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with inner anguish that modern psychiatrists would have probably diagnosed as a form of dehabilitating depression. A chronic misery had fallen over him. He drifted across the Atlantic, fumbled about London and Rome, occasionally sneaked in some serious hunting, but mostly just squandered opportunities to succeed at anything. For a while he sought rehabilitation in Illinois and worked in Virginia. But spiritual destitution followed him every step of the way. Despite being married to a wonderful wife, Anna Hall, Elliott was nevertheless a serial adulterer, like Uncle Rob. By including Elliott as a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, Theodore hoped to get his brother refocused on the outdoors life—hunting being the one activity that stabilized Elliott’s tormented spirit.28 However, once Elliott became embroiled in a paternity suit, Theodore lost all patience with his brother.29 Bringing shame upon the family name, he believed, was never acceptable. “He is evidently a maniac,” an agitated Theodore wrote Bamie about Elliott, “morally no less than mentally.”30

In early 1889, besides worrying about Elliott, Roosevelt wondered whether the Boone and Crockett Club had a staunch ally in Benjamin Harrison. Because Harrison was a Republican—as were most early conservationists—Roosevelt was hopeful. Would the new president fight for forest reserves, fish hatcheries, and big game preservation? The stoop-shouldered Harrison, in fact, was an “aesthetic conservationist” who loved the outdoors almost as much as Roosevelt did.31 Growing up on a farm along the banks of the Ohio River (near Cincinnati), Harrison hunted duck, fished for smallmouth bass, and hiked around the North Bend woods looking for arrowheads. He had a sharp eye for birds. Harrison appreciated the redemptive quality of wild places and their contribution to building character. Twice before being elected president, he visited Yellowstone National Park. While serving as a U.S. senator from Indiana, Harrison had been instrumental in halting commercial development in Yellowstone, pushing for prohibitive legislation that allowed only ten park acres to be leased for hotel use. Harrison had also introduced a bill in early 1882 that would have set aside land along the Colorado River of Arizona for government preservation. (The legislation failed, but T.R. eventually saved the Grand Canyon under an executive order known as the Antiquities Act of 1906.)

Despite these legislative setbacks, Harrison’s conservationist convictions grew. His new secretary of the interior, John W. Noble, was a college friend of his at Yale who’d risen through the Third Iowa Cavalry to become a brigadier general during the Civil War. Following Lee’s surrender, Noble moved to Saint Louis, practiced law, and was eventually made a U.S. district attorney.32 Perhaps because he had seen so much killing in the Civil War, Noble didn’t cotton to the slaughtering of bison by market hunters, which had become widespread owing to the demand for the hides. And he worried about a timber famine in the Missouri Ozarks and elsewhere, seeing it as an impending national danger. In 1910 George Bird Grinnell, reflecting on the early history of the conservation movement in his partially unpublished “Brief History of the Boone and Crockett Club,” praised Noble in no uncertain terms, writing that he was “a man of the loftiest and broadest views and heartily in sympathy with the efforts to protect the forests.”33

As an intellectual, Roosevelt spent much of the 1890s competing with Edward Coues for preeminence as the top frontier historian. Each man, in particular, was vying to be considered most knowledgeable about the American West. While Roosevelt was writing The Winning of the West, Coues was editing an impressive string of journals and frontier reports about western exploration. The years Coues spent as an army surgeon in forlorn outposts along the Mexican border had allowed him to gather valuable insights for his books. Coues’s firsthand knowledge of the West clearly informed his reliable annotations of the classic accounts