army, which had first started administering the park in 1886, would continue doing so until 1918. Entrepreneurs trying to make a quick buck out of Yellowstone were frowned on by Roosevelt. For example, Edward Waters of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, operated a buffalo-elk zoo (even getting a permit to exhibit Crow Indians) but was eventually forced to shut down his roadside operation. As purists, Roosevelt and Grinnell even wanted to prohibit steamboat tours of Yellowstone Lake. “In protecting the beautiful wonders of the Park from vandalism,” Captain Anderson noted, “the main things to be contended against were the propensities of women to gather specimens, and of men to advertise their folly by writing their names on everything beautiful within their reach.”⁷⁰

Overnight Roosevelt’s beloved bears had a sanctuary, and they were on their way to becoming a great tourist attraction.⁷¹ At the Fountain Hotel in the park, black bears started showing up regularly at the kitchen garbage dump, begging for leftovers. Their panhandling became almost as reliable as Old Faithful, and a new tourist attraction. “The preservation of the game in the Park has unexpectedly resulted in turning a great many of the bears into scavengers for the hotels within the Park limits,” Roosevelt wrote with self-evident glee of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act a few years later. “Their tameness and familiarity are astonishing; they act much more like hogs than beasts of prey. Naturalists now have a chance of studying their character from an entirely new standpoint, and under entirely new conditions. It would be well worth the while of any student of nature to devote an entire season in the Park simply to study of bear life; never before has such an opportunity been afforded.”⁷²

The passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act of 1894 impelled Roosevelt to push for more U.S. government protection over the national parks. There was scant chance wildlife would last, he believed, if U.S. Army guards didn’t patrol California parks like Sequoia, General Grant, and Yosemite as protectors. In Yosemite, grazing sheep—domestic animals that John Muir denigrated as “hoofed locusts”—were ruining the integrity of the park’s valleys. Instead of merely chasing the flocks off the U.S. government property, Roosevelt wanted illegal shepherds arrested, handcuffed, and marched to jail. For the wondrous California parks to survive, Roosevelt believed, the U.S. Army also needed to be trained in stocking fish, fighting forest fires, and planting trees.

Although Roosevelt still grumbled that the Northern Pacific was trying to “segregate” Yellowstone, in truth the railroad industry was becoming a fierce proponent of establishing national parks throughout the West. The Southern Pacific Railroad company had even helped push the Yosemite bill through Congress. The railroads saw big tourist dollars in luring easterners to see the wonders of Yosemite as well as the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, and so on.⁷³ John Muir himself embraced the notion of tourists coming to visit Yosemite by passenger train. “Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms,” he wrote, “mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arranged more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas—even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of our times.”⁷⁴

Whether or not Muir influenced Roosevelt’s thinking remains unclear; what we do know, however, is that Roosevelt soon dialed back on pounding the railroad industry. Nevertheless, he continued to assail the avarice of timber barons, illegal game hunters, metallurgical fiends, real estate dealers, and souvenir poachers bent on disregarding the U.S. government’s “No Trespassing” postings. With a gleam of white teeth, Roosevelt attacked the “baseness of spirit” of such Coloradan politicians as Senator Teller and Governor Davis Waite with a steady barrage of invective. Tired of Rooseveltian theatrics, they, in turn, wanted to clap a chloroformed bandana over his mouth once and for all. While John Burroughs preferred fellowship over invective, he knew the “great cause” of wilderness protection needed the bluntness of his new friend’s militant temperament. “Roosevelt was the man of the clenched fist,” Burroughs wrote years later in The Last Harvest, “not one to stir up strife, but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just cause.” ⁷⁵

Roosevelt continued to push his conservationist agenda forward. He soon wrote to Captain Anderson that the new legislation could be improved. President Cleveland’s protection act was “by no means as good,” Roosevelt maintained, as what the Boone and Crockett Club demanded. The bill, he feared, had ambiguous overtones. With unabated ardor, Roosevelt wanted opprobrium names and public humiliation hurled at dishonorable men like Howell through Wyoming’s newspapers. W. Hallett Phillips of the Boone and Crockett Club wrote to Captain Anderson, in fact, saying that “Roosevelt says you made the greatest mistake of your life in not accidentally having that scoundrel [Howell] killed and he speaks as if he would have shot him on the spot.” ⁷⁶ Regardless, Roosevelt couldn’t deny that the Yellowstone Game Protection Act was a giant leap in the right direction. To cough up $1,000 or spend two years in jail—the harsh penalty suddenly imposed on poachers for merely shooting an elk or deer on U.S. government property—was a serious deterrent in 1894. At the end of this letter to Captain Anderson, Roosevelt admitted that Cleveland’s act was “a good deal better than the present systems,” adding that “at least [it] gives us a groundwork on which to go.” ⁷⁷

Another worry for Roosevelt after May 7 was his fear that Yellowstone buffalo—believed to be among the last remnant herds in the United States—would still fall prey to poachers if the number of U.S. Army personnel in the park wasn’t dramatically increased more than the act provided. There were fewer than twenty buffalo in Yellowstone—with its high altitude and harsh winters the park wasn’t a natural environment for them, but inside the park they were now protected. Roosevelt kept grappling with the larger question of how to save the buffalo in the long term. The Smithsonian Institution was floating a plan that involved fencing them in, which he was lukewarm about. Before long, Roosevelt started touting the notion of breeding buffalo in zoos and then reintroducing them throughout the western forest reserves, particularly in their traditional grounds like the Black Hills, Pine Ridge Reservation, Flint Hills, and Wichita Mountains.⁷⁸

Most important, Roosevelt believed that westerners would have to become good wildlife protectionists themselves in order for buffalo herds, national parks, and forest reserves to remain unmolested. Regular citizens would have to turn in poachers, even if the poachers were friends or neighbors. Emerson used to quote Francis Bacon as saying that humans were the ministers and interpreters of nature; Roosevelt wanted to add a modern point: and protectors. Somehow, Roosevelt believed, the people of the West needed to adopt the buffalo permanently as their mascot. “Eastern people, and especially Eastern sportsmen, need to keep steadily in mind the fact that the westerners who live in the neighborhood of the forest preserves are the men who, in the last resort, will determine whether or not those preserves are to be permanent,” he wrote. “They cannot…be kept…as game reservations unless the settlers roundabout believe in them and heartily support them.”⁷⁹

IV

A shock wave rippled through Roosevelt’s life on August 14, 1894, when news reached him that his brother Elliott had died. The New York Times cited heart disease as the cause of death, but Theodore knew it was heartbreak. Elliott’s wife, Anna, and son, Elliott Jr., had died of diphtheria in the preceding years. Unable to ward off the demons of the double loss, Elliott had been drinking heavily all summer long. Theodore felt downcast, but found a bit of closure at the funeral. “When dead the poor fellow looked very peaceful,” he wrote to his sister Bamie, “and so like his old, generous, gallant self of fifteen years ago. The horror, and the terrible mixture of sadness and grotesque, grim evil continued to the very end; and the dreadful flashes of his old sweetness, which made it all even more hopeless.”⁸⁰ Elliott left behind his ten-year-old daughter, Eleanor, who was then raised by her grandmother Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall.

No sooner was his brother buried than Theodore headed to North Dakota for a couple of recuperative weeks. Once again he left his wife and children behind. With Bill Merrifield accompanying him, Roosevelt went antelope hunting on the plains around Medora in honor of Elliott. Game was scarce that year, chased away by Plains Indians and Dakota sheepherders. Nevertheless, he managed to shoot, skin, and eat five antelope. Drinking in a bit of Badlands solitude helped bring perspective back into his life. Full of deep thoughts, he spent his nights sleeping in his buffalo-lined bag in the open grassy plains with a tarpaulin to pull over him if the wind squalled. As if following the stations of the cross, he visited the great landmarks of the North Dakota Badlands—Sentinel Butte, Square Butte, and Middle Butte. “Great flocks of sandhill cranes passed overhead from time to time,” Roosevelt wrote, “the air resounding with their strange, musical, guttural clangor.”⁸¹ The deep-rooted sagebrush of the plains colored long stretches of the parched summer landscape. “The cattle aren’t doing particularly well,” Roosevelt told Lodge in a letter. “The drought has been very severe on everything. However, except for feeling a little blue, I passed a delightful fortnight all the time in the open; and feel as rugged as a bull-moose.”⁸²

The year 1894 also saw the publication of Volume 3 of The Winning of the West, covering the post–Revolutionary War expansion into the Ohio River Valley, the Tennessee Valley, and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Kentucky. The book is marred by stereotypes of Indians as being “cunning and stealthy,” essentially “the tigers of the human race.” Roosevelt claimed it was only natural that white Americans would persevere. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him,” he wrote. “American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartan, New Zealander and Maori—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.”⁸³

Such passages, redolent of the white man’s burden, occur throughout Volume 3 of The Winning of the West—Roosevelt even promotes his theory of “dominant world races” over “aboriginals.” In his landmark study Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indian, the historian William T. Hagan was generally perplexed at the difference in attitude toward Native Americans in Volume 3 of The Winning of the West compared with Roosevelt’s humane reports of 1894–1895 as civil service commissioner. Influenced by Indian rights activists among his friends—especially Charles L. Lummis, Herbert Walsh, George Bird Grinnell, Hamlin Garland, C. Hart Merriam, and Francis Leupp—Commissioner Roosevelt (unlike the historian Roosevelt) said that the defeated Indians deserved a “square deal” from the U.S. government. These stark differences within Roosevelt, reminiscent of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, would have caused Robert Louis Stevenson himself to scratch his head in puzzlement. Roosevelt number one (of The Winning of the West) seemed to loathe Indians. Roosevelt number two (of the civil service reports) fought for their human rights.

The rational explanation lies in Roosevelt’s belief that it was only proper to treat a defeated people with dignity. A true nineteenth-century gentleman, he put his faith in the hope that education, assimilation, and the example of white Americans would improve Native Americans’ lot in the near future. In fact, he envisioned the day when high-quality men like Luther Standing Bear and Few Trails would dine in the White House. Regardless of which side was the real Roosevelt, his ideas intersected in a singular way: heconsistently saw the Indians’ future in North America in stark Darwinian terms. Once U.S. federal government graft, skimming, and unconstitutional injustice were removed from the reservations, Roosevelt argued, it would be up to individual Indian tribes to survive. He had high hopes for the Cherokee and Pawnee, less so for the Sioux. “We must turn them loose,” Roosevelt wrote in one report, “hardening our hearts to the fact that many will sink, exactly as many will swim.”⁸⁴