The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [0]
Theodore Roosevelt
and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley
Dedicated to the memory of
Dr. John A. Gable (1943–2005),
executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association;
and
Sheila Schafer of Medora, North Dakota,
whom I love with all my heart;
and
Robert M. Utley (aka “Old Bison”)
Historian of the American West
Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying that “the game belongs to the people.” So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, A Book-Lover’s
Holidays in the Open (1916)
And learn power, however sweet they call you, learn power, the smash of the holy once more, and signed by its name. Be victim to abruptness and seizures, events intercalated, swellings of heart. You’ll climb trees. You won’t be able to sleep, or need to, for the joy of it.
—ANNIE DILLARD, Holy the Firm (1984)
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One The Education of a Darwinian Naturalist
Birds Above All—The Face of God—Sitting at the Feet of Darwin and Huxley—The Swashbuckling Adventures of Captain Mayne Reid—Boy Hunters and the White Buffalo—The Last Link—The Foraging Ants—Bear Bob Stories—Collecting for the Roosevelt Museum—Drawn to the Hudson River Valley—Of James Fenimore Cooper and the Adirondack Park—Albert Bickmore and the American Museum of Natural History—In Search of Live Animals
Chapter Two Animal Rights and Evolution
Protection of Harmless Wildlife—Feeling Pain—T.R.’s Family and the Humane Movement—Henry Bergh and the SPCA—Are Turtles Insects?—Theodore Sr. and the Civil War Surrogate—The Art of Taxidermy—The Talented Mr. John Bell—Travelling to Europe—Jackal Hunting in Palestine—Journey Down the Ancient Nile—Damn the Old Mummy Collectors—Comprehending the Origin of Species—Evolution from the Stork—Thomas Huxley and Man’s Place in Nature
Chapter Three Of Science, Fish, and Robert B. Roosevelt
Learning the Latin Binomials—In the Shadow of Linnaeus—Preparing for Harvard—“Tranquility” in Oyster Bay—What Is Wilderness?—With Moses Sawyer in the Adirondacks—Under the Sway of the American West—Protecting Alaska—The Willful and Wily Robert Barnwell Roosevelt—Fish of the Great Lakes—Save the Shad—Seth Green and the Hatcheries—The Sage of Lotus Lake—Yachting in the Great South Bay—Eels and Evolution—The Frogs of Illinois—Forgotten Mentor
Chapter Four Harvard and the North Woods of Maine
The Moosehead Lake Hazing—Evolution of the Red Crossbills—The Loathsome Death of Frederick Osborn—Homage to Edward Coues’s Bird Key—Under the Wing of Arthur Cutler—Shorebirds of New York and New Jersey—The Philadelphia Centennial—Harvard Zoologists—Summer Birds of the Adirondacks—North Woods of Maine—Will Sewall and the Art of Surviving in the Wild—An Ode to Alice Lee—The Birth of Weasel Words—A Bull Moose in the Making—Thoreau’s Mount Katahdin—Galumphing About—My Debt to Maine
Chapter Five Midwest Tramping and the Conquering of the Matterhorn
Boxing for Harvard—The Highs and Lows of Exuberance—Mount Desert Island Aglow—The Heroic Historian Francis Parkman—Goin’ to Chicago, Chicago—Competitive Grouse Hunting in Iowa—Tramping on the Plains—The Red River Valley Appeal—Getting Serious about Law—Sou’-Sou’-Southerly—Honeymooning in Europe—Conquering the Matterhorn—Beware the New York Assemblyman—Spencer Fullerton Baird and America’s Attic