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at the Bronx Zoo any way he wanted. He had faith that Hornaday was the man best able to breed buffalo in captivity as the first step in repopulating the Great Plains. Always speeding up the timetables, Roosevelt was impatient and held the view that if it took six years to destroy all the bison in Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and the Texas panhandle, then the Bronx Zoo should be able to repopulate those same expansive grasslands with buffalo in an equivalent time. Only a maladjusted obsessive like Hornaday, with fever in the veins, could possibly pull off a breeding program in such unrealistically short order. Promised a handsome salary, Hornaday agreed, with a little pressure from the Boone and Crockett Club, to accept the zoo directorship—a position he held for the next thirty years. During these decades Hornaday wrote a series of books, articles, and lectures that are the core documents of the wildlife conservation movement in America. His Our Vanishing Wild Life is perhaps the single most important (if deeply flawed) book ever published on protecting endangered species. “Give the game the benefit of every doubt!,” he would lecture. “If it becomes too thick, your gun can quickly thin it out; but if it is once exterminated, it will be impossible to bring it back. Be wise; and take thought for the morrow. Remember the heath hen.”19

As Hornaday saw it, the Bronx Zoo would celebrate the whole post–Civil War generation of Darwinian naturalists, including the affluent Roosevelt. The center of Hornaday’s zoo was Baird Court—the administrative and library offices—named after the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Then there was Lake Agassiz, named after the great Harvard zoologist. The Boone and Crockett Club contributed hundreds of horns and antlers to put on display. Meanwhile, plans to raise buffalo got off to a rocky start. The native Bronx grass on which the bison grazed was not the same as prairie grass; in fact, it was so different that the first domestically raised herd of American bison died. Grinnell, it seemed, had been right. Bitterly disappointed, Hornaday had to remove all the native grasses and then pay zookeepers to feed the buffalo the proper prairie grasses by hand and keep the water hole always full.20

That was quite an embarrassing failure for Roosevelt; he felt a real, if momentary, sense of loss when the buffalo died. But Roosevelt wasn’t a quitter. He stuck by his determined zoo director. Since buffalo weren’t going to be the zoo’s only mission, Hornaday, at Roosevelt’s request, hired the field researcher Andrew J. Stone to survey the status of Alaska’s caribou herds, polar bears, and seal rookeries.21 For even if the Bronx buffalo range went away, Roosevelt and Hornaday’s plan of breeding buffalo in the Indian Territories (and two or three prairie states) was on track. And Grant, lobbying for financing from the New York state legislature, got the Boone and Crockett Club all the appropriation provisions it had requested. Roosevelt essentially left all the fund-raising and architectural details of the Bronx Zoo up to Madison Grant, whose actorish ways could move mountains. When the Bronx Zoo was officially sanctioned by the Park Board around Thanksgiving of 1897,22 Roosevelt offered Grant thanks. “I congratulate you with all my heart upon your success with the Zoo bill,” he wrote. “Really, you have done more than I hoped. I always count myself lucky if I get one out of three or four measures through.”23

III

The creation of the Bronx Zoo, with the help of regiments of planners, was the capstone to Roosevelt’s tenure as president of the Boone and Crockett Club. Over the years 1888 to 1894, he had achieved a scorecard of extraordinary accomplishments. From the Timberland Act of 1891 to the Yellowstone Protection Act of 1894 to the creation of the New York Zoological Society, the Boone and Crockett Club had become the most effective big-game conservation group in America. Even though Roosevelt was sometimes tasked with club work that he despised—such as preparing accounts for