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By Root 4334 0

fame, Roosevelt, advocate of the strenuous life, found peace shaving stubble from his face in a nearly frozen stream. In Colorado he dreamed. He plotted. He slept and breathed well. He found his scattered wits by cupping his hands, then shouting Hello, and not getting a reply. “Some thirty miles to the east and north the mountains rise higher, the evergreen forest becomes continuous, the snow lies deep all through the winter, and such Northern animals as the wolverene, lucivee, and snow-shoe rabbit are found,” Roosevelt wrote. “This high country is the summer home of the Colorado elk, now woefully diminished in numbers, and of the Colorado blacktail deer, which are still very plentiful, but which, unless better protected, will follow the elk in the next few decades.”48

Not that he didn’t work hard throughout the six weeks. Daily he visited Colorado homesteads to record reports of cougar sightings, as if he were collecting census data for the federal government. Replaying his days collecting grizzly bear stories in Montana in 1889, he now performed the same oral history task in the winter loneliness of Colorado. What could be better than dusk on horseback in the Rockies looking for cougars and hearing lore from old-timers in the snow? Or watching every night as a crescent moon hung over the mountain peaks. Black-tailed deer abounded, but Roosevelt conscientiously refused to shoot one. He took his Biological Survey job too seriously for that. After all, deer weren’t predators. Also, Stewart—who took photographs of the Colorado wilderness with his new Kodak camera—didn’t want to take down a deer.49 “The bucks had not lost their antlers, and were generally, but not always, found in small troops by themselves,” Roosevelt wrote, “the does, yearlings, and fawns—now almost yearlings themselves—went in bands. They seemed tame, and we often passed close to them before they took alarm. Of course at that season it was against the law to kill them; and even had this not been so none of our party would have dreamed of molesting them.”50

In Roosevelt’s “With the Cougar Hounds”—which appeared in his 1905 book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter—Roosevelt mentions Merriam by name three or four times, with interesting elaborations.51 Clearly, Roosevelt was determined to make readers understand that his hunt wasn’t just for sport; it was a scientific expedition. Fourteen cougars both male and female were shot between January 19 and February 14, and Roosevelt recorded detailed data about each one. The largest was eight feet long, and the shortest was under five feet. Zoological tables were compiled by Roosevelt to help Merriam and others at the survey understand the precise circumstances in which the cougars were killed. His field reports from Colorado were the work of a professional, recording whether the cougars’ coats were tawny golden or gray-brown. “The fourteen cougar we killed showed the widest variation not only in size but in color, as shown by the following table,” Roosevelt wrote. “Some were as slaty-gray as deer when in the so-called ‘blue’ others, rufous, almost as bright as deer in the ‘red.’ I use these two terms to describe the color phases; though in some instances the tint was very undecided. The color phase evidently has nothing to do with age, sex, season, or locality.”52

Roosevelt’s relationship with cougars was complex. In The Wilderness Hunter, as a western rancher, he portrayed them as “bloodthirsty” killers attacking cattle with vicious abandon.53 There was even an overdramatized illustration by J. Carter Beard of a rabid-looking cougar Roosevelt had shot in September 1889. But Roosevelt’s respect for the cougar had grown over the years. He liked the fact that a male cougar would defend between 50 and 400 square miles on its own. But he worried that the cougars’ prey were elk and deer. Cougars were obligate carnivores that depended on deer and elk as part of their primary diet. If the cougars weren’t controlled in the Rockies, then the big game couldn’t come back. So Roosevelt saw himself on a four-pronged mission