The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [124]
Although Roosevelt admired the illustrators assigned to his own articles, he was astonished by the exquisite pen-and-ink sketches of an obscure artist named Frederic Remington that he discovered elsewhere in the magazine, accompanying stories about the Apache Wars along the Arizona-Sonora border. Impressed by Remington’s clear, honest eye, Roosevelt decided to tap him to illustrate future stories he planned on writing about the Badlands for Century.
In the Outing article “The Ranch,” Roosevelt expressed his environmental concerns in earnest. “To see the rapidity with which larger kinds of game animals are being exterminated throughout the United States is really melancholy,” he grumbled. “Fifteen years ago, the Western plains and mountains were places fairly thronged with deer, elk, antelope, and buffalo…. All this has now been changed, or else is being changed at a really remarkable rate of speed. The buffalo are already gone; a few straggling individuals, and perhaps here and there a herd so small that it can hardly be called more than a squad, are all that remain. Over four-fifths of their former range the same fate has befallen the elk; and their number…is greatly decreased. The shrinkage among deer and antelope has been relatively nearly as serious. There are but few places left now where it is profitable for a man to take to hunting as a profession; the brutal skin-hunters and greasy Nimrods are now themselves sharing the fate of the game that has disappeared from before their rifles.”71
In August 1886 Roosevelt took another hunting trip, with Merrifield as sidekick, this time to the Coeur d’Alene mountains of Montana and Idaho in search of white goats. He would draw on this trip for two essays about these sure-footed climbers, which he considered the “queerest wild beasts in North America.” Roosevelt, in fact, wrote naturalist essays about mountain goats (he sometimes called them white goats) for both his second book on the Badlands (Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, published in 1888) and Harper’s Round Table in 1897. They were among his very best prose efforts. Even though Roosevelt thought that the meat of mountain goats was musky (and that trying to compete with them in mountain climbing was a fool’s errand), he developed a deep fondness for them. Tracing their lineage back to the Himalayas, Roosevelt described their agility, long tail, and distinctive hump. “If a goat is on its guard, and can get its back to a rock,” he enthused, “both wolf and panther [mountain lion] will fight shy of facing the thrust of the dagger-like horns.”72
The hunt for the white goat marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s injecting the “fair chase” doctrine (or code of ethics) into his personal relationships with westerners. Roosevelt employed a market hunter, Joe Willis, as his guide in the Coeur d’Alene mountains.73 Up to this point Roosevelt had treated his rugged, unwashed guides almost as equals (although he insisted that they all call him “Mr. Roosevelt,” never by his first name). Not anymore—on the white goat hunt, Roosevelt continually lectured Willis about changing his careless hunting habits. Grinnell would later describe how Theodore “made himself agreeable as usual and preached so effectively the doctrine of game preservation that he wholly converted Willis, who up to this time had been a skin and meat hunter, considering game animals valuable only for the dollars they yielded the hunter. Roosevelt was constantly doing such individual useful work in conservation matters.”74
Once back in Medora with his new white goat trophies, Roosevelt received a jolt. A gossip columnist in New York had broken