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But he lost his temper when game market syndicates used the war as a pretext to abolish hunting restrictions in Alaska and elsewhere. Only money-grubbing thugs, Roosevelt said, would wipe out animal species “for all time” to “gratify the greed of the moment.”30 The premise of the market hunter syndicate was that meat—including deer, elk, antelope, moose, and caribou—was needed to feed U.S. Army troops in training. Hornaday—who had a peak named after him in the Absaroka Range in Yellowstone National Park—was unleashed by the CFCA to be an attack dog. This time, however, Roosevelt was even more vehement and threatening. “To the profiteering proposal of the Pseudo-patriots, the patriots for revenue only, that protection of wildlife in wartime be relaxed, the united hosts of conservation reply,” Roosevelt said, “You Shall Not Pass.”31

A local Alaskan conservation society—the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association, based in Fairbanks—backed the pugnacious Roosevelt. The association was founded in 1916, and its headquarters eventually were located alongside the lovely Chena River; it was made up of hunter-anglers from interior Alaska. The members oversaw the transporting of almost thirty bison from Montana to Delta Junction, Alaska. In coming decades they also backed the repopulation of Alaska with musk ox; supported the protection of bears;32 and helped protect the Mulchatna caribou herd, which as a result of their efforts grew into one of the largest in Alaska. All around Twin and Turquoise lakes, in what became Lake Clark National Park, these Alaskan hunter-conservationists helped the Dall sheep survive, too.

One area where Roosevelt seemingly wanted to say “You shall not pass” was the Arctic; scientists, naturalists, and explorers—not extraction industries—were needed at the pole. Roosevelt wrote a fine article for the Outlook, “Is Polar Exploration Worth While?” Looking at the bright side of exploration, Roosevelt said there was a need for more Pearys, Amundsens, Stefanssons, and Shackletons. The natural history of Antarctica was an opportunity for someone hoping to make a name for himself as a mammalogist or zoologist. “The leopard seal is as fierce as the great spotted cat of the tropics from which it takes its name; and there are other seals, fat, good-humored, helpless, who, unless cruelly undeceived, treat men merely as friendly strangers, objects of mild curiosity only,” Roosevelt wrote. “The penguins never touch dry land and never know warmth. They pass their whole lives upon the ice and in the icy water. The emperor penguin, standing erect on its two flippers, is almost as tall as a short man.”33

But it was the abundant wildlife of Arctic Alaska that most intrigued Roosevelt. The Inupiat (or Eskimos) actually lived above the Arctic Divide. (By contrast, there was no permanent human habitation in Antarctica.) With no hard-packed trails to follow, they traveled by dogsled over frozen creeks and shorelines along the Beaufort Sea. The whole North Slope was a tide of caribou in migration. During the fall months, hundreds of thousands of lesser snow geese landed like a blizzard on the coastal tundra; some observers claimed it was the greatest avian spectacle on American soil.34 “There is an abundant life stretching very far towards the Pole, and probably there are some representatives of this life which occasionally stray to the North Pole,” Roosevelt wrote. “Both in the water, and on the ice when it is solid over the water, and on the land, in the brief Arctic summer when the sun never sets, the Arctic regions teem with life as do few other portions of the globe. Save where killed out by men, whales, seals, walruses, innumerable fish literally swarm in the waters; myriads not only of water birds but of land birds fairly darken the air in their flights; and there are many strange mammals, some of which abound with a plenty which one would associate rather with the tropics.”35

Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the Boone and Crockett Club started amassing data on the inequitable treatment of Alaska’s game animals. Madison