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its founding. He was also active in the American Ornithological Union. Darwin had detailed the courtship rituals of the Australian bowerbird; Elliot did the same for shorebirds. No fewer than ten nations had decorated Elliot for his first-rate empirical work in the natural sciences. Throughout the 1890s he interacted with Roosevelt socially in New York, swapping stories of bird sightings like a couple of old fuddy-duddies from the British Museum. Playing the eager student, Roosevelt had read Elliot’s monographs, all saturated with facts, including Family of the Pheasants and Birds of Paradise. With his large walrus mustache, which stood out more vibrantly than his pointed beard, Elliot was easily distinguishable in a crowd. When the naturalist Dr. Albert Bickmore heard that Elliot had been chosen by the Field Museum of Chicago to be its zoology curator in late 1894, he lamented that New York had lost “one of America’s first scientists.” In 1898, while Roosevelt was in Cuba with the Rough Riders, Elliot was the first serious naturalist to systematically study the Olympic Mountains in the Washington Territory (home range to Roosevelt’s elk). Elliot had initiated a movement to save the state of Washington’s Mount Olympus from the timber conglomerates.

Then there was T. S. Van Dyke, whose book The Still Hunter was considered a classic in the sporting genre. Van Dyke was less scientific than Elliot and was blessed with the ability to spin a good yarn about cougars; Roosevelt admired the way he brought wild creatures into the lives of everyday Americans without scientific pretension. He had a tremendous knack for powerful, accurate generalization. Nobody in the United States wrote prose as similar to the president’s as Van Dyke. There was a tradition that was passed down from Reid to Van Dyke to Roosevelt. The president was enthralled by a popular article of Van Dyke’s, “The Hills of San Bernardino,” and recommended it to everyone. “We have left far behind us the mellow flute of the valley quail,” Van Dyke wrote, “but his double-plumed and gay cousin of the mountain well supplies his place. From the lowest valley to the loftiest point where vegetation grows, you often see his mottled waistcoat of white and cinnamon, his bluish coat, and long nodding plumes; may hear the gentle patter of his little feet on the pine-needles as he steals softly away, and hear his ordinary quit-quit-quit-quit queeah changed into a dismally-anxious queeeee-awwk, as he leads the little brood from danger.”50 Just as Elliot was making his mark studying the Olympics, Van Dyke became the preeminent mountain climber-naturalist of California’s Palomar mountain range. Fancying himself as the Joaquin Miller of any California landscape south of Big Sur, Van Dyke also wrote The City and County of San Diego, published by a small local press.51 Unlike that of the other authors in The Deer Family, however, some of Van Dyke’s work was clearly mediocre. And at times, as when he claimed to have shot four wildcats with one shotgun blast, he defied believability.52

Rounding out The Deer Family’s quartet was A. J. Stone, the naturalist wunderkind of the moment. As a corresponding member of the Zoological and Ethnological Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society he spent the years 1897 to 1899 living around the Arctic Circle with only his kayak and sled dogs as companions.53 Taking off from Fort McPherson, the Hudson Bay Company’s northernmost outpost, he trudged up through sea ice to forlorn Herschel Island. During one five-month stint Stone hiked 3,000 miles above the Artic Circle, shattering all previous land travel records. With the bitter wind assaulting him, and temperatures often falling to minus seventy or eighty degrees Fahrenheit, he nevertheless traversed snowdrifts as tall as the White House. Polar bears, northern fur seals, and arctic foxes were all vividly described in his field notes. When the harpooner hero returned to America the New York Times saluted his circumnavigation as finishing “one of the most remarkable trips in the history