• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4308 0

collections.24 Forgetting about caribou for the moment, Roosevelt captured the feisty little shrew and studied it carefully. The Kootenai guide, Ammál, who had taken to calling Roosevelt “Boston Man,” shook his head in disbelief at the glee his client felt about a rodent.25 “It was a soft, pretty creature,” Roosevelt wrote, “dark above, snow-white below, with a very long tail.” After inspecting it alive, Roosevelt killed the shrew, turning the skin inside and letting it dry. Throughout his days in Idaho, he treated the specimen as a prized possession. Too much handling of the skin, Roosevelt believed, owing to chemicals on one’s hands, would lead to discoloration. When Roosevelt returned to New York he sent the shrew to Baird in Washington, D.C., where it became part of the Smithsonian’s natural history collection.26

But Roosevelt hadn’t traveled all the way to Idaho so that a solitary water shrew could be put on display at the Smithsonian. Eventually he killed a black bear, one with “two curious brown streaks down its back,” and fried its meat for dinner. The caribou, however, remained elusive. Hiking up steep mountain crests and the faces of cliffs, a frustrated Roosevelt couldn’t even find a caribou trail. Willis often ran ahead to reconnoiter, but without luck. At dusk Roosevelt’s party felt removed from even the back of civilization. “Indeed the night sounds of these great stretches of mountain woodlands were very weird and strange,” Roosevelt wrote. “Though I have often and for long periods dwelt and hunted in the wilderness, yet I never before so well understood why the people who live in lonely forest regions are prone to believe in elves, wood spirits, and other beings of an unseen world.”27

Back in New York, Roosevelt raved about the unsurpassed beauty of Idaho—and it was also pretty good for the hunter’s pot. While Grinnell promoted Montana’s Flathead Range as the most gorgeous part of the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt championed the stupendous ranges of Idaho. Perhaps because he had so fully documented wildlife in the Dakota Territory, he was proud to add the topmost peaks of the Idaho Territory to his area of expertise. Before long he was writing about Idaho’s “hoary woodchucks [marmots],” “timid conies [pikas],” and “troops of noisy, parti-colored Clark’s crows.”28

When Roosevelt became president thirteen years after the caribou hunt, saving wild Idaho—which had become a state in 1889—ranked high on his agenda. On January 15, 1907, he created Caribou National Forest, about 200 miles east of Boise. The following year, on July 1, he virtually turned the state into one vast wildlife preserve, setting aside millions of acres in seventeen new national forests with his presidential pen: Pocatello, Cache, Challis, Salmon, Clearwater, Coeur d’Alene, Pend Orielle, Kaniksu, Weiser, Nez Perce, Idaho, Payette, Boise, Sawtooth, Lemhi, Targhee, and Bitterroot.29 Seldom, if ever, had a hunt resulted in such a momentous conservationist gesture on behalf of wild creatures.

IV

That fall, Roosevelt agreed to campaign for the Republican presidential nominee, Benjamin Harrison. Huge crowds came out to hear Theodore as he and Edith traversed Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Perhaps because of the fame he’d achieved through his connections with the West, the farmers and ranchers of the upper Midwest and Great Plains loved him. And he was just as popular all the way south to the Rio Grande and Rio Colorado. To Roosevelt the “hurly-burly of a political campaign,”30 as he once put it, was an enthralling blood sport, the supreme test of personal combat for a genuine warrior.31 While Harrison ran a “front porch” campaign, delivering speeches from his home in Indianapolis and avoiding perspiration, Roosevelt hit the trail with a vengeance, orating at every crossroads town and village junction. The whole experience, he wrote in a letter to Lodge, was “immense fun.”32

As Election Day neared, Roosevelt celebrated his thirtieth birthday. It was a rare time for self-reflection. Despite all his exciting work with the Boone and