The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  * 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  * The essay remained unpublished until 1988, when the scholar John Rousmaniere unearthed it from the Library of Congress’s T.R. Collection and published it in Gray’s Sporting Journal.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.

  * 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.

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

  * 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.”

  * 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).

  * 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.

  * 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.

  * 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.”

  * 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.”

  * Unfortunately, Grant also fancied himself as a eugenicist, and he believed some deeply racist theories of Nordic superiority. His 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race caused widespread fear of a new wave of Italians and Slavic immigration coming to the United States after World War I. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned Grant by name as a race theorist. Others have claimed that Grant’s eugenicist works were studied in Germany during the Third Reich.

  * Mackinac National Park—demoted to Mackinac State Park in the summer of 1895—was an exception. So was Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, slightly more than 1,000 preserved acres, saved only because Bathhouse Row (man-made facilities around therapeutic thermal springs) was what the U.S. government was intent on preserving. That Arkansas location probably should have been declared a national historic site, not a national park.

  † Mayor William Strong, a Republican, actually appointed a four-man board of police commissioners. T.R. was selected as board president by his three peers.

  * The existing Pacific Forest Reserve of Washington state was greatly enlarged and renamed Mount Rainier Forest Reserve on February 22, 1897.

  * After devouring the book in a single sitting, Roosevelt had reviewed Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 positively in the October 1890 Atlantic Monthly. And in 1897 he praised Mahan’s biography of the British admiral Horatio Nelson in a review in The Bookman.

  * Roosevelt was referring to the son of the great Louis Agassiz. Alexander Agassiz became famous for his numerous comparative zoology reports, including Marine Animals of Massachusetts Bay (1871). David Starr Jordan was a renowned ichthyologist who became president of Indiana University and then Stanford University. He went on to be a peace activist and was an expert witness in the Scopes trial of 1925.

  * For conservationist-naturalists, visiting Mount Shasta—the sixth-tallest mountain in California—had become something of a rite of passage. John Muir wrote of Shasta that his “blood turned to wine” upon seeing the peak. Because it was a volcano Muir also called it a “fire mountain.” To the poet Joaquin Miller the summit was “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter of 1908, wrote that he considered “the evening twilight on Mt. Shasta one of the grandest sights I have ever witnessed.”

  * Remember that George Bird Grinnell’s original Audubon was defunct. There were only state Audubon societies in the late 1890s. No real national “Audubon Society” was formed until the 1940s. And even as late as 2008, some state Audubons (like Connecticut’s) remain separate and independent of the National Audubon.


  * Roosevelt loved absolutely everything about Japanese culture. As U.S. president he hired one of the premier Japanese jujitsu teachers as his personal trainer. He also introduced jujitsu to Annapolis and West Point.

  * In this book Benjamin Kidd’s name was dropped from the chapter title.

  * Roosevelt was right to worry about the future of Florida wildlife. As Elizabeth Kolbert noted in The New Yorker (May 25, 2009), of the fifty billion species to have ever inhabited Earth, over ninety-nine percent have vanished. At least eighty percent of all marine species have become extinct.

  * The Osprey, an illustrated magazine of birds and nature, thought the Rough Riders, in their letters home, were unfairly maligning vultures. “Had the men only known, the birds, instead of being their enemies, were in reality, invaluable allies,” the editorial argued. “In the thick growth of vegetation that clothes many of the hillsides and valleys of Cuba, the work of the burial parties is slow and difficult, and bodies are often overlooked in the search. The keen senses of the buzzard lead them unerringly to the spot. In many cases his work, nauseating and disgusting as it must be to contemplate, is the means of preserving the health and strength of many of our soldiers.” Walter Adams Johnson and Dr. Elliot Coues, “Editorial Notes,” Osprey, Vol. 3, No. 1 (September 1898), p. 12.

  * In 1908 Roosevelt’s beloved Bronx Zoo displayed two of the largest American bald or golden eagles ever captured; they shared a cage. Their names were Uncle Sam and Teddy Roosevelt. Both birds were popular attractions. Unfortunately, on one hot June afternoon, a field mouse scampered into their cage, pecking for corn kernels on the floor. Simultaneously, both eagles went for the kill, their bodies, according to the New York Times “hurtling down like projectiles driven from a twelve-inch gun.” A death grapple ensued over the mouse (which escaped unharmed) and supposedly over who was king of the eagle house. “Uncle Sam is a trifle heavier than Teddy Roosevelt,” the Times noted, as if reporting a boxing match. “And Uncle Sam got in the first blow. It was a vicious wing blow, and the second joint of his massive wing struck Teddy Roosevelt full in the chest. The smaller eagle recoiled, as he did so he lunged with his hooklike beak at Uncle Sam. The beak tore a gash in Uncle Sam’s right shoulder.” “Uncle Sam and Teddy in a Death Grapple,” New York Times (June 22, 1908), p. 16.

  * The superintendent would have the authority to appoint three deputies: a forester, a fish culturist, and a supervisor of marine fisheries. See “The Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission,” New York Times (March 3, 1900), p. 6.

  * New Mexico and Arizona didn’t achieve statehood until 1912. They were the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states, respectively.

  * Slabsides was at West Park, Esopus, New York, in the Hudson Valley (Ulster County), a mile and a half inland from the river. Burroughs’s main farmhouse, Riverby, as of 2009 was still owned by his descendants.

  * Published to capitalize on Roosevelt’s fame as a Rough Rider, this volume comprised Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and The Wilderness Hunter, with factual natural history corrections. They were packaged together.

  * Roosevelt found that in Texas cougars were often called panthers. In California they were mistakenly called catamounts, a term that properly refers to the wildcat or lynx. By 2009 the best place to find cougars in the United States was along the Middle Prong of the Gila River in New Mexico.

  * The total acreage of the three reserves effective June 30, 1915, was 4,147,682. From the Reports of the Forest Service, Department of Agriculture.

  * Anybody reading an old copy of the Biographical Record of the Graduates and Former Students of the Yale Forestry School (published in 1913) can see dozens of Yale Forestry School graduates being sent all over the country to assist seasoned rangers, eventually becoming rangers or forestry scientists themselves.

  * On March 4, 1907, President Roosevelt created the Chalmette Monument and Grounds (site of the Battle of New Orleans), including a cemetery for veterans of the War of 1812. Today the Chalmette National Historic Park—located in Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River near New Orleans—is a major tourist attraction.

  * There is some debate as to whether Crater Lake was the fifth, sixth, or seventh national park. Because Mackinac Island was decommissioned and General Grant was absorbed into King Canyon National Park in 1940, the ranking can vary. Officially it was the seventh national park established. I’m going with sixth because that was how President Roosevelt saw it in 1902.

  * To be exact Wister’s dedication read: “TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT…Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new—written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.”

  * Roosevelt may have thought Pat Garrett adhered to the western code, but he didn’t. Garrett’s law enforcement decades had many unethical episodes.

  * Not included in this table is the Medicine Bow Forest Reserve (Colorado and Wyoming). Originally created on May 22, 1902, it had about 2 million acres. Medicine Bow Forest Reserve has gone through a number of changes since its creation, including boundary modifications on July 26, 1902, and May 17, 1905. Absaroka is not generally included as one of Roosevelt’s 1902 accomplishments, as it was absorbed into Yellowstone Forest Reserve on January 29, 1903. See “100 Years of Conservation and Public Service on the Medicine Bow,” U.S. Forest Service Archives, Washington D.C. See also Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year Ended June 30, 1905 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905), pp. 213–215.

  * Gottlob had dropped off Arthur, then about twelve, in Crestline, Ohio, with his brother Adolf.

  * Indian River oranges were and are considered, by many, the best in the world, and are known as the “royalty” of oranges. Three-quarters of all Florida grapefruit comes from the Indian River region.

  * Visitors from New York got to the Indian River by railroad to Jacksonville. Then they took a steamboat up the Saint Johns River, debarking at Salt Lake, near the town of Enterprise. From there it was a mule-drawn wagon tram to Titusville.

  * The Pelican Island refuge was increased to 616 acres; and in 1968 403 acres more were added to the refuge. As of 2009 it encompassed 4,359 acres of mangrove islands and bottomland in the Indian River (some of which was under lease from the state of Florida).

  * The Hermit was Mason A. Walton, called the “hermit of Gloucester.” He spent many solitary years in the woods of Bond’s Hill, Massachusetts. Walton was known for his 1903 book The Hermit’s Wild Friends; or, Eighteen Years in the Woods. His home was called “Ravenswood.”

  * On January 1, 1905, Senator Mitchell was indicted, for favoritism regarding land claims, before the U.S. Land Commissioner. On July 5 Mitchell was convicted while the Senate was in recess. He died that December. Mitchell was one of only eleven elected U.S. senators ever indicted. President Roosevelt, cheering on cartoonists who portrayed Mitchell’s beard in rich people’s pockets, took his death as good riddance.

  * In 1917–1918, elks, bison, and white-tailed deer were reintroduced to Sully’s Hill. On March 3, 1931, Congress transferred Roosevelt’s North Dakota national park to the National Wildlife Refuge System; today it is managed as a big game preserve.

  * While Roosevelt may have thought his campaign refused the money a 1912 investigation came to a different conclusion. The check had been cashed by the RNC. Although it was determined that Roosevelt hadn’t been in the loop.

  * Emperor Menelik was an unusual personality—he lived surrounded by pets—and an unusual leader. He helped Ethiopia create its first modern banks, railroads, postal service, and so on. Anxious to establish modern capital punishment techniques in Ethiopia, he ordered three electric chairs. Unable to produce the electric current necessary for executions, yet not wanting to throw his purchase out, Menelik used one as his throne.

  * Others on the receiving platform with President Roosevelt included Henry Cabot Lodge and Ethan Hitchcock.r />
  * As an additional preservation measure in the Wichita Mountains, the Roosevelt administration levied a $1,000 fine on anybody caught poaching or hunting in the reserve.

  * In 1887 Native Americans owned 138 million acres; by 1934, when the allotments ceased, they had only 48 million acres, much of it not good for farming.

  * John Wetherill’s brother Richard was the famous archaeologist, based in Santa Fe, who helped promote saving ruins in the Southwest. John and Richard often get confused.