The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [128]
By the time Roosevelt left the Badlands for New York, his conservationist resolve had grown firm. What his Uncle Rob had done for fish, he would do for American big game. A day after arriving back in New York, in early December 1887, Roosevelt convened some of the best and brightest wildlife lovers and naturalists in the New York area to dine at his sister’s Madison Avenue home. He was ready to make a hard sell. If his father could found the American Museum of Natural History from a parlor in Manhattan, Theodore saw no reason why this group, meeting in the cramped uptown quarters he shared with Edith, Bamie, and little Alice when not at Sagamore Hill, couldn’t save buffalo and elk in the American West.1 After all, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman had established him as the authority on big game. Roosevelt now had a sacred responsibility, he believed, to save herds of North American ungulates from extinction.
As his first step, Roosevelt asked George Bird Grinnell to be a co-founder of the Boone and Crockett Club (named after his two favorite, iconic trailblazers). Grinnell had already successfully created the Audubon Society and was editor of the respected periodical Forest and Stream, so he knew how to rally public opinion. Roosevelt always valued experienced help. Although Grinnell disdained lobbying, he was good at it. Grinnell fully approved of the project, and his willingness to join forces with Roosevelt to promote the conservation of big game animals and their habitat boded well for the eventual success of the Boone and Crockett Club. Roosevelt and Grinnell then lured a who’s who of other conservation-minded “American hunting riflemen” to serve as founders. All of the original twelve members, they insisted, had to espouse the “fair chase” philosophy and believe in the sanctity of national parks.2
Roosevelt tapped his brother, Elliott, and his cousin J. West Roosevelt (both childhood veterans of board meetings for Theodore’s Roosevelt Museum during the 1870s) to join the Boone and Crockett Club. It was now the turn of their generation, emerging into maturity, to continue the kind of conservation work Robert B. Roosevelt had long championed. Most of the other founders were New York capitalists with deep pockets, like T.R. himself: E. P. Rogers, a yachtsman and financial investor; Archibald Rogers, the rear commodore of the New York Yacht Club; J. Coleman Drayton, who was John Jacob Astor’s son-in-law; Thomas Paton, the husband of the heiress Marion Rowle; and Rutherford Stuyvesant, a wealthy real estate investor. From the outset Roosevelt knew that large sums of money would be necessary to lobby effectively in Washington, D.C.3 Basically, the founders were from the establishment, easily distinguishable from the plain citizenry of New York even though none was afraid to get mud on his boots.
A drawing of Roosevelt standing next to a trophy worthy of the Boone and Crockett Club.
T.R. with Boone and Crockett Club antlers. (Courtesy of the Boone and Crockett Club)
In early January 1888, the twelve founders of the Boone and Crockett Club had approved a prescient conservationist constitution at Pinnards Restaurant in Manhattan. Ideas had been allowed to percolate freely. The thought of buffalo once again thundering on the plains aroused the founders’ enthusiasm during their inaugural deliberations. A decision was made from the outset that the club would have a permanent membership of exactly 100 hunters. The bylaws also stipulated that a limited number of associate members (no more than fifty) would also be allowed. Roosevelt—who would remain the