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treatment of captured wildlife for both humane and sanitary reasons. Although many Americans liked to have some of the world’s 350 parrot species as pets, a majority of these parrots died in transit from South America or Africa. Roosevelt wanted to have such importation regulated to ensure the birds’ safe passage. But exotic birds hardly consumed much of his time. To instill discipline on the force, Roosevelt took to taking “midnight prowls” to investigate the cops’ beats. Determined to run a squeaky-clean department, he insisted that public integrity was an essential component of proper law enforcement, that a single bad apple poisoned the nobility of the entire force. “Two years and eight months left to me on this Board,” he boasted after just a few weeks in office, referring to his appointed term “and that is time enough to make matters very unpleasant for policemen who shirk their duty.”33

But even as Roosevelt succeeded at modernizing the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, introducing bicycle squads and implementing pistol shooting practice, he continued his work for the Boone and Crockett Club. In late 1895, for example, the National Academy of Sciences asked him for his opinions on the condition of America’s national forests. Gleaning information from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (Biological Survey), Roosevelt didn’t like what he found. In his report, he worried that the 13 million acres of national forests set aside by the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 were being plundered for timber, and that the sheep pasturing in forest reservations would destroy all the herbage. In addition, Roosevelt once again called for the U.S. Army to do more policing of western reserves; urged the hiring of dozens of wardens; and, last, recommended to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith that still more forest acreage be set aside by the Cleveland administration.

As New York’s police commissioner, Roosevelt appeared in the newspapers daily throughout the spring of 1896. In particular, the press reported his searching the streets and saloons for “slacking cops.”34 Not that Roosevelt, in his zeal to end corruption on the force, ignored the need to fight crime. For instance, when Owen Wister spent some time with Roosevelt on Mulberry Street, he was impressed by how committed his old friend was to stopping gambling and prostitution in the city. After one lunch Wister dutifully noted that Roosevelt’s jaw was “acquiring a grimness which his experience of life made inevitable; and beneath the laughter and the courage of the blue eyes, a wistfulness had begun to lurk which I had never seen in college; but the warmth, the eagerness, the boisterous boyish recounting of some anecdote, the explosive expression of some opinion about a person, or a thing, or a state of things—these were unchanged, and even to the end still bubbled up unchanged.”35

Truth be told, Roosevelt wasn’t happy as police commissioner, finding the work “grimy” and “inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating.”36 Firing underlings for gross incompetence was demoralizing, and the job left him hardly any time for the outdoors life. Roosevelt found consolation in the fact that at least he wasn’t forgotten as a historian. The final volume of The Winning of the West was published in June 1896, to a fourth round of positive reviews. However, this time Roosevelt received no psychic uplift from the publication, and perhaps he was relieved that the long work, based on antiquated ideas he had first paraded before the public seven years ago, was at last over. Instead of reviewing Volume 4, the New York Times presented a feature article about how Roosevelt couldn’t wait to tramp around the West (where he hadn’t been in two years) with a new small-caliber Winchester. Roosevelt commuted back and forth on the Long Island Railroad from Sagamore Hill to his Mulberry Street office, preferring the pastoral Oyster Bay to the hurly-burly of the carriage-choked city. Roosevelt would have preferred to make his