The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (173 page)

^*
Although the term Audubon Society is commonly used, many state Audubons are separate entities in fierce competition with the “National Audubon.”

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He created two federal bird reservations at the same time in Michigan: Siskiwit Islands and Huron Islands.

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George Bird Grinnell used almost the same phrase in 1882, in an editorial in
Forest and Stream
, speaking of “generations yet unborn.”

^*
The Boy Hunters
was dedicated to “The Boy Readers of England and America.” Reid hoped that the novel would “Interest Them So as to Rival in Their Affections the Top, the Ball, and the Kite—That It May Impress Them, So as to Create a Taste for that Most Refining Study, the Study of Nature.” As for the hunting of white buffalo, Reid got the idea from the true story of the Cheyenne killing one in 1833.

^*
Baird’s scientific naturalist works
—Catalogue of North America Birds, Review of American Birds, North American Reptiles
, and
Catalogue of North America Mammals—
were reference bibles to Roosevelt.

^*
By 2009 the naturalist E. O. Wilson of Harvard University had documented 14,001 ant species. See Nicholas Wade, “Scientist At Work: Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans,”
New York Times
, July 15, 2008.

^*
Other allies of Bergh included the poet William Cullen Bryant, the industrialist Peter Cooper (who formed Cooper Union), and the politician John A. Dix (whom Fort Dix, New Jersey, was named after).

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According to the historian Patricia O’Toole, Henry Adams was touring the Nile River at the same time as the Roosevelt family.

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Theodore noted that these “seven species” were “in easy shot” but did not raise his rifle to them, as December 29 was a Sunday and his father forbade shooting.

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The voyage of the
Beagle
lasted from December 1831 to October 1836. Its mission was a hydrographical survey of South America and the South Pacific. Besides the Galápagos, Darwin got to visit the Falkland Islands, Cape de Verde Islands, Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand, and dozens of other nirvanas for an aspiring naturalist.

^*
Charles Waterton (1856–1912) was a British naturalist and explorer who influenced Charles Darwin, publishing a number of books recounting his specimen collecting missions. Nikolaus Brahm (1751–1812) was an eccentric German zoologist who was obsessed with naming larvae. Roosevelt liked the stories about Waterton—another eccentric, to put it mildly—who pretended to be a dog biting dinner guests on their legs. Waterton also invented a way to preserve animal skins, molding them to create caricatures of his opponents. A fierce opponent of the British soap factories that polluted a lake near his house, Thomas Waterton eventually had a national park named after him in Alberta, Canada. Waterton turned his own estate into the world’s first waterfowl and nature reserve. Roosevelt may have later taken his ideas about federal bird reservations from Waterton.

^*
When it was created in 1885 by Congress the Biological Survey was for “economic ornithology.” The following year mammals were incorporated. In 1896 the unit’s name was changed to the Division of Biological Survey. On March 3, 1905 T.R. officially upgraded the outfit to the Bureau of Biological Survey. Throughout the text I use simply Biological Survey.

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Ironically, in 1919 R.B.R.’s brownstone became headquarters for the Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Association.

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Originally published as
Forest and Stream
in 1873, the magazine changed its name to
Field and Stream
in 1930.

^*
Probably Roosevelt meant snow buntings, which would have been rare indeed in New York in May.

^*
Some scholars question whether Roosevelt was using “bully” at this early point in his life. Certainly he was saying it in the early 1880s. Other expressions that he constantly used during his college years were “By Jove” and “My Boy.”

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Much of Mount Desert Island became preserved. It was originally established as Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916, then as Lafayette National Park in 1919, and was renamed Acadia National Park in 1929.

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Throughout the entire Midwest tramp Theodore kept regular diaries, which have (strangely) remained unpublished. They are permanently housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. A university press should jump at the chance of publishing an edition.

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There are actually three Raccoon rivers in Iowa: North, South, and Middle. They are tributaries of the Des Moines River and part of the Mississippi River watershed.

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Although the game birds of western Iowa seemed plentiful in 1880, that was an illusion. Overhunting would by 1932 cause the extinction of the heath hen, and by 2009 Attwater’s prairie chicken would top the endangered species list.

^*
The essay remained unpublished until 1988, when the scholar John Rousmaniere unearthed it from the Library of Congress’s T.R. Collection and published it in
Gray’s Sporting Journal
. (Rousmaniere had been alerted to the essay’s existence by a footnote in
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
.)

^*
Although the words “bison” and “buffalo” are often used interchangeably, these are very different animals. Bison have a proportionately large head, short horns, and variable hair length and shed seasonally. They’re found in North America and Europe. Buffalo, by contrast, have proportionately average-size heads, long horns, and uniform hair and never shed in any significant way. They are found in Africa and Asia.

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Originally consisting of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska, some of the Dakota Territories were broken up into the Idaho Territory, Wyoming Territory, and Nebraska Territory. On November 2, 1889, the remaining Dakota Territories split to become the separate states of North Dakota and South Dakota.

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Billings County was created by the 1879 territorial legislature. The first government, however, wasn’t organized until May 4, 1886.

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In an article in
Harper’s Round Table
titled “Ranching” (August 31, 1897) Roosevelt admitted that being a shepherd was hard work: “A good deal of skill must be shown by the shepherd in managing his flock and in handling the sheep-dogs, ordinarily it is appallingly dreary to sit all day long in the sun, or loll about in the saddle, watching the flocks of fleecy idiots. In times of storm he must work like a demon and know exactly what to do, or his whole flock will die before his eyes, sheep being as tender as horses and cattle are tough.”

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Four of Canada’s first national parks—Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Yoho, and Banff—are all part of the Selkirks.

^*
Amazingly, that same year Roosevelt published two other books:
Life of Gouverneur Morris
and
Essays on Practical Politics.

^*
Dr. C. Hart Merriam,
Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona,
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Ornithology and Mammology, No. 3, (Washington Government Printing Office, 1890).

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Burroughs usually took the train to the Hyde Park station and then caught a little ferry across to his farm at West Park, in Esopus. In the winter, he’d simply walk across the ice.

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The reserves would be renamed national forests in 1907, during Roosevelt’s presidency. Besides the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve in Wyoming these new federal lands included the White River Plateau timberland reserve (Colorado), Pecos River forest reserve (New Mexico), Sierra forest reserve (California), Pacific forest reserve (Washington), Pike’s Peak timberland reserve (Colorado), Bull Run timberland reserve (Oregon), Plum Creek timberland reserve (Colorado), South Platte forest reserve (Colorado), San Gabriel timberland reserve (California), Battlement Mesa forest reserve (California), Afognak Forest and Fish Culture reserve (Alaska), Grand Canyon forest reserve (Arizona), Trabuco Canyon forest reserve (California), San Bernardino forest reserve (California), Ashland forest reserve (Oregon), and Cascade Range forest reserve (Oregon). The difference in designations was fairly simple: trees weren’t allowed to be cut in forest reserves, but in timberlands limited government-supervised logging was allowed.

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The National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame’s first inductee was Theodore Roosevelt, in 1964.

^*
The “new western history” of 1990 was different from Roosevelt’s “new history” of 1890. All Roosevelt wanted was for the West to be brought into the larger national narrative. Limerick and White had no problem with this, per se. What they objected to was Roosevelt’s one-dimensional characterization of the West as all manifest destiny and triumphalism. Their new western history correctly brought in Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and others who had been cut out of the Rooseveltian Anglo-American “new history.”

^*
William F. Cody first called the troupe (in 1893) “Buffalo Bull Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” But, in truth, Roosevelt also had fair claim to the term. In August 1883 he had written to a friend from the Elkhorn Ranch, “I think there is some good fighting stuff among these harum-scarum roughriders out here.”

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Starting in 1932, the Boone and Crockett Club would distinguish itself as publicly promoting “record book” trophies based on a scoring system for big game. The club took as a model the English Rowland Ward records system. For moose the best score was 224–418 with an antler span of sixty-seven inches and a weight of over 1,800 pounds. A host of categories were soon developed. Take, for example, goats. By the time of World War II, the members of Boone and Crockett were encouraged to be “grand slammers” (i.e., to hunt one sheep from each of four individual subspecies: desert bighorn, Rocky Mountain bighorn, Dall’s sheep, and Stone’s sheep). The club also would disqualify submissions for a host of reasons: for example, hunting with a telescopic 4X scope was considered not “fair chase.”

^*
In 1875 Whitehead had won
Phelps v. Racey
, an important case against a Manhattan game dealer who was wholesaling quail shot out of season. It was considered a “landmark decision supporting state authority to limit the sale of game.”