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By Root 3032 0

in Okefenokee Swamp was up to. It was much more than gossip, or a grapevine. Facts about birds, insects, mammals, and trees were traded. The bourgeois were belittled for never turning down a dollar, for their predictable greed, avarice, and overconsumption. The conservationists praised the legacy of both Muir and Pinchot. There was a growing post-Darwinian belief that the natural world held the key to unlocking the mysteries of man. Among the U.S. Forest Service publications that were being privately printed across the country, Leopold’s The Pine Cone was the most audacious. It became mandatory reading for all those in the outdoors world, including Theodore Roosevelt.

A letter that Roosevelt sent to Leopold in 1917 has, over the decades, become the connective tissue between his and Leopold’s generations of conservationists. Leopold received it courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service in his mailbox at Albuquerque, and it was as unexpected as the snowy owl Roosevelt had shot in Long Island many years earlier. It was neatly typed and quite brief. But to Leopold it was a stamp of approval for his career, as when Thomas Edison told the young Henry Ford at the Oriental Hotel on Long Island that the gasoline-run internal combustion engine, not the electric car, represented the future.

My Dear Mr. Leopold,

Through you, I wish to congratulate the Albuquerque Game Protection Association on what it is doing. I have just read the Pine Cone. I think your platform simply capital, and I earnestly hope that you will get the right type of game warden. It seems to me that your association in New Mexico is setting an example to the whole country.

Sincerely Yours, Theodore Roosevelt.24

Roosevelt was in his late fifties when he praised The Pine Cone. His health was declining. After losing the 1912 election he had several high points—such as hiking in the Grand Canyon with his family and exploring a hitherto undiscovered river in Brazil’s Amazon (named Rio Teodoro in his honor) with Kermit, who had saved his father’s life in the jungle. After practicing the strenuous life for so long, Roosevelt was burned out, exhausted to the point of depletion. Jack London died in 1916. Buffalo Bill died the following year, and was buried in a tomb on top of Lookout Mountain in Colorado.25 The whole Rough Rider generation, it seemed, was going . . . going . . . gone.

Most of Roosevelt’s characteristic vitality had disappeared by 1916. He was blind in one eye; a bullet was still lodged in his chest; he occasionally experienced bouts of malarial shivers and fever lingering from the arduous trip to the Amazon in 1913–1914; some minuscule parasite still lived in his body, eating away at his energy; his digestive system was a wreck. Unable to tap into his physical reserves, Roosevelt retired his gun and took up philosophizing. Instead of telling bear yarns, he spoke of nature, the universe, the planet Earth, hardship, existence, and destiny. At home at Sagamore Hill, forgetful of his bearings, looking out the window to the west and thinking for a second he might see Old Faithful or Pikes Peak, somber in its blue snow at sunset, Roosevelt grew melancholic. After he wrote Through the Brazilian Wilderness—a memoir of hunting and camping with Kermit in the Amazon jungle—his prose was understandably less action-packed and aimed more at the horizon, toward distant buttes, calving glaciers, and shore mud. He turned once again to the vast expanses of Alaska.

Roosevelt’s infatuation with Alaska was notable in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), his elegant celebration of the world’s cragsmen, explorers, scientists, and faunal naturalists. Trumpeting his own conservationist record, he called for a revolutionary ethos of game management like the one Leopold was promoting in The Pine Cone. He wanted Americans to take seriously the dire Biological Survey reports by Edward W. Nelson about the danger Alaska’s caribou herds were in when the long winters shut down food supplies. “The man should have youth and strength who seeks adventure in the wild, waste spaces of the