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By Root 3056 0

these predators, his own eyes seemed more attracted to the wildflowers and birds. He was eager to share his own counts of Grand Canyon wildlife with Sheldon, proud that he was adding to the U.S. Biological Survey’s cataloging of the Southwest. “Although we reached the plateau in mid-July, the spring was just coming to an end,” Roosevelt wrote. “Silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit-thrushes [Catharus guttatus] chanted divinely from the deep woods. There were multitudes of flowers, of which, alas! I know only a very few, and these by their vernacular names, for as yet there is no such handbook for the flowers of the southern Rocky Mountains as, thanks to Mrs. Frances Dana, we have for those of the Eastern United States, and, thanks to Miss Mary Elizabeth Parsons, for those of California.”5

Roosevelt’s prose from the Grand Canyon in the Outlook, later collected in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, was unusual for its ease and impressionistic quality.6 His tone had tempered and softened considerably since he wrote his Dakota trilogy of the 1880s, and certainly since he wrote the gory African Game Trails. He now conveyed a feeling of tranquillity and harmony. Portraits and photographs from the southwestern trip, in fact, seem to confirm this alteration, capturing a less strident-looking Roosevelt—the hard lines of his famous grimace are somewhat softened by traces of a smile. The hats he wore were more floppy, no longer crisp and uncreased. He was playing the father and uncle. Roosevelt had always been a child of nature: this new Roosevelt seemed to verge on beatific pastoralism. The reader of his essay on the Grand Canyon, which appeared in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, is almost relieved when Roosevelt finally betrays a familiar ferocity, snapping at the despoilers of nature like a provoked grizzly bear: “Continual efforts are made by demagogues and by unscrupulous agitators to excite hostility to the forest policy of the government, and needy men who are short-sighted and unscrupulous join in the cry, and play into the hands of the corrupt politicians who do the bidding of the big and selfish exploiters of the public domain. One device of these politicians is through their representations in Congress to cut down the appropriation for the forest service.”7

One national forest Roosevelt surely had in mind in 1913 was Alaska’s Chugach. In the coming months a bill was introduced in Congress to dissolve the Chugach National Forest. According to two U.S. senators—Wesley Jones of Washington and Thomas Walsh of Montana—the Forest Service was thwarting the economic development of Alaska. Likewise, the territorial government issued a report declaring that the Chugach was an example of abuse by the federal government. The commercial timber industries, these politicians argued, should be given free rein in the Chugach. Backing this campaign to abolish the Chugach was Secretary of the Interior Walter Fisher, who wanted an Alaska commission created to lease out the land for timbering. Luckily, the U.S. Forest Service still had a lot of conservationists willing to wage an all-out war over the Chugach.8

Roosevelt dutifully dispatched notes from the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Utah’s Rainbow Bridge for the Outlook, and Leopold was riveted by TR’s words, amazed that the ex-president had spent time in Deming, New Mexico, an afternoon’s drive from Carson National Forest.9 When Hornaday came west to Albuquerque in 1915 on a book tour, orating with holy-roller fervor, Leopold was in the audience cheering his every word. A mesmerizing showman, full of the indignant rage of a true believer, Hornaday showed horrific slides of seals being slaughtered, clubbed, and skinned alive. The images were so gruesome that even New Mexican sportsmen in the audience, accustomed to blood and guts, winced. A cowboy hat was passed around to collect money for Hornaday’s Wildlife Protection Fund (used to pay legal fees in his successful battle against the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor for using unethical practices to hunt marine mammals