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members. Although he was preparing to move to Washington, D.C., for his new post as U.S. civil service commissioner, he nevertheless continued fulminating against the deplorable conditions in New York City’s notorious cordon of louse-infected tenement slums. No job could ever rein in his multifarious reformist interests and instincts. But Roosevelt dropped his anti-poverty crusade and his history writing on March 7 for a long-coveted opportunity to meet the naturalist John Burroughs. The date, in fact, should be noted in the annals of U.S. conservation history as the cementing of an extremely significant alliance that would last for nearly three decades. “I thought him very vigorous, alive all over, with a great variety of interests; and it was surprising how well he knew the birds and animals,” Burroughs recalled. “He’s a rare combination of the sportsman and the naturalist.”1

Roosevelt and Burroughs’s lunch reportedly came about through an intermediary. As an assemblyman, Roosevelt had gotten to know Jacob A. Riis, a Danish-born newspaperman whose How the Other Half Lives would soon awake the nation to the suffering of New York City’s immigrants. Roosevelt regularly visited a boys’ club run by the reformer and polemicist John Jay Chapman in Hell’s Kitchen with Riis, and would often give away copies of Burroughs’s compilations of essays, such as Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine. Chapman, who was a neighbor of Burroughs, arranged to have the two birders meet for lunch at the Fellowcraft Club.2 Joining them was Elizabeth Custer, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Since her husband died at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, she’d published two western memoirs: “Boots and Saddles” or Life in Dakota with General Custer (1885) and Tenting on the Plains or General Custer in Kansas and Texas (1887). She, too, would have plenty to converse about with Roosevelt.3

Theodore Roosevelt with John Burroughs in Yellowstone National Park in 1903. The photograph was taken by Illustrated Sporting News.

T.R. and John Burroughs at Yellowstone camp. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

T.R. was always trying to engulf people up in the tidal wave of his erudition, which some interpreted as monomaniacal self-regard. As one close friend kindly put it, “He was the prism through which the light of day took on more colors than could be seen in anybody else’s company.” 4 But Burroughs was a household name—his books were mandatory reading in schoolhouses all over America—and he made Roosevelt feel inferior.5 Burroughs didn’t just tramp around the wooded countryside keeping field notes or hunting game—he was the wooded countryside personified. Unlike Roosevelt, who was constantly showing off his credentials as a naturalist, Burroughs, as if half divine, believed there was sanctity in every fallen leaf or grain of sand. (Or, as Charles Dickens wrote of a favorite character in his 1854 novel Hard Times, he was a “man who was the Bully of humility.” 6

Concerned over the post–Civil War abandonment of agrarian communities in favor of overcrowded cities, the usually benevolent Burroughs wrote stingingly against “scientific barbarism,” even calling humming factories “the devil’s laboratory.”7 Raised in the Catskill mountains, Burroughs would rub his eyes in disbelief as he surveyed the environmental degradation of New York City’s waterways. Although Burroughs never postulated a social philosophy per se, there was a sympathy for the Transcendentalists in everything he did or said. But he nevertheless admired captains of industry like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who rose from the tinker’s bench to change the world. Roosevelt, by contrast, never fully condemned industrialization—he wanted only to break up trusts and to create great American parks, forest reserves, and bird rookeries to help invigorate city dwellers and uplift their urban spirits from chronic factory smoke and industrial disease.

There were other differences between the two naturalists. Burroughs was contemplative whereas Roosevelt