The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [120]
So when Roosevelt stormed into Grinnell’s office at Forest and Stream he was dealing with a heavyweight. Starting in 1882, using the magazine as a soapbox, the editor began crusading to save natural resources. Among other environmental causes he promoted seasonal licenses, laws against killing young animals, the need to preserve habitat, and the need for game wardens. Grinnell was small in stature, with large ears, and usually sported a well-trimmed mustache or goatee; his regal personality stood in sharp contrast to that of the bombastic Roosevelt. Grinnell was also soft-spoken, self-effacing, and humble—yet there was nothing timid about his approach. When he spoke about the American West, people listened. He believed strongly that scientists should get mud on their boots, and he dreamed of forest reserves, bison parks, restocked rivers, and greenbelts around western cities. To the scientific-minded Grinnell, there was an interconnectedness to nature. Even if the United States had the best game laws in the world, they meant nothing without forest protection. Last but not least, Grinnell encouraged states to create zoological societies—a lobbying campaign at which he proved successful in New York.
As a self-appointed watchdog for Yellowstone National Park, Grinnell constantly denounced overcommercialization and federal mismanagement. After witnessing hunters slaughter elk and deer in the park in 1875, he had written a scolding letter promoting big game conservation there and included it in the Ludlow Expedition report. Over the years to come, with a great deal of success, Grinnell would lobby the U.S. Senate to preserve the territorial integrity of Yellowstone. “My account of big-game destruction [in Yellowstone] much impressed Roosevelt, and gave him his first direct and detailed information about this slaughter of elk, deer, antelope, and mountain-sheep,” Grinnell recalled. “No doubt it had some influence in making him the ardent game protector that he later became, just as my own experiences had started me along the same road.”49
Early in 1886, a few months after the publication of Hunting Trips, Grinnell helped form the Audubon Society to protect birds from extinction. From the get-go he had no stronger ally in those efforts than Theodore Roosevelt. As the historian John Reiger observed in 1972 in The Passing of the Great West, “Grinnell, the originator and amalgamator of ideas, prepared Roosevelt for Gifford Pinchot, the President’s famous environmental administrator.”50 It was the alliance of Roosevelt and Grinnell (not Roosevelt and Pinchot) that launched the modern conservation movement in earnest. To Roosevelt, Grinnell was an American treasure whose likeness should have been cast in granite.
III
By late August 1885, following the publication of Hunting Trips, Roosevelt was back in the Badlands. The Elkhorn Ranch was now completely built, with eight rooms, a large stone fireplace, numerous windows, and a center hall—all adorned with taxidermy. Buffalo robes, deer antlers, and bearskins were strewn about the place. There were so many mule deer sheds and elk sheds on the piazza that it looked like an antler museum. Roosevelt converted the cellar into a photography darkroom; taking pictures of nature was yet another of his hobbies. There were two stables, together often housing as many as thirty horses. Roosevelt entertained and wrote at the Elkhorn (most of the real ranching work, however, was done from the Maltese Cross),