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few dollars they are too lazy to earn in any other and more honest way.”24 By expressing such views in 1885, Roosevelt was pitting himself against the railroad behemoths, telegraph companies, real estate brokers, and even Buffalo Bill, whom he respected as a master horse-breaker.25 Although there are only a few such passages—in a book that promoted the joys of big game hunting—Hunting Trips nevertheless marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s great crusade for the conservation of deer, elk, antelope, big-horn sheep, and bears. Wringing a livelihood from the “outdoors” literary marketplace instead of U.S. naval history now became an all-important occupational pursuit for Roosevelt to juggle along with politics, ranching, and managing the family trust. And in wildlife protection he had found his cause.

Hunting Trips received impressive reviews that July. The New York Times, for example, said that the book was clear-eyed and would seize “a leading position in the literature of the American sportsman.” Although the first part of the review focused on Roosevelt’s ethnological delineation of cowboy culture, the Times also noted that his naturalist writing on the survivalist tactics of white-tailed deer was exemplary. “The common deer, or whitetailed deer, found in almost any State in the Union, he tells us was not so plentiful five years ago on the northern plains as it is to-day,” the unidentified reviewer wrote. “With this deer its increase seems to be due to its particular habits. It seeks the densest coverts, is fond of wet and swampy places, and is rarely jumped by accident. It demonstrates the survival of the fittest.”26

Overnight Hunting Trips became the seminal study of both the Badlands and the Bighorns. The core message Roosevelt conveyed was that hunting big game was good for the American soul. Bouts of barbarism, Roosevelt believed, reawakened the primitive and the savage in a man, to good effect. It was a theme that pervaded his writings for the rest of his life. “In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole,” he later wrote. “The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures—all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all national pastimes; it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.” 27

II

One mixed review, however, caught Roosevelt’s attention amid the cavalcade of raves.28 The thirty-five-year-old naturalist George Bird Grinnell, the esteemed editor of Forest and Stream, did compare Hunting Trips to Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail and Lewis H. Garrard’s Wahtoyah and the Taos Trail because of its “freshness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm” on the other hand, Grinnell criticized Roosevelt for generalizing too much about the western species he had encountered while hunting, for failing to discuss color variations properly, and for other inaccuracies of zoological detail. The slightly patronizing review observed that although the youthful Roosevelt had studied a particular antelope herd in Montana, the herds in Manitoba or Saskatchewan were not necessarily identical to it. Grinnell believed that Roosevelt was talented, but that to be a real Darwinian zoologist he should have spent more time doing field observations before rushing into print with his first impressions, which were sometimes inaccurate despite being well written. “Mr. Roosevelt is not well known as a sportsman, and his experience of the Western country is quite limited, but this very fact in one way lends an added charm to this book,” Grinnell wrote, damning Roosevelt with faint praise. “He has not become accustomed to all the various sights and sounds of the plains and the mountains, and for him all the difference which exists between the East and the West are still sharply