The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [246]
Much of Roosevelt’s first day in Vermont was consumed with making speeches on topics ranging from the Civil War to naval policy. On September 6, however, Roosevelt attended a big-tent luncheon of the Vermont Fish and Game League on Isle LaMotte in Lake Champlain.75 The league had been highly successful in reintroducing Adirondack white-tailed deer to the state, issuing fishing licenses (as a kind of taxation), and opening game reserves.76 Pleased that as governor of New York Roosevelt had adopted various of Vermont’s conservation ideas for his own state, the conservation league had elected him an honorary member.77 His primary host in Vermont was Frank Lester Greene, an ardent champion of forestry science who had served valiantly in the Spanish-American War. Harvard may have been America’s Darwinian laboratory and Yale the institution where forestry science took hold, but Vermont, owing to George Perkins Marsh’s legacy, was the birthplace of early conservationist thinking. There was a down-to-earth pragmatism about the way Vermonters like Greene were wise stewards of the lands. Dairy farmers and town merchants in Vermont understood that mangling woodlands was injurious to every aspect of good living. Roosevelt wanted to learn how Vermonters applied conservation and then implement it on a large scale.
From the second Roosevelt was deposited on the lakefront dock from Seward Webb’s yacht Elfrida, he explored Isle LaMotte like a tourist. At his side was ex-Rough Rider Guy Murchie. A book had informed Roosevelt that the world’s oldest coral reefs existed around Isle LaMotte. The Chazy Reef was buried under the southernmost part of the island; its limestone was more than 450 million years old.78 Roosevelt couldn’t help marveling that Vermont—of all places—had once been under a tropical sea. There were other geological facts that probably intrigued Roosevelt and appealed to his insatiable curiosity about the island. Somehow, the few hundred residents of Isle LaMotte were able to quarry black marble limestone from the reefs without polluting the harbor. Some of the finest marble blocks ever discovered, in fact, came from Lake Champlain and were used as construction materials for the U.S. Capitol and Radio City music hall. There were other attractions on the island including a fish culture station said to be spawning more than 1 million eggs a week, incubated in a series of tanks, but he never got around to inspecting them, owing to a tragedy.79
That evening of September 6, much of Roosevelt’s talk to his fellow conservationists centered on his recent cougar hunt in Colorado. Sitting in the audience was Philip Stewart, his hunting protégé and photographer, who gave him somebody to bounce his anecdotes off in a slightly humorous way. “Stewart took the hunt a shade less seriously than I did,” Roosevelt joked. “I wanted to shoot the lions but he wanted to Kodak them. He had a large and Catholic taste and wanted to Kodak everything. When the dogs treed the first lion I was riding ahead and had got within fifty yards of the tree and could see the animal in the tree snarling and spitting. I was immensely interested. Suddenly Stewart halted me in a tone almost agonizing in its earnestness, as though a pack of mountain lions was upon us when he proceeded with the air of a villain in melodrama to take a picture of a rabbit on a stump.”80
After the speech Roosevelt repaired to the grand estate of Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk, next door to where the Fish and Game League’s banquet had been held. He was going to talk off the record to various conservationists in a little while. Back in 1897 President McKinley had stayed at the mansion, where he claimed a cane chair as his own. Now Roosevelt, as a courtesy, was given the same chair. Roosevelt had anticipated having a delightful evening because the novelist Winston Churchill (the author of Richard Carvel) was on hand, along