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as merely the logical next step following the publication of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Thomas Hart Benton. Even though the Allegheny upcountry of the 1770s was vastly different from the Badlands of the 1880s, Roosevelt found them deeply connected.85 “We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red, on the banks of the Little Missouri, and among the wooded, precipitous foot-hills of the Bighorn, exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years previously built their log-cabins, beside the Kentucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies,” Roosevelt wrote in the preface of Volume 1 of The Winning of the West. “The men who have shared in the fast-vanishing frontier life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier of the past.”86

Such triumphalist “white man’s burden” sentiments aside, Roosevelt nevertheless worried that the United States’ innate sense of opportunity had recently degenerated into exploitation. America knew how to conquer, but it was failing in the art of properly managing its hard-won resources. The West’s virgin woodlands were rapidly being logged and its rolling prairies plowed. Wetlands were being drained, and streams were being fished out. Everywhere Roosevelt went in the Dakota Territory, the topsoil had been leached of nutrients and signs of erosion were commonplace. It sickened him to see wild ungulates being poisoned and slaughtered because they supposedly ate the same grasses as cattle and sheep. Even the very wilderness of the West was disappearing in a maze of train tracks, barbed wire, telegraph lines, and meat-processing plants.

As Roosevelt surveyed the Dakota Territory in 1887, finding it nearly impossible to hunt a buffalo, elk, or pronghorn, he understood that the “winning of the West” had been accomplished at the expense of natural resource management, and it made him melancholy. Saving the American West from environmental ruin after the winter of 1886–1887 became a high priority for public policy. Even while he was counting cattle casualties from the “blue snow,” he was planning future western trips: to the Selkirks of British Columbia, the Bitterroots of Wyoming and Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, and the Two Ocean Pass of Wyoming. Each sojourn reinforced his newfound belief that the western terrain was a fragile ecosystem.87

CHAPTER EIGHT

WILDLIFE PROTECTION BUSINESS: BOONE AND CROCKETT CLUB MEETS THE U.S. BIOLOGICAL SURVEY

I

To offset his losses from the “blue snow,” Roosevelt wrote yet another book about his Badlands experiences, to be called Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, illustrated by Frederic Remington. (This book often gets mixed up with Hunting Trips of a Ranchman because, even though they were published three years apart, their titles are very similar.) Ranch Life would consist largely of articles Roosevelt had been commissioned to write for Century starting in late 1887, along with additional previously unpublished essays. An overarching conservationist message now emerged from Roosevelt’s hunting experiences: tragically, American big game was verging on extinction throughout the entire West. Consider how difficult it had been for Roosevelt to shoot a lone buffalo, or to find a grizzly bear. Poacher syndicates were even slaughtering elk within the confines of Yellowstone National Park. If law enforcement didn’t round up the illegal shooters and trappers, then doomsday, Roosevelt believed, lurked just around the corner for western wildlife.

The overwhelming question weighing on Roosevelt’s conscience as he worked on Ranch Life was simple: how could he be proactive to save big game animals? Although Roosevelt’s exact moment of reckoning remains unclear, in early December 1887 he found a conservationist solution to his quandary. Borrowing from the way his elders tackled societal ills, he would create a hunting club devoted to saving big game and its habitats. High-powered sportsmen like himself, he believed, banding