The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [192]
VI
As Roosevelt put together the Boone and Crockett Club’s third volume, Trail and Camp-Fire, he retained a bias toward preservation and the kind of songbirds that the Audubon societies had lobbied to protect, as opposed to the plight of milkweed bugs or the angular-winged katydid.* “The geology and the beetles will remain unchanged for ages,” he wrote George Bird Grinnell, his co-editor once more, when going over a manuscript about Africa, “but the big game will vanish, and only the pioneer hunters can tell about it. Hunting books of the best type are often of more permanent value than scientific pamphlets; & I think the B&C should differentiate sharply between worthless hunting stories, & those that are of value.” Perhaps not wanting to war with his co-editor as well as Dr. Merriam, Roosevelt ended his letter praising Grinnell’s recent article on buffalo as “worth more than any but the very best scientific monographs about the beast.”77
In Roosevelt’s correspondence of 1897, four interrelated conservation issues—increased national park protection, more forest reserves, western water reservoirs, and the diminution of buffalo—concern him above all others. He truly believed that the Boone and Crockett Club had made great inroads in raising public consciousness of buffalo’s plight. Hoofed game were on the rebound in North America, and the Bronx Zoo would soon get the word out even more throughout the East Coast. Citizens had started warming up to the idea of game and forest wardens being trained in biology. As Roosevelt told Grinnell, Trail and Camp-Fire must hit the same urgent notes: “We have made such a point of Yellowstone Park in our two previous volumes,” he noted, “that I think we ought to dwell on it in this one.”78
By September, with Trail and Camp-Fire delivered to its publisher, Roosevelt took a rare three deep breaths, sheepishly worried that he had been too roughshod in his exchanges with Merriam both in Science and at the Cosmos Club. His defiant mood had tapered off. “I almost broke the heart of my beloved friend Merriam,” Roosevelt confided to Henry Fairfield Osborn. “He felt as though he had been betrayed in the house of his friends; but he really goes too far. He just sent me a pamphlet announcing the discovery of two species of mountain lion from Nevada. If he is right I will guarantee to produce fifty-seven new species of red fox from Long Island.”79
Apparently Merriam harbored his own regrets about the dustup, declaring that Roosevelt was “a writer of the best accounts we have ever had of the habits of our larger mammals.”80 Furthermore, while he was in the Olympic Mountains of far western Washington, a stunning Pacific slope cluster of low-lying peaks surrounded by rain forests and considered the wettest spot in the continental United States, Merriam discovered that the elks there had coloration and antler size different from those found in Yellowstone. Appealing to Roosevelt’s ego (and perhaps his own wicked sense of humor), Merriam named this new subspecies Cervus roosevelti.81 These huge elk were magnificent creatures. “It is fitting that the noblest deer of America should perpetuate the name of one who, in the midst of a busy public career,” Merriam wrote in the December 17, 1897, issue of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington “has found time to study our larger mammals in their native haunts and has written the best accounts we have ever had of their habits and chase.”82
What could Roosevelt do? There was hardly an honor in the world he would have preferred more than having a species of elk found in the dusky coastal and Cascade ranges of the Pacific Northwest