The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [116]
Meanwhile, G.P. Putnam’s Sons was preparing to publish Hunting Trips (dedicated to Elliott Roosevelt, “That Keenest of Sportsmen and Truest of Friends”) in July, as a so-called sporting book.19 No other well-known politician in America, the advance notices boasted, could have written such a gripping hunting narrative. A photograph of Roosevelt posed in a fringed buckskin suit, Winchester rifle at his side, was used to promote the author as a gentleman-sportsman. Taken in a New York studio, the photo, a contrived combination of Buffalo Bill and John James Audubon, reeked of Broadway hokeyness, right down to the backdrop of ferns and an artificial grass carpet. But the actual book, filled with etchings and woodcuts and published in a first edition of only 500 copies, printed on quarto-size sheets of handwoven paper, remains a true collector’s item. Although it had a strong conservationist ethos, Hunting Trips was primarily aimed at gentleman-sportsmen like the writer, aristocrats who could afford hunting holidays, chuck-wagon hands, and what was then a hefty retail price of fifteen dollars.20
All of Roosevelt’s major outdoors adventures between 1880 and 1884 were vividly recounted in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (subtitled Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains). Putting his college education to good use, he wrote about Minnesota grouse, Montana buffalo, Dakota Territory bighorn sheep, Great Plains antelope, and Bighorns bears. Chronology was abandoned, often to the reader’s confusion, in favor of biological and topographical edification. Showcasing his erudition as a naturalist was Roosevelt’s first priority; recounting thrilling hunts was a close second. Most chapter titles, in fact, had to do with wildlife: “Water Fowl,” “The Grouse of the Northern Cattle Plains,” “The Deer of the River-Bottoms,” “The Black-Tail Deer.” Roosevelt wrote that the American West was a Darwinian laboratory full of amazing wildlife action. “The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that,” Roosevelt wrote about On the Origin of Species. “It does not do to be merciful to a few, at the cost of justice to the many.”21
The villains of Hunting Trips were the “swinish game butchers” who ruthlessly hunted for hides “not for sport or actual food,” and who cold-bloodedly murdered the “gravid doe and the spotted fawn with as little hesitation as they would kill a buck of ten points.”22 Whenever T.R. turned polemical on behalf of good sportmanship, he echoed the ethical sentiments and concerns of his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt and the sporting press, such as Forest and Stream. Like Uncle Rob pontificating on the essential beauty of shad, trout, and eels, throughout Hunting Trips Roosevelt gave loving naturalist observations about the elk, antelope, and buffalo he had hunted. Not all, however, was blood and thunder. There was an “Indian guide” feel to much of the prose. For example, Roosevelt wrote quietly about stumbling upon a white-tailed deer’s resting spot with the “blades of grass still slowly rising, after the hasty departure of the weight that has flattened them down.” 23 Reading Hunting Trips makes it abundantly clear that Roosevelt deeply respected these deer.
Although cherry-picking is required, genuine conservationist beliefs can be excavated from the pages of Hunting Trips. For example, true western outdoorsmen, Roosevelt wrote, would have to become citizen-protectors of the wildlife being devastated by bands of destructive rogues. In almost every chapter he feared the day when elk, buffalo, and prairie chickens would vanish forever. “No one who is not himself a sportsman and lover of nature can realize the intense indignation with which a true hunter sees these butchers at their brutal work of slaughtering the game, in season and out,” he wrote in Hunting Trips, “for the sake of the