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a final good-bye, and cheer him up with Bull Moose stories, or to give the family privacy. He chose the latter. He came to regret the decision. On January 6, 1919, Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill of a lung embolism made worse by multiple arthritis. He also had serious heart problems.6 Instead of mourning, Ickes, like many other Bull Moosers, reread Roosevelt’s writings about how conservation had taught him to achieve peace in dying. “Nature is ruthless, and where her sway is uncontested, there is no peace, save the peace of death,” Roosevelt had written, “and the fecund streams of life, especially of life on the lower levels, flows like an immense torrent out of non-existence for but the briefest moment before the enormous majority of the beings composing it are engulfed in the jaws of death, and again go out into the shadow.”7

Funeral services were held on January 8 at Christ Church in Oyster Bay. The Army Air Corps dropped laurel wreaths over Sagamore Hill to start the day of national mourning.8 Four hundred to 500 people attended the Episcopalian service to celebrate the ex-president’s life. They buried him in Young’s Cemetery, a village burial ground on a knoll situated between Sagamore Hill and downtown Oyster Bay. He was eulogized as the only American president who hadn’t needed a crisis to be great. Today the grave is surrounded by the Oyster Bay National Wildlife Refuge: 3,204 acres of freshwater ponds, salt marshes, and subtidal habitats. “He was the most encouraging person in the world,” said Edna Ferber, who would later write a novel about Alaska, Ice Palace. “The strongest character in the world has died. I have never known another person so vital, nor another man so dear.”9

After Roosevelt’s death, all the conservationist groups in the country, particularly those Roosevelt had been associated with at the uppermost level of New York society, offered ideas about how to honor him properly. William Temple Hornaday, for example, suggested placing a marble shaft, like the Washington Monument, on the highest point in Central Park.10 Charles Sheldon wanted a second moose reserve (like the one on Fire Island) created in his honor in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Dr. C. Hart Merriam thought a new subspecies of bear should be named after the Colonel. President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, a leading teacher of Darwin and a progenitor of Pinnacles National Monument, lobbied for a new national park in California, to be named after Roosevelt. The novelist Hamlin Garland, saying that a “mountain had slid from the horizon,” wanted to name the Front Range of the Rockies after Roosevelt. “Death and Roosevelt do not seem possible partners,” Garland wrote in his diary. “He was life abounding, restless life.”11

A consensus soon developed that Roosevelt wouldn’t have liked sad remembrances.12 A few weeks after Roosevelt’s death, the Grand Canyon was at last upgraded by Congress from a monument to a national park. The American Society of Mammalogists started publishing the Journal of Mammalogy as a quarterly aimed at researching and protecting mammals in the wild.13 The Boone and Crockett Club urged that Sequoia National Park be renamed Theodore Roosevelt National Park to honor Roosevelt’s conservationist ethos.14 Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane and Director of the National Park Service Stephen Mather both approved of this idea within a week of Roosevelt’s death (but for bureaucratic and political reasons, the name was never changed). Eventually, in 1978, 70,447 acres of the Badlands near Medora, North Dakota, where the Colonel had spent time as a cowboy in the 1880s, would become Theodore Roosevelt National Park. As he would have wanted, buffalo and antelope were reintroduced into the park; his Maltese Cabin and Elkhorn Ranch sites were preserved as the “cradles of conservation.”15

Gifford Pinchot decided that Roosevelt’s death was an opportunity to inspire people to take action for wild Alaska. The Colonel, he believed, hadn’t really died but like a big brown bear had lumbered into a deep winter