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by the migratory sheep bands” that were permitted to “pasture on, and to destroy the public domain.” (Muir, even though he had once been a shepherd, famously called domesticated sheep “hoofed locusts.”) Pinchot was pleased that the Colonel was still going after thugs. Hornaday’s prescient book, in fact, had given Roosevelt an array of devastating statistics for making his conservationist case. But to the Republican regulars, still bitter that Roosevelt had wreaked havoc on the party in 1912, the review was another indication that TR had become a wild man. “Crazy Teddy” was more interested in the ability of sea otters to raid oyster beds in the Alexander Archipelago than in the ability of hardworking Cordova coal miners to earn a living for their families.16 Roosevelt shot back defiantly that at least he wasn’t “guilty of a crime against our children,” the handing down of a “wasted heritage.”17

Roosevelt applauded the isolated efforts of some states to protect wildlife populations, such as Montana’s attempts to save bison and Alaska’s efforts to protect fur seals. According to Roosevelt, Vermont—the home state of the conservationists George Perkins Marsh and Charles Sheldon—had been heroic in managing its white-tailed deer population. But as a whole, the United States had a woeful record with regard to big-game preservation. To Roosevelt’s dismay, Territorial Governor Walter Eli Clark of Alaska, a trigger-happy boomer without a conservationist bone in his body, was trying to abolish the law on Kodiak Island protecting brown bears. Clark’s attempt was for the supposed benefit of settlers, but if bears were a problem, control them, Rooseveltians insisted; don’t market-slaughter them for profit. The Boone and Crockett Club formed yet another committee—led by Charles Sheldon—to save Alaska’s brown bears, to treat them as game to be managed, not predators to be slaughtered. “The brown bears are the greatest attraction to visiting sportsmen in Alaska, and as living animals, are worth infinitely more to natives and the white population of Alaska,” Madison Grant, of the Hunt Club, wrote to Dr. E. Lester Jones, of the Department of Commerce, in 1915, regarding a bill then before Congress proposing to transfer the care of Alaska’s brown bears from the Biological Survey (which offered protection) to the Bureau of Fisheries (which would eliminate them as a nuisance to the industry).18

Alaskans who loved the outdoors life needed to undertake a relentless war against air polluters, land degraders, and market hunters. There should be no cowering or compromising with regard to species extinction. “The wild antelope and the prairie chicken are on the point of following the wild bison and the passenger pigeon into memory,” Roosevelt said. “Our rich men should realize that to import a Rembrandt or Raphael into the country is in no shape or way such a service at this moment as to spend the money which such a picture costs in helping either the missionary movement as a whole, or else parts of it, such as the preservation of the prongbuck [pronghorn antelope, Antilocapra americana] or the activities of the Audubon Society on behalf of gulls and terns.”19

Championing individual species in peril, Roosevelt lamented the declining populations of the whooping crane, bald eagle, and California condor (Gymnogyps californianus). Taking a step in the right direction, New York had recently passed the Audubon Plumage Law of 1910, banning the sale of plumes of all native birds for the millinery trade.20 Roosevelt was nevertheless concerned that the Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica) off the coast of Maine, which had distinctive black-and-white plumage and a colorful, almost clownlike beak, had been extirpated. American citizens, he argued, shouldn’t have to travel all the way to Newfoundland or Labrador to see a puffin breeding ground. Roosevelt called for “international agreements” among all the nations of the western hemisphere to “put down the iniquitous feather trade.” This was a direct jab at ex-president Taft for having canceled the World Conservation