The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [166]
Others whom Roosevelt and Grinnell asked to participate in American Big-Game Hunting were Winthrop Chanler (“A Day with Elk”), Archibald Rogers (“Big Game in the Rockies”), and F. C. Crocker (“After Wapiti in Wyoming”). As coeditor of the book, Roosevelt had diligently corresponded with contributors, making suggestions about how to improve their manuscripts and struggling to create an overall unity of effect. Roosevelt, in fact, oversaw the physical look of the volume, choosing deep red cloth and a big-game head for the cover. The first fifth of American Big-Game Hunting explained the conservationist objectives of the Boone and Crockett Club to readers. The West Pointer Captain George S. Anderson, superintendent of Yellowstone, for example, led off with the hunter’s lament “A Buffalo Story.” Picking up the saga in the 1870s, Anderson traced the demise of the buffalo as a species in a longing, heartfelt way. Nevertheless, he gloated over killing a “lonesome George” just for its tongue. A veteran of the Indian Wars with the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Commanche, Captain Anderson was known as the premier “saddle officer” in the West. That was in the 1870s and 1880s. As of 1890, in a complete reversal, Captain Anderson’s enemies were no longer Native Americans in war paint but white settlers around Yellowstone engaged in poaching, vandalizing, and overgrazing.43 His conservationist evolution from buffalo skinner to buffalo protector was indicative of a new consciousness developing in the American West of the 1890s, one which Roosevelt was instrumental in promoting.
Not wanting to be left out, Roosevelt took up the Great Plains in American Big-Game Hunting. His “Coursing the Prongbuck” (lifted, in tone and emphasis, from Hunting Trips and Ranch Life), again expressed his enthusiasm for the Badlands. He explained that pronghorn herds were thinning out from the Dakotas to Texas because of the pronghorn’s own curiosity; they were always investigating prairie schooners or human camps too closely. All a westerner had to do was wave a colored rag from behind a rock or sage, and the antelope would slowly head toward it—and, invariably, be shot as a result. “The pronghorn is the most characteristic and distinctive of American game animals,” Roosevelt wrote. “Zoologically speaking, its position is unique. It is the only hollow-horned ruminant which sheds its horns. We speak of it as an antelope, and it does of course represent on our prairies the antelopes of the Old World, and is a distant relative of theirs; but it stands apart from all other horned animals. Its position in the natural world is almost as lonely as that of the giraffe.”44
Roosevelt also contributed “Literature of American Big-Game Hunting” to the volume, enthusiastically touting his all-time favorite naturalists and sportsmen. “The faunal natural histories, from the days of Audubon and Bachman to those of Hart Merriam, must likewise be included,” Roosevelt advised fellow hunters, “and, in addition, no lover of nature would willingly be without the works of those masters of American literature who have written concerning their wanderings in the wilderness, as Parkman did in his Oregon Trail, and Irving in his Tour on the Prairies; while the volumes of Burroughs and Thoreau have of course a unique literary value for every man who cares for outdoor life in the woods and fields and among the mountains.”45
One conservationist from whom Theodore Roosevelt didn’t solicit an essay was Robert B. Roosevelt. Every time T.R. and his freewheeling, unpredictable uncle tried to