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By Root 4000 0

are living in rural areas, compared with 40 percent when The Wilderness Hunter was published, so Roosevelt was anticipating a modern trend. As of 2008 Jefferson’s agrarian vision and the homesteading of the West were kaput. Even Thoreau’s back-to-nature ethos, based on self-reliance, which had a revisionist run in the 1960s, had become cultish at best, a matter of a few survivalists holed up in forlorn mountain cabins in the Sierra Nevada or Appalachians. But Roosevelt’s notion of extreme wilderness experiences in short fixes has become widespread. Shooting the rapids, mountain climbing, rappelling—Americans crave an extreme fix from nature in hundreds of different ways. Whole cities such as Boulder, Eugene, and Asheville cater to consumers of nature like Roosevelt: claustrophobic city dwellers and suburbanites desperate to encounter a rare bird or cypress grove or desert ecosystem before it all vanished.

III

With the commercial success of The Wilderness Hunter, Roosevelt had enhanced conservationist stature. Using a civil service issue as a pretext to open a dialogue with Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith, he tried in April 1894 to influence U.S. government policy on law enforcement in parklands protection. “I am very glad of the position the Interior Department has taken in reference to the Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt wrote to Smith. “The next time we give a dinner I shall ask you to be our guest, as we much appreciate the stand you have taken in forestry matters and in the preservation of these parks. It will be an outrage if this government does not keep the big Sequoia Park, the Yosemite, and such like places under touch.”58

Roosevelt respected Smith, who was then thirty-eight years old and the publisher of the Atlanta Evening Journal. A tall, pickle-nosed, big-bellied Cleveland Democrat, Smith was a shrewd anticorporation lawyer bent on promoting the “New South.” President Cleveland believed Smith would “stand fast against land grabbers and exploiters of the public domain.” As a corollary, Smith was unafraid to lambaste the Populist Party (or People’s Party, founded in 1891 to lobby for free silver coinage), scoffing at its membership as essentially a beehive of charlatan hayseeds.59 Although Roosevelt was from the opposition party, he respected Smith as a tough, honest, no-nonsense yellow-dog Democrat with the admirable glare of a battle-tested Confederate veteran. Smith was a snappy dresser, always seen wearing a frock coat and slouch hat; there were no wrinkles in his wardrobe. Often he would sport a handkerchief in his jacket pocket as an affectation. Roosevelt, who denounced the Populists as the type of men who didn’t wear “under shirts,” admired Smith’s sense of style. Furthermore, Smith’s wife was the daughter of the legendary General Howell Cobb—a Confederate so gray his image should have been chiseled onto Stone Mountain, and also a former secretary of the treasury, having served under President Franklin Pierce. Cobb, it was said, calculated every waking hour in the service of Georgia’s greatness.60

Shrewdly, Roosevelt used the fact that his own mother had lived in Georgia—as a Bulloch from Roswell—as an ice-breaker with Smith. Peaches, pine trees, and red clay were part of his heritage, and many of his first-prize items assigned to his boyhood Roosevelt Museum had come from just north of Atlanta. For his part, Smith, who would go on to serve as a U.S. senator from Georgia, told Roosevelt that he welcomed any strategic wisdom from the Boone and Crockett on how to deal with policing Yellowstone and the California national parks.

Roosevelt’s friendship with Smith became extremely important in the bipartisan effort to vex the relentless lobbying of western anticonservation legislators. From the outset of his second term, President Cleveland, using Smith as his megaphone, made it clear he was on the side of the forestry movement. Only weeks after his inauguration Cleveland, in fact, threw down the gauntlet: he “deplored” the grim fact that the western timberlands, which his predecessors Grant and Harrison