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the Biological Survey to analyze. This was the new arrangement between Roosevelt and Merriam. Somehow, perhaps as a payback for Roosevelt’s Cosmos Club challenge, Merriam now had Roosevelt collecting specimens for him in the Rocky Mountains, a pretty nifty trick. For six weeks Roosevelt hunted north of the White River on horseback—mainly between Coyote Basin and Col-orow Mountain—enjoying the high, dry country with the cutting air full of shimmering frost particles. These pearly peaks were a fine diversion from politics. The heavily wooded slopes were wilder than he had imagined, untouched by axes. Meeker, named after a U.S. government Indian agent who had been killed by a band of Utes in 1878, had become a regional center for hunting. The White River Plateau Timberland Reserve (the precursor of what became White River National Forest) had been the favorite hunting grounds of many members of the Boone and Crockett Club.

Roosevelt had written (with some nostalgia for his days in the Badlands around 1886), that he had “no more hesitation in sleeping out in a woods where there were cougars, or walking through it after nightfall, than I should have if the cougars were tomcats.”*45 Nevertheless, he spent most nights sleeping in a forest hut or a rancher’s house chosen at random, or at the Hotel Meeker across from the local courthouse. (It was hypothermia he was worried about, not cougars.) As at every hotel in the American West where Roosevelt ever slept—that is, among those surviving the wrecking ball—a bronze plaque would soon be erected at the Meeker Hotel on Main Street bragging that he had once stayed there. Over the years Roosevelt would tell people that the Meeker Hotel was better than any lodge in the Swiss Alps. The rock-hewn splendor of Colorado, he’d say, was by his estimate a world-class attraction. The tourist board of Colorado loved him for that, even though the timber barons and mining companies wanted him buried in an avalanche of snow. “The sage-brush grows everywhere upon the flats and hillsides,” he wrote in what would become a chapter in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter. “Large open groves of pinyon and cedar are scattered over the peaks, ridges and tablelands. Tall spruces cluster in the cold ravines.”46

Having adopted Josephine the cougar as the mascot of the Rough Riders, feeding her milk from a bottle and watching her grow, Roosevelt had become extremely interested in mountain lions (or cougars, as he preferred to call the species). Only Merriam and Winthrop Chanler, he believed, had written proficiently about cougars. (And he even doubted a few of their scientific claims.) False reports about how cougars seized prey and about their size variation annoyed him no end. Some zoologists actually believed bobcats were small cougars, a proposition that T.R. knew was hokum. Even though Roosevelt was a fan of the famous hunter Richard Irving Dodge’s The Plains of the Great West, he believed that Dodge had misidentified cougars as two separate species. Roosevelt—sounding a bit like Merriam—believed there were also five subspecies such as the Florida panther. “No American beast has been the subject of so much loose writing or of such wild fables as the cougar,” Roosevelt complained. “Even its name is unsettled.”*

While tramping about the Maroon Bells, a gorgeous group of Paleozoic sandstone and mudstone peaks near Aspen, Roosevelt recognized the wisdom of the Harrison administration in having protected this piece of the Colorado wilderness for all time. On every scientific “relief map” of the continental states that Roosevelt had ever seen, those which reproduced nature exactly, showing the peaks and valleys and other geographic details on a small scale, Colorado was the most intriguing, with its hilly ribs and mountain ranges. This was an ancestral elk range, a place where the Ute once hunted the great herds, a wild evergreen country which, thanks to federal intervention, would stay wild.47 The elemental and the fundamental were honored in the Rockies. Far away from the thunder of applause and prodigious