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The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [180]

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audit 24—he relished promoting outdoor writers in his edited books. Encouraged by the fine reviews of American Big-Game Hunting, Roosevelt and Grinnell began working throughout 1894 on a successor volume, one having a more global perspective than the first. How did North American white-horn deer compare with the fallow deer of the Mediterranean region of Europe and Asia Minor? Why did the Nubian ibex of the Palestine countryside have larger scimitar-shaped horns than the mountain goats Roosevelt had hunted in the Rockies? What caused the nyala of southeastern Africa to be slightly faster than the Badlands antelope? These were the types of questions Roosevelt and his coeditor George Bird Grinnell wanted answered in the new book, called Hunting in Many Lands.

When commissioning Madison Grant to write on moose in Hunting in Many Lands, for example, Roosevelt preferred that his hunt story take place in Canada. Roosevelt wanted to know everything about moose found farther north than Maine and Minnesota, around the headwaters of the Ottawa River along the Ontario-Quebec border. This, Roosevelt wrote to Grant, would run against the current zoological thinking that the differences between species in tropical and temperate zones were the most scientifically important. By focusing on moose in a specific Canadian habitat, Grant could show (so his editor hoped) the variation among moose populations in North America. “The best zoologists nowadays put North America in with North Asia and Europe as one archetypal province, separate from the South American, Indian, Australasian, and South African provinces, which have equal rank,” Roosevelt complained to Grant. “Our moose, wapiti, bear, beaver, wolf, etc., differ more or less from those of the Old World but the difference sinks into insignificance when compared with differences between all these forms, Old World and New, from the tropical forms south of them. The wapiti is undoubtedly entirely distinct from the European red deer; but I don’t think the difference is as great as between the black-tail [mule] and white-tail deer.”25

In 1895 Hunting in Many Lands was published, with a sterling article by Madison Grant, “A Canadian Moose Hunt,” about the upper Ottawa River, essentially companion piece to his article in Century. Grant also eventually became instrumental in two other conservationist causes besides the Boone and Crockett Club and its offshoot, the Bronx Zoo: these were the American Bison Society (founded by Roosevelt and Hornaday in 1905) and Save the Redwoods League.* Unlike American Big Game, this second volume, comprising sixteen essays (plus appendixes, which included the Yellowstone Protection Act), was, as Roosevelt and Grinnell planned, international in approach. Fine photographs were interspersed throughout the text. The final product included essays on hunting Russian wolves, Sierra Mountain bears, Mexican rams, East African zebras, Korean leopards, and American antelope-deer (by Roosevelt).

And another contributor, the future U.S. secretary of state Henry L. Stimson, wrote of the wildlife he encountered when he was climbing the turret-shaped mountains of northwestern Montana. W. W. Rockhill, a friend of the Dalai Lama, focused on the big game found in Mongolia and Tibet. There was even an essay on dogsledding in Manitoba by D. M. Barringer, a nineteen-year-old graduate of Princeton University who dedicated his life to the “impact theory” (he became the first geologist to discover that Coon Butte, Arizona, was in fact a meteor crater). In the impressive essay “The Cougar,” by Casper W. Whitney (the editor of Outlook) Roosevelt himself was praised as being the world’s expert on the mountain lion’s “moods.”26 The global approach to wildlife conservation of Hunting in Many Lands was smart and innovative. In the preface Roosevelt and Grinnell called for accelerated mammological research. Color variation, hoof sizes, whisker lengths, mating habits—the more scientific data compiled, the easier it would become for “wild creatures” to be taught “to look upon human beings as

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