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named after him. However, if he embraced Cervus roosevelti, other naturalists would dismiss him as a hypocrite bought off by flattery. Nevertheless, here was a heaven-sent opportunity for Roosevelt to make everything right again with Merriam, and he seized it. There is no record of Roosevelt’s thought process, but in any event he accepted the new honor, informing Merriam, “No compliment could be paid me that I would appreciate as much as this—in the first place, because of the fact itself, and in the next place because it comes from you. To have the noblest game animal in America named after me by the foremost of living mammalogists is something that really makes me prouder than I can well say. I deeply appreciate the compliment and I am only sorry that I will never be in my power to do anything except to just merely appreciate it.”83

The deeply touched Roosevelt now felt he had a debt to repay. He began reading everything he could on the Olympic Mountains and sought photographs of Cervus roosevelti. The 800-pound “Roosevelt elk” was brown or dark beige with very dark underparts and a yellowish-brown tail. Much like their namesake, these elk were crepuscular, extremely active at dawn and dusk. Focusing on Washington state wildlife for the first time, he learned that the Olympics contained five distinct landscapes: temperate rain forest, rugged mountain terrain, large lowland lakes, cascading rivers, and saltwater beaches. As an ornithologist, Roosevelt hoped to soon see the black oystercatchers, with their long reddish beaks, crack open mollusks along the rugged Pacific shore. The mere thought of aromatic Sitka spruce and western hemlock appealed to Roosevelt just as much as seeing his namesake elk in their natural habitat.

Starting in 1897, Mount Olympus became Roosevelt’s new Matterhorn, another peak he wanted to conquer. The highest point in the Olympics chain, not even until 1907, it had eight tumbling glaciers and some of the finest strands of Pacific silver fir in North America. Mount Olympus—the very name enthralled Roosevelt—wasn’t going to elude him. The Pacific Ocean here was a sea of boulders, many larger than houses. For a marine biologist there were new universes to explore. While Muir championed the Yosemite Valley, Merriam studied northern Arizona, and Grinnell focused on northwestern Montana, Roosevelt developed an abiding fascination for the Olympics of Washington state and the forest reserves of Colorado; they were two unexplored western places (not counting Alaska) on his future itinerary. Fascinated to learn about Washington state’s big-leaf maples in rain forests adorned with epiphytic mosses and ferns, he became determined to save them—a feat he accomplished six years later as president. The only other rain forests as temperate as those stretching from Alaska to Oregon along the Pacific Coast were in Chile, New Zealand, and South Australia. Europe had nothing like them, so Roosevelt, as he educated himself about the Olympics, swelled like a toad with pride.

When Encyclopaedia of Sport, a British reference guide, asked Roosevelt to contribute an article on elk that year, he turned his focus to the herds he’d been studying with unremitting interest. “There are several aberrant forms of wapiti, including one that dwells in the great Tule swamps of California,” Roosevelt wrote. “There is also an entirely distinct species with its centre of abundance in the Olympic mountains of Washington and in Vancouver Island. This species, which Dr. Hart Merriam has recently done the present writer the honour of naming after him (Cervus roosevelti).” 84

Ironically, in the long run, Roosevelt’s position, that Merriam was creating too many species of mammals, triumphed. Cervus roosevelti would lose its species status in 1899, becoming a subspecies called Cervus canadensis roosevelti.85 Hearing the news of his demotion, Roosevelt asked Merriam, “By the way, is ‘Roosevelti’ merely a synonym of ‘occidentalis,’ for the Olympic Wapiti? My only glory gone!”86 Regardless of its designation, however, “Roosevelt elk” remains