The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [262]
Between 1896 and 1900 the great archaeologist and trail guide Richard Wetherill began excavating the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. At the same time the American Museum of Natural History in New York began analyzing Pueblo Bonito. When Roosevelt was governor he inspected crates of artifacts from the Southwest when they arrived at the American Museum of Natural History and were eventually put on permanent display. Therefore, by the time Roosevelt became president in September 1901 the fact that the GLO was promoting the idea of a Chacoan national park was old news to Roosevelt. Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the committed archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett—a quiet, unassuming intellectual enamored of the Chacoan past—was mapping various sites at Four Corners in preparation for preservation, as head of the School of American Research. Hewett made it a personal crusade to save these amazing archaeological sites. There were dozens of legal hurdles to clear (not the least being Wetherill’s claim to the land around Chaco Canyon), but Roosevelt told Congressman Lacey they’d find a way to preserve Chacoan sites. In 1902 Lacey—hiring Hewett as coconspirator—began working on sensible legislation. It would evolve into the Antiquities Act of 1906.
III
So Roosevelt had started to put the wheels in motion for preservation early in his administration. Polishing up his credentials as a naturalist and one of the four or five popular authorities on North American mammals, Roosevelt also published, on May 7, 1902, a book titled The Deer Family. Written while he was vice president, The Deer Family was issued as the first volume of the American Sportsman’s Library (edited by Casper Whitney of the Boone and Crockett Club).48 The book was done in collaboration with his fellow naturalists T. S. Van Dyke (on Pacific Coast elk and Columbia black-tailed deer), Daniel G. Elliot (on caribou), and A. J. Stone (on moose), and Roosevelt wrote the first four chapters himself. The publisher of The Deer Family—the Macmillan Company—made much of the fact that it constituted, as the Washington Times noted, “the first time in the history of the country a book has appeared bearing the name of the President of the United States as that of the author.”49
Collaboration between authors was fairly commonplace in the academic world of 1902, and scientists usually presented scholarly papers at conferences with three or four names attached to their joint research. But Theodore Roosevelt was president: whom he decided to share his title page with was automatically news. And he didn’t mind working with Darwinian eccentrics. The three men Roosevelt chose to be associated with in publishing this historic book were among the very best naturalists in America. All of them held a Darwinian belief in the importance of fossil records and the interconnectedness of environment and life. One of Roosevelt’s major motivations for writing his essays in The Deer Family, in fact, was to swing a lantern over the names of these naturalists, big game hunters, and explorers, in gratitude for their decades of largely unsung work. And the Boone and Crockett Club, in a congenial way, was circulating petitions in the Great Plains to promote the notion of big game preserves; The Deer Family was an important tool in this wildlife repopulation effort.
President Roosevelt had been in awe of Professor Elliot ever since age nineteen, when Theodore Sr. had introduced them in Italy. Honored all over the world for his bravery and his zoological discoveries, and known especially for his astounding papers on birds, Elliot had been vaguely associated with the American Museum of Natural History since