The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [148]
As Edith and Corinne soon learned, however, for all his scientific knowledge, Theodore was a reckless escort in the wilderness. For starters, the professional guide he had hired, Ira Dodge, got them terribly lost. Acting as if it were still midsummer, one evening the Roosevelt party camped at an altitude of 7,500 feet, shivering all night under flimsy blankets; even the camp’s drinking water, in a pail, froze.70 Disregarding safety, Theodore thrust people ill equipped for outdoors rigors to push themselves to the point of breakdown or exhaustion. Worse yet, Roosevelt had leased a string of horses unaccustomed to being ridden sidesaddle. On a pack trail ride along stretches of the Continental Divide, which separates waters flowing west from those flowing east, Edith was thrown off her horse, which had reared suddenly, spooked by an erupting geyser. The pain in her back was excruciating, but no doctor was brought in. Her recovery was slow. Soon thereafter, Theodore himself was injured when hunting with Ferguson outside the park. He had “rather strained” his groin and was uncomfortable on horseback for a few days. After visiting the Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of Yellowstone, where the hot water rose through limestone instead of lava, the Roosevelt party was back at the Elkhorn Ranch on September 23, bruised but all smiles.71
The whole Medora-Yellowstone trip was hailed by T.R. as an unsurpassed bonding experience for his family. Only going to a great European spa like Baden-Baden, he believed, had the same rejuvenating effect on citified people as a week in America’s great park. (It didn’t hurt that he had an office of civil service clerks to mind the store back in Washington, D.C., during his six-week grand holiday.) “I have rarely seen Edith enjoy anything more than she did the six [weeks] at my ranch, and the trip through the Yellowstone Park,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “And she looks just as well and young and pretty and happy as she did four years ago when I married her—indeed I sometimes think she looks if possible even sweeter and prettier…. Edith particularly enjoyed the riding at the ranch, where she had an excellent little horse, named Wire Fence, and the strange, wild beautiful scenery, and the loneliness and freedom of the life fascinated and appealed to her as it did to me.” 72
After the vacation at Yellowstone, Theodore threw himself into his conservation work for the Boone and Crockett Club harder than ever. Arming himself with scientific data, he was determined that his children could someday bring their children to experience Wyoming’s Garden of Wonders. Using the newest wildlife science available, Roosevelt wanted the old-time wildlife abundance back. Yellowstone needed to be expanded as a zoological reservation (George Catlin had once called for this), where big game like elk and buffalo could thunder around unmolested by the intrusions of civilization. After all, Roosevelt argued, the West couldn’t have been won without buffalo and elk to provide the pathfinders with meat. The time had come to create reserves so that the populations of both species could increase again and be safe. If Robert B. Roosevelt and his amiable helper Seth Green could repopulate Hudson River spawning shad through artificial propagation, then surely a similar repopulation project could be undertaken on behalf of buffalo. Essentially, the visionary Roosevelt was calling for what in the 1980s became the American Prairie Foundation, a nonprofit organization that wanted to create a 3.5-million-acre reserve in central Montana for studying, North American game, bird-watching, hunting, and hiking.73
By 1890 the conservationist movement was no longer embryonic. A new leader had appeared on the West Coast, a man who spoke on behalf of pristine nature with the grace of a literary angel. The California naturalist John Muir’s two articles in Century magazine (both illustrated by Thomas Moran), “The Treasures of the Yosemite” and “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park,” 74 had created a literary