The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [130]
Therefore, the Boone and Crockett Club appointed a committee to “promote useful and proper legislation toward the enlargement of the Yellowstone National Park.”11 As the railroad fought for a right-of-way through the park, and its allies pushed legislation reducing Yellowstone’s acreage, the Boone and Crockett committee lobbied for regulations with teeth in them.12 There are about 130 boxes of largely uncataloged material at the club’s archives in Missoula that bear witness to how crucial Yellowstone preservation was to the founding members.
The club had real reasons to worry about wildlife depletion in the West. Audubon’s bighorn sheep, the eastern and Merriam’s elk, the heath hen, the Carolina parakeet, and the great auk had all gone extinct since the 1870s, to name just six examples. The once plentiful beaver was no longer found east of the Mississippi River. (Even encountering a beaver in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains was a rare event by 1887.) The buffalo population had dwindled dramatically since the start of the century, from 40 million in 1800 to at most a couple of thousand in 1887. White-tailed deer were faring only slightly better: when Europeans first came to America, there had been approximately 24 million white-tailed deer, compared with just 500,000 at the time of the first Boone and Crockett dinner. Even wild turkeys—once nearly ubiquitous and numbering 15 million—were struggling, with current estimates of only 30,000. (Today the number is around 7 million.) “As sportsmen, the club founders were very aware of what the plight of wildlife meant in terms of future hunting prospects,” George B. Ward and Richard E. McCabe explained in Records of North American Big Game. “As Americans, they saw clearly what it represented in broader resource terms to the national health. As businessmen, industrialists, journalists, and politicians, they recognized that it lay with them, and others of like vision, to attempt ‘so far as possible’ to relieve and correct the situation.”13 The survival of two game animals Roosevelt had written about so authoritatively in Hunting Trips and in his outstanding articles for Outing—the pronghorn and elk—was a high priority of the Boone and Crockett club. Only 150,000 elk and 25,000 pronghorn remained in the West; each species was down 98 percent from counts early in the nineteenth century.14 Yellowstone became the club’s special cause.
“So far from having this Park cut down it should be extended,” Roosevelt declared, “and legislation adopted which would enable the military authorities…to punish in the most rigorous way people who trespass against it.”15
Many historians now believe that the Boone and Crockett Club—Roosevelt’s brainchild—was the first wildlife conservation group to lobby effectively on behalf of big game. The club sprinkled the issue of wildlife protection with kerosene, struck a match, and watched it take off. While antihunters sat on the sidelines gabbing about the extermination of the buffalo, Roosevelt and Grinnell popularized the sportsman’s code and called for protection of the buffalo in Yellowstone. In essence, the club became the most important lobbying group to promote all national parks in the late 1880s. Audubon’s six words—“surely this should not be permitted”—which Grinnell promulgated had now become the club’s rallying cry. And with the help of General Sheridan and Senator Vest, in particular, Roosevelt and his friends achieved very good press during their club’s first two years of existence.
The club had awakened a national conscience pertaining to the wanton destruction of America