The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (158 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Naturalist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University has written about a human condition he calls biophilia, the desire to affiliate with other forms of life. If ever there was somebody possessed with biophilia, it was Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson surmises that
Homo sapiens
, as a rule, has a genuine love of nature which is biological. Almost everybody responds intuitively with oohs and ahs when viewing a gorgeous valley, hiking a red-rock canyon, or hearing a loon call from a mud bog. Wilson’s biophilia theory suggests that, at heart, humans
want
to be touched by nature in their daily lives. Wilson’s hypothesis is the key to understanding why Roosevelt added over 234 million acres to the public domain between 1901 and 1909. Roosevelt responded both scientifically and emotively to wilderness. Therefore, I’ve purposefully avoided the fairly shopworn debate over whether Roosevelt was a nature preservationist or a utilitarian conservationist. He was both. Roosevelt was too many-sided and paradoxical to be pigeonholed. If forced to attach a single label to Roosevelt, I’d go with “Darwinian naturalist” (albeit one imbued with excessive biophilic needs).

Roosevelt’s voluminous correspondence, books, articles, and diaries about his so-called outdoors life proved invaluable in writing this book. My institutional partner in tracking down all of Roosevelt’s leavings was Dickinson State University. Under the leadership of Professor Clay Jenkinson, this fine North Dakota higher-learning institution created the Theodore Roosevelt Center in 2007. The center has undertaken a complete digitization of the Library of Congress’s holdings of our twenty-sixth president. The center is also digitizing all T.R. photographs, films, audio, and ancillary papers.

The Library of Congress has also put T.R.’s papers on microfilm, an admirable move that made the collection user-friendly at the library of the University of Texas-Austin.

Another fine resource is the eight-volume
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), selected and edited by Elting E. Morison. When convenient, I have quoted from the hundreds of missives in this outstanding primary source set. Morison and his associate editors, however, only partially tapped the reservoir of Roosevelt’s brilliant correspondence. Bird watching, big game hunting, Interior and Agriculture department reforms, and Marshian conservation got short shrift in the
Letters
compared to political campaigns, foreign affairs, and trust busting. This gave me quite an opening: many of the excerpts of Roosevelt’s letters and diary entries in this volume are appearing in print for the first time. Nobody before had systematically gone through Roosevelt’s complete correspondence with an eye trained on his observations of the natural world. The result is that the intellectual influence of Charles Darwin on Roosevelt looms larger than previously discerned.

Special thanks to Aunna Carlton of Austin for helping me go through rolls and rolls of T.R. microfilm. When I taught at Tulane University, Andrew Travers did the same with reels of the Gifford Pinchot papers (courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Wallace Dailey, curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at Harvard University, was a marvelous facilitator. An old-school archivist extraordinaire, Wallace helped me track down obscure photographs and boyhood diaries. The bulk of T.R.’s correspondence is held at the Library of Congress in letterbooks (which he started in 1897). Originals of these typed letters, however, are scattered about various institutional collections or held in private hands. A significant number of letters to family members are housed at Harvard, where I conducted research in the Houghton Library’s reading room. All told, Roosevelt wrote more than 150,000 letters. I’ve read most of them with a keen eye
for information pertaining to conservation. Meanwhile, the reader should be aware of my occasional use of Latin binomials to designate wildlife in taxonomic terms, which is limited to instances when Roosevelt used the Linnaeusian classification himself (or when it was absolutely pertinent to the narrative flow).

Since 1992, I’ve spent summers in the Badlands of North Dakota (first started as a Civilian Conservation Corps project in 1934, it became Theodore Roosevelt National Park in 1978). My family considers Medora—the park’s gateway hamlet—our second home. When Roosevelt first arrived in the Badlands in September 1883, the area was still a frontier wilderness. Today, it’s the easiest place in the Great Plains to encounter wild horses, buffalo, antelope, and prairie dogs. Numerous Roosevelt conservation sites in the Badlands have deeply inspired me (such as his Elkhorn Ranch, located thirty-five miles north of Medora). Everybody needs to discover a landscape that speaks to them, and mine is the washed-out prairie, rock-strewn slopes, and thick woody draws along the Little Missouri River. My true-blue friendships in North Dakota run extremely deep. I’d like to thank and send love to my North Dakotan friends, especially Sheila Schafer (an angel); Randy and Laurie Hatzenbuhler (T.R. Medora Foundation); Ed Schafer (former U.S. secretary of agriculture); Byron Dorgan (U.S. senator); Kent Conrad (U.S. senator); and Douglas and Mary Ellison (Western Edge Books). Valerie Naylor, the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, dutifully read chapters pertaining to the American West. She is an amazing public servant.

Dr. John Allen Gable of the Theodore Roosevelt Association (TRA) of Oyster Bay, New York, was largely responsible for my writing this book. As longtime executive director of the TRA, John knew more minutiae about our twenty-sixth president than all the award-winning biographers combined. Back in April 1990, John and I cohosted the Theodore Roosevelt Conference at Hofstra University. (We later coedited a conference volume of the academic papers with Natalie Naylor). In October 2002, John and I, along with Barbara Berryman Brandt, cochaired another T.R. conference (“The Big Stick and the Square Deal”) at Canisius College in Buffalo. At both of these meetings, I lectured on T.R. and the environment. Following the Buffalo event—which featured biographers Edmund Morris, Kathleen Dalton, Candice Millard, Patricia O’Toole, and H. W. Brands—John encouraged me to write a definitive book on T.R. as our naturalist president. As an incentive, John put together the first comprehensive list of all the parks, forests, monuments, and bird reservations Roosevelt had saved. Gilding the lily, he opened up previously closed T.R. papers for me to use, including illuminating new material on Robert B. Roosevelt. Unfortunately, John died of cancer in 2005. He was only sixty-two years old. This book was written—in part—for him.

Tweed Roosevelt likewise encouraged me to write about his great-grandfather’s conservationist legacy. Tweed’s article “Theodore Roosevelt: The Mystery of the Unrecorded Environmentalist” (published in a 2002 issue of
Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal
) considered the notion that the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was Roosevelt’s great institutional accomplishment. Often misunderstood by a public enamored with “scenic wonders” such as the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife rangers and biologists (Rachel Carson was one) protect more than 280 different endangered species and their habitats in 550 national wildlife refuges. Every day, these men and women serve as Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental foot soldiers. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife archive in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is a treasure trove. If I ever execute my planned America in the Age of Conservation quartet—with
The Wilderness Warrior
serving as the first volume—Shepherdstown will surely become my new Medora.

Throughout the writing process I had five guardian angels: Paul Tritaik of Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge; Mark Madison, historian of U.S. Fish and Wildlife in Shepherdstown; Lowell Baier, president of the Boone and Crockett Club; Professor John
Reiger of Ohio University-Chillicothe, the leading scholar on George Bird Grinnell; and Robert M. Utley, former chief historian of the National Park Service. They carefully read chapters and offered their expertise.

After I finished the first draft of the manuscript, I asked numerous specialists and friends to comment on chapters. My honor roll includes the following experts: Donald Worster of the University of Kansas; Doris Kearns Goodwin of Concord, Massachusetts; David Dary of the University of Oklahoma; Paul Schullery of Yellowstone National Park; Chris Darimont of the University of California-Santa Cruz; Mike Grunwald of
TIME;
Wendell Swank of the Boone and Crockett Club; Stephen Mark of Crater Lake National Park; Dorothy FireCloud and Hugh Hawthorne of Devils Tower National Monument; Harvey Leake, historian to the Whetherill family; Tom Farrell of Wind Cave National Park; Jeff Rupert of Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge; Bruce Noble of the Chickasaw National Recreation Area; Debbie Baroff at the Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, Oklahoma; Elizabeth Sims and Leslie Klinger of the Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina; John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society; Edward Renehan, Jr., author of
John Burroughs: An American Naturalist;
Joan Burroughs, granddaughter of the legendary naturalist; Bob Edwards of the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum, Buffalo, Wyoming; Martha Resk of the Audubon House, Key West, Florida; Ann Hornaday of the
Washington Post;
Michael Tuerkay of the Senckenberg Research Institute, Germany; Denise Pope of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas; Stephen L. Zawistowski and Alison Zaccone of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; Susan Blair of the National Geographic Society; Mike Gipple of the Mahaska County Conservation Board in Iowa; Patrick Sharp of California State University–Los Angeles; Minor Ferris Buchanan of Jackson, Mississippi; Jeff Johns of the Brooks Institute; Ellen Allers of the Smithsonian Institution; John Coleman of the University of Notre Dame; Pat Romero of the Rough Riders Museum, Las Vegas, New Mexico; Ryan Hathaway, David Bennett, and Chris Murray of the University of Delaware; Bill Kight of the White River National Forest; Richard Paterson of Grey Towers National Monument; Jennifer Capps of the Benjamin Harrison Home, Indianapolis, Indiana; Jamie Fowler of Ohio University; and Cathy Engstrom and Greg Beisker of the Iowa National Heritage Foundation; and Nancy Freeman of NWR Center.

Rice University, where I teach history, is a fantastic, top-tier place of higher education. I would like to thank Professor Allen Matusow and Ambassador Edward Djerejian at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy for allowing me to host a conservation public policy seminar. The staff of Fondren Library at Rice tolerated many demands. Thanks to Sara Lowman, Randy Tibbits, Suellen Denton, Cheryl Cormier, Barbara Hansel, Karol Comie, Ginny Martin, and Lea Martinello. Also, the Rice University biology department kept me honest about Darwin, especially Lesley Campbell, David Queller, and Jim Coleman. My colleagues in the history department at Rice allowed me to teach a graduate course on Theodore Roosevelt and conservation, which proved very beneficial to me.

The Smithsonian Institution unfailingly helped me better understand Spencer Fullerton Baird, sharing his correspondence with Robert B. Roosevelt and William T. Hornaday. Members of the World Conservation Society opened papers up to me, read chapters, and encouraged the writing process in numerous ways. Special thanks to the Bronx Zoo’s director, Jim Breheny, and its vice president of communications, Mary Dixon. There is no finer way to spend a day than wandering around the 265-acre zoo, whose educational displays would make Charles Darwin proud. The staff of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, especially Ellen V. Futter, did more than any other institution to encourage me in writing this book. Likewise, the Boone and Crockett Club Archive in Missoula, Montana—all 130 boxes—proved indispensable. The SPCA in New York enhanced my understanding of Henry Bergh mightily.

In Austin, Eric Busch, a history PhD student at the University of Texas, aided me on a couple of chapters. He’s on the fast track to becoming a premier environmental historian. A knot of local historian friends graciously listened to my T.R. yarns at dinner parties with good cheer, including H. W. Brands, David and Jane Oshinsky, Robert Utley and Melody Webb, Lawrence and Roberta Wright, Don and Suzanne Carleton, Evan and Julia Smith, and Tom and Muffy Staley. They make living in Austin special.

I’ve spent so many days in Oyster Bay, New York (a town since 1653), that the mayor should issue me an honorary residence certificate. The drive to Sagamore Hill along Cove Neck Road remains the most surefire way to transport me back one hundred years to when T.R. was the reigning squire. At Sagamore Hill National Historic Site—run by the U.S. Department of the Interior—a special thanks is due to Thomas Ross, Charles Markis, Amy Verone, Eric Witzke, and Julie Abbate. When visiting Sagamore Hill, one must be sure to stop at the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Center, where there are nature programs featuring live birds of prey and ecosystem rehabilitation workshops. Adjacent to the sanctuary is Youngs Memorial Cemetery, which contains the graves of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt.

I’ve been a member of the Theodore Roosevelt Association since 1990. Besides attending annual meetings, I’ve participated in TRA excursions to the Netherlands, North Dakota, San Antonio, and Tampa Bay. A few stalwart friends I’ve made in the TRA include Theodore Roosevelt IV, Edmund and Sylvia Morris, Admiral C. S. Abbot, Mark Ames, Dr. William N. Tilchin, Robert D. Dalziel, Norman Parsons, Lucky Roosevelt, Stephen and Regina Jefferies, Simon Roosevelt, Elizabeth Moore, and Dr. Cornelius A. van Minnen. Two ardent Rooseveltian conservationist friends—Nate Brostrom of the University of California–Berkeley and William J. vanden Heuvel of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute—have helped me every step of the way.

At HarperCollins, my editor, Tim Duggan, was his trademark self—smart, proactive, and devoted. Anybody who believes the days of quality editing are over has never worked with Tim, whose standards are the best in the business. Jonathan Burnham epitomizes an excellent publisher in 2009—a lucid thinker and marketplace-savvy friend. Brian Murray, the president and CEO of HarperCollins worldwide, was typically helpful at every stage. I’ll always be grateful for his wise counsel. Others at HarperCollins who deserve thanks are Allison Lorentzen (a genius facilitator), Susan Gamer (copyeditor), Katharine Baker (production editor), and Leah Carlson-Stanisic (designer). The indomitable Trent Duffy of New York assisted me in editing the first half of the manuscript. Likewise, the ethereal Emma Juniper assisted me during my final stages. Lisa Bankoff of ICM—my agent since 1992—offered her trademark sound counsel.