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collaborate on anything there was a clash of wills. The group R.B.R. had founded, the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG), had shifted its focus from an early triumph—saving quail—to a new craze for trapshooting.46 Ever since the Interstate Trapshooting Association was formed in 1890,47 NYAPG’s members were using the association more or less as a rod-and-gun club for blasting plates on manicured fairways. Even the New York Times, not immune to the fad, started covering trap tournaments as if they were premier sporting events.48 But plates were the good part of the fad. Unfortunately, some clubs started using live pigeons instead of clay ones. Although not an animal rights advocate, Grinnell vehemently denounced the shooting of birds as both cruel and unsportsmanlike. In an editorial in Forest and Stream he lambasted not only the shooters but also the commercial netters who sold boxes of the pigeons to trapshooting clubs.49

There is no record of whether R.B.R. felt hurt about not being tapped for the Boone and Crockett. Spending the late 1880s abroad as ambassador to the Netherlands during President Cleveland’s first term, R.B.R. let the conservationist mission of NYAPG slip away; preoccupied in The Hague, he had scant time to seriously challenge poachers in upstate New York. Seizing the opening, T.R. and Grinnell had created the Boone and Crockett at an appropriate time, entering the void left by the NYAPG’s slack course. Most important, instead of being a statewide organization like NYAPG, the Boone and Crockett Club was national in scope. Owing to his celebrity Roosevelt was able to attract the best people to his club. With apparently no sense of betrayal NYAPG’s lawyer, Charles E. Whitehead, for example, instead began doing pro bono work for T.R.’s Boone and Crockett Club.* “It was, in other words, an opportune time for a new organization,” the historian John F. Reiger has explained in American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, “one that would have a scope, as well as the self-discipline to stay focused on what was important.”50

Following the publication of American Big-Game Hunting, it was becoming clear that Roosevelt was among those Americans best equipped to exert, as his sister Corinne put it, a “potent influence for good in Western affairs.”51 Coincidentally, Roosevelt’s The Wilderness Hunter reached bookstores around the same time; it included twenty-four full-page engravings (some drawn by Remington). To a modern-day reader, the book smacks of the influence of John Burroughs, starting with epigraphs from Walt Whitman and Joaquin Miller. Boasting like Moses in the Old Testament, Roosevelt declared in his preface that for a “number of years much of my life was spent either in the wilderness or on the borders of the settled country.”52

Roosevelt’s preface goes on to explain that his firsthand outdoors experiences taught him that besides the thrill of the fair chase there was an aesthetic value in nature. Merely soaking in grand scenery and studying woodland creatures united the naturalist’s body and soul. “In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun,” Roosevelt wrote, sounding like Katherine Lee Bates’s 1895 patriotic anthem “America the Beautiful,” “of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.”53

Carefully studying Burroughs had taught Roosevelt to make the most minute and detailed observations of nature, from a blade of bunch-grass to a nagging gnat, from a dead fly on a windowsill to the highest branch of a towering redwood tree. Even when Roosevelt was stalking a wapiti (round-horned elk) in the Bitterroots, he now paused to note