The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [164]
As the Panic of 1893 gripped the Midwest and West, there were clamorous demands that the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 be revoked. The only people the reserves benefited, their opponents said, were “nature cranks” and the “athletic rich.”33 In this uncertain financial climate, the high price of Big-Game Hunting—ten dollars—meant it would appeal only to the well-off or antiquarians. “We thought,” Grinnell recalled, “that perhaps there were enough big game hunters in the country to make it possible to publish the book without too great a loss.” The idea of the Boone and Crockett Club’s publishing venture had originated with Roosevelt. Grinnell recalled that Roosevelt financed the first printing of 1,000 copies with a personal check of $1,250. “He never said anything about this,” Grinnell recalled, “and I never asked about it.”34
Personally immune to the Panic of 1893, Roosevelt and Grinnell recruited stories for American Big Game Hunting from founding club members. Roosevelt carefully edited and pruned the prose of the submissions, proving to be well suited for the task. Always ready with red pencil, Roosevelt actually asked Grinnell to send an overwritten submission his way so he could “slash it up” by a third.35 This presented a delicate problem in the case of one submission.
Back in 1887, Roosevelt had tapped the famous landscape painter Albert Bierstadt to become a member of the Boone and Crockett. Bierstadt’s sublime paintings of the Rockies and the Mojave Desert, in which settlers were shown (if at all) as dots dwarfed by the vast American West, promoted the inherent value of wilderness. In addition, Bierstadt, whose notebooks are filled with sketches of American wildlife, had killed a huge moose along the New Brunswick–Maine line.36 With a rack sixty-four and a half inches wide, it was determined to be the eighth-largest set of antlers ever recorded.*
Bierstadt had realistically painted this triumph in Moose Hunter’s Camp, so Roosevelt was eager to get a first-person account from him for the book. “At the last meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club it was decided, subject to the approval of the rest of the members or of a majority of them, to see if we could not produce a volume to be known by some such title as that of the Boone and Crockett Club, and to consist of various articles on big game hunting, etc. by members of the Club,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt in February. “We intend to issue it annually if we find it reasonably successful. To do this would need some money, probably five or ten dollars annual dues for each member being sufficient. I hope you approve of the scheme and that if we decide to get out the book you will give us an article on moose hunting. I should greatly like to have in permanent form one or two of your experiences. Have you ever published an account of the way in which you got your big head? If not, do write it out for us at once.” 37
Of course, the fact that Bierstadt was an excellent painter didn’t necessarily mean he wrote well. The artist’s mother tongue was German, and his English was only passable. Nevertheless, as requested, Bierstadt wrote an accurate, lively account of his Maine–New Brunswick moose hunt. In reading the essay, Roosevelt discovered a bigger problem than atrocious spelling or awkward syntax: Bierstadt hadn’t actually