Overnight Hunting Trips became the seminal study of both the Badlands and the Bighorns. The core message Roosevelt conveyed was that hunting big game was good for the American soul. Bouts of barbarism, Roosevelt believed, reawakened the primitive and the savage in a man, to good effect. It was a theme that pervaded his writings for the rest of his life. “In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole,” he later wrote. “The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures—all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.” 27
II
One mixed review, however, caught Roosevelt’s attention amid the cavalcade of raves.28 The thirty-five-year-old naturalist George Bird Grinnell, the esteemed editor of Forest and Stream, did compare Hunting Trips to Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail and Lewis H. Garrard’s Wahtoyah and the Taos Trail because of its “freshness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm” on the other hand, Grinnell criticized Roosevelt for generalizing too much about the western species he had encountered while hunting, for failing to discuss color variations properly, and for other inaccuracies of zoological detail. The slightly patronizing review observed that although the youthful Roosevelt had studied a particular antelope herd in Montana, the herds in Manitoba or Saskatchewan were not necessarily identical to it. Grinnell believed that Roosevelt was talented, but that to be a real Darwinian zoologist he should have spent more time doing field observations before rushing into print with his first impressions, which were sometimes inaccurate despite being well written. “Mr. Roosevelt is not well known as a sportsman, and his experience of the Western country is quite limited, but this very fact in one way lends an added charm to this book,” Grinnell wrote, damning Roosevelt with faint praise. “He has not become accustomed to all the various sights and sounds of the plains and the mountains, and for him all the difference which exists between the East and the West are still sharply defined…. We are sorry to see that a number of hunting myths are given as fact, but it was after all scarcely to be expected that with the author’s limited experience he could sift the wheat from the chaff and distinguish the true from the false.” 29
George Bird Grinnell was the editor of Forest and Stream and a co-founder of the Boone and Crockett Club with Theodore Roosevelt. The New York Times deemed him the “father of conservation.”
George Bird Grinnell. (Courtesy of John F. Reiger)
The review stung Roosevelt, who prided himself on the scientific exactitude of his animal descriptions. Grinnell, it seemed, had taken Roosevelt down a notch. Doubly frustrating was the fact that Grinnell had championed Roosevelt’s conservation activism in Forest and Stream the previous year, praising his efforts in the New York state assembly to halt the damming of streams that fed the Hudson River. “It is satisfying to see,” Grinnell had written, “now and then, in our legislative halls, a man whom neither money, nor influences, nor politics can induce to turn from what he believes to be right to what he knows to be wrong.”30 But now, in 1885, Grinnell had become Roosevelt’s enemy.
After reading the review, Roosevelt stormed into the offices of Forest and Stream demanding a meeting. Always cordial, Grinnell agreed, and they sat together for hours going through Hunting Trips almost page by page. To Roosevelt’s surprise, the erudite editor seemed to know more about bighorn sheep and white-tailed deer than he did. Once Roosevelt’s bruised ego was salved, the conversation turned to conservation issues, specifically big game protection. “I told him something about game destruction in Montana for the hides, which, so far as small game was concerned, had begun in the West only a few years before that,” Grinnell recalled; “though the slaughter of the buffalo for their skins had been going on their extermination had been substantially completed. Straggling buffalo were occasionally killed for some years after this, but much longer and by this time…the last of the big herds had disappeared.” 31
By the time Roosevelt left the headquarters of Forest and Stream no lingering animosity or grudge would spoil his new friendship with George Bird Grinnell, who fast became as close a friend as Henry Cabot Lodge. When it came to saving wildlife the two men were in sync. And Roosevelt had learned a lesson: never again would he leave himself vulnerable to charges of faking about nature or of mischaracterizing species. Instead of being rivals, Roosevelt and Grinnell united in what would become a lifelong crusade to save the big game animals of the American West from extinction.32 “Roosevelt called often at my office to discuss the broad country that we both loved, and we came to know each other extremely well,” Grinnell recalled decades later. “Though chiefly interested in big game and its hunting, and telling interestingly of events that had occurred on his own hunting trips, Roosevelt enjoyed hearing of the birds, the small mammals, the Indians, and the incidents of travel of early expeditions on which I had gone. He was always fond of natural history, having begun, as so many boys have done, with birds; but as he saw more and more of outdoor life his interest in the subject broadened and later it became a passion with him.”33
It was easy to see why Roosevelt was captivated by Grinnell, who was nine years his senior. Grinnell, a native of Brooklyn, was an explorer, rancher, hunter, bird-watcher, ethnologist, published author, first-rate editor, and western folklorist. (And as if that weren’t enough, the New York Times would later call him the “father of American conservation.”34) Like the Roosevelts, the Grinnells had deep roots in the United States, having arrived in Rhode Island as far back as 1630.35 A real sophisticate, always impeccably dressed, with a pipe close at hand, he knew more about the American West, and more about North America’s 650 mammal species, than any other scholar alive. Puff-puff-puffing, he would discuss why kit foxes were the pygmies of the fox group and why the spotted skunk had the strongest scent of the species.
When Grinnell was seven, his family had moved to Audubon Park in upper Manhattan, the thirty-acre estate that had served as the great ornithologist’s last home. The hallways there were cluttered with overhanging elk and deer antlers, “which supported guns, shot pouches, powder flasks, and belts.”36 The grounds were full of wild animals for Audubon to study and draw. The walls of Audubon Park, in fact, groaned with paintings and hunting trophies once belonging to the great Audubon.37 A close friendship developed between the young Grinnell and Audubon’s widow, Madame Lucy. The old barn was filled with ornithologists’ collections of skins and specimens, and Grinnell absorbed Audubon’s influence. The nearby Hudson River became his bird-watching laboratory. “In winter the river was often very full of ice, and eagles and crows were constantly seen walking about on the ice, no doubt feeding on refuse and the bodies of animals thrown into the stream north,” Grinnell wrote in a partially unpublished memoir. “The crows used to roost on a cedar-covered knoll north of the Harlem River in what is now the Bronx, not very far from Highbridge, and each morning they flew low among the tree tops.”38
As an undergraduate at Yale, Grinnell had the same problems in the classroom that Roosevelt would have at Harvard. He was too enamored with the idea of following in the footsteps of his idol to sit still in the classroom. Grinnell’s life mission crystallized when he read Audubon’s 1843 account of traversing the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. A passage Audubon wrote in his journal, a lament about the buffalo slaughter on the Great Plains, was seared into Grinnell’s mind and became, in a sense, a mission statement. “What a terrible destruction of life,” Audubon wrote, “as it were for nothing…as the tongues only were brought in, and the flesh of these fine animals was left to beasts and birds of prey, or to rot on the spots where they fell. The prairies are literally covered with the skulls of the victims.”39
Then
Audubon had fired off a verbal challenge that would launch the modern conservation movement. “This cannot last,” Audubon said of the buffalo slaughter. “Even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.”40
Those last six words—“surely this should not be permitted”—galvanized Grinnell. With the encouragement of Professor Othniel C. Marsh (no relation to George Perkins Marsh), the leading paleontologist in the United States, Grinnell volunteered to work on a Yale-sponsored Great Plains dinosaur dig in 1870, writing that he was “bound for a West that was then really wild and wooly.” 41
Grinnell had read every one of Mayne Reid’s books as a boy, so the American West beckoned to him like the star of Bethlehem. While collecting fossils at Antelope Station in Nebraska, Grinnell encountered buckskin scouts, drifters, gold-seekers, Christian farmers, itinerant preachers, and Plains Indians. It was just the first of many trips west, during which he befriended such legendary figures as Charley Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, and Frank and Luther North. By the time he reviewed Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips in July 1885, he not only had been part of the Marsh Paleontological Expedition but had made scientific discoveries in support of Darwinism, had accompanied Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to the Black Hills in 1874 when gold was discovered, and had joined Captain William Ludlow of the Army Corps of Engineers the next year in surveying Yellowstone.42 And nobody alive wrote about duck hunting with more authority than Grinnell.43 Believing that Native Americans had been “shamefully robbed” by the U.S. government, Grinnell worked side by side with Plains tribes, 44 inspiring enough trust and confidence that many of the Indian bands gave him a special name: to the Pawnee, he was “White Wolf,” an honorary member of the tribe; to the Cheyenne he was wikis (“migratory bird”); to the Blackfeet he was “Fisher Hat,” in recognition of his ability to find fish in seemingly depleted streams; and to the Gros Ventres he was “Gray Clothes,” because of the dull suit he often wore.45 By 1885 he was known as the American expert on the ethnology of the Plains Indians. The anthropologist Margaret Mead saluted Grinnell’s pioneering efforts on behalf of saving Indian tribal culture as recently as 1960, using the word “classic”46 to describe his book about the Cheyenne.47 (The great western writer Mari Sandoz did the same in 1962.48)
So when Roosevelt stormed into Grinnell’s office at Forest and Stream he was dealing with a heavyweight. Starting in 1882, using the magazine as a soapbox, the editor began crusading to save natural resources. Among other environmental causes he promoted seasonal licenses, laws against killing young animals, the need to preserve habitat, and the need for game wardens. Grinnell was small in stature, with large ears, and usually sported a well-trimmed mustache or goatee; his regal personality stood in sharp contrast to that of the bombastic Roosevelt. Grinnell was also soft-spoken, self-effacing, and humble—yet there was nothing timid about his approach. When he spoke about the American West, people listened. He believed strongly that scientists should get mud on their boots, and he dreamed of forest reserves, bison parks, restocked rivers, and greenbelts around western cities. To the scientific-minded Grinnell, there was an interconnectedness to nature. Even if the United States had the best game laws in the world, they meant nothing without forest protection. Last but not least, Grinnell encouraged states to create zoological societies—a lobbying campaign at which he proved successful in New York.
As a self-appointed watchdog for Yellowstone National Park, Grinnell constantly denounced overcommercialization and federal mismanagement. After witnessing hunters slaughter elk and deer in the park in 1875, he had written a scolding letter promoting big game conservation there and included it in the Ludlow Expedition report. Over the years to come, with a great deal of success, Grinnell would lobby the U.S. Senate to preserve the territorial integrity of Yellowstone. “My account of big-game destruction [in Yellowstone] much impressed Roosevelt, and gave him his first direct and detailed information about this slaughter of elk, deer, antelope, and mountain-sheep,” Grinnell recalled. “No doubt it had some influence in making him the ardent game protector that he later became, just as my own experiences had started me along the same road.”49
Early in 1886, a few months after the publication of Hunting Trips, Grinnell helped form the Audubon Society to protect birds from extinction. From the get-go he had no stronger ally in those efforts than Theodore Roosevelt. As the historian John Reiger observed in 1972 in The Passing of the Great West, “Grinnell, the originator and amalgamator of ideas, prepared Roosevelt for Gifford Pinchot, the President’s famous environmental administrator.”50 It was the alliance of Roosevelt and Grinnell (not Roosevelt and Pinchot) that launched the modern conservation movement in earnest. To Roosevelt, Grinnell was an American treasure whose likeness should have been cast in granite.
III
By late August 1885, following the publication of Hunting Trips, Roosevelt was back in the Badlands. The Elkhorn Ranch was now completely built, with eight rooms, a large stone fireplace, numerous windows, and a center hall—all adorned with taxidermy. Buffalo robes, deer antlers, and bearskins were strewn about the place. There were so many mule deer sheds and elk sheds on the piazza that it looked like an antler museum. Roosevelt converted the cellar into a photography darkroom; taking pictures of nature was yet another of his hobbies. There were two stables, together often housing as many as thirty horses. Roosevelt entertained and wrote at the Elkhorn (most of the real ranching work, however, was done from the Maltese Cross), 51 and especially enjoyed sitting on the porch facing the piazza-like area in front of the ranch house. “Just in front of the ranch veranda is a line of old cottonwoods that shade it during the fierce heats of summer, rendering it always cool and pleasant,” Roosevelt wrote. “But a few feet beyond these trees comes the cut-off bank of the river through whose broad sandy bed in the shallow stream winds as if lost except when a freshet fills it from brim to brim with foaming yellow water.”52
The big news around Medora was that Marquis de Mores had been arrested for murdering Riley Luffsey, a buffalo hunter who loathed de Mores’s barbed wire. De Mores was now in jail in Bismarck, awaiting trial. Furthermore, there was a rumor that he was furious at Roosevelt over land boundaries, cattle prices, Roosevelt’s rude ranchhands, and much else. Because Roosevelt was essentially a squatter, in the last years before fences and deeds transformed the open range into fixed property, enforcing boundaries was constantly a cause of friction. Sharp letters were exchanged between the two rich cattlemen. Talk of a pistol duel was even bandied about, but it proved empty. Eventually de Mores was found not guilty of murdering Luffsey.53 In any event, his arrest had been, at worst, an unpleasant distraction to Roosevelt, who had founded the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association and prided himself on his western leadership role even more than on being a New York assemblyman. And the stockmen’s association did more than settle land and brand issues. Because of a drought, brushfires were common in the Badlands that summer. As head of the association, Roosevelt worked side by side with his neighbors to put out the blazes, many started by Plains Indians angry at white settlement.
By September 16 Roosevelt was headed back east, stopping at the Bismarck jail for a brief visit with de Mores. In the spring, writing Hunting Trips had left Roosevelt physically depleted, but now he was in high spirits back home in New York. He attended the state Republican convention in Saratoga Springs and spent time with his little Alice. Friends were impressed by his general happiness and vitality. For the first time since his wife’s death, he was open to the idea of a new romance. This changed attitude allowed him to reconnect with his childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow. “For nineteen months (since the deaths of Alice and Mittie) they had successfully avoided each other,” Sylvia Jukes Morris wrote in Edith Kermit Roosevelt. “But sometime early that fall, either by chance or design, they met.”54
Deeply refined, quietly attractive, and unmarried,
Edith Carow was then twenty-four and still infatuated with Theodore. As Roosevelt had been winning elections and writing critically acclaimed books, his sister Bamie had constantly updated Edith, with whom she’d remained friends. Victorian etiquette called for a long mourning period, so as Theodore and Edith grew closer, they were very discreet. Even after Edith accepted Roosevelt’s proposal that November, they behaved in public only as friends for a full year. Somehow three years “in waiting” seemed much more socially appropriate than only two.
That Christmas season Roosevelt circulated at numerous social gatherings with Edith at his side. Nevertheless, he didn’t use her full name in his diary, referring to her as only “E” and reserving all his affection in the journal for Alice. No love letters between the two survive—Edith ordered their correspondence destroyed—and, in fact, it’s quite possible there weren’t any. By all accounts, Edith was an intensely private woman, with a unique ability of tamping down Roosevelt’s over-the-top enthusiasms. “Edith was not the sort of person to encourage rhapsodies anyway,” according to the historian Edmund Morris. “She disapproved of excess, whether it be in language, behavior, clothes, food, or drink.”55
Keeping Sagamore Hill running and maintaining the Dakota ranches were expensive propositions for Roosevelt. As marriage plans were privately discussed, he dreamed of having a large family. Keeping bloodlines alive mattered to him a great deal. Although he could live comfortably on his trust fund, he needed book advances to feel financially secure. At Henry Cabot Lodge’s suggestion Roosevelt signed a contract with Houghton Mifflin to write a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, the senator from Missouri who from 1821 to 1851 had fervently encouraged westward expansion.56 It would be part of a new series called American Statesmen. During January and February 1886 Roosevelt started writing Thomas Hart Benton in earnest, taking advantage of New York’s fine research libraries. Edith’s company was welcome, too, but still he kept thinking about the Badlands. A conscientious businessman, he knew, always checked up on his investment. Imagining Sewall and Dow suffering in the cold, worried that his dogies and yearlings wouldn’t make it through the winter, he returned to Medora at the end of the winter planning to write Benton there while collecting new material for a sequel to Hunting Trips. “I got out here all right, and was met at the station by my men,” he wrote to Bamie on March 20 from the Elkhorn. “I was really heartily glad to see the great, stalwart, bearded fellows again, and they were honestly pleased to see me. Joe Ferris is married, and his wife made me most comfortable the night I spent in town. Next morning snow covered the ground; but we pushed to this ranch, which we reached long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light. There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house, the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep…. No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even then it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like Arctic explorers.”57
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