The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [264]
The selection of Elliot, Van Dyke, and Stone as coauthors of The Deer Family represented three distinct sides of Roosevelt’s conservationist persona, though perhaps the president did not realize this. There was the intrepid Elliot, the man of letters, naturalist, and globe-trotter, known for the precision of his scientific work in ornithology and mammalogy (but also heartily equipped to endure leeches and snakebites). The dominant strain of the big game hunter–naturalist was represented more than adequately by the indomitable Van Dyke, who was roaming the West Coast in search of bears, as he had done in Montana. Like Roosevelt’s, Van Dyke’s prose was action packed, yet careful about wildlife observations. Being a naturalist explorer was an occupation that the president coveted more than any other. Recognizing that the Artic Circle was one of the last frontiers, Roosevelt, from temperate Washington, D.C., chose Stone, who had exhibited the grit, individualism, and adventurousness in the wild taiga and tundra at the top of the world, tethered to a dogsled. They shared a fundamental attitude of no retreat. Clearly Stone, like the president himself, had learned to overcome wind chill, distance, and isolation while still managing to read Tolstoy on a inflatable mattress by quiet candlelight in a makeshift outpost shack.
Bookstores throughout the United States set up displays of The Deer Family, complete with handsome illustrations of sixty-seven-inch Alaskan moose antlers and Wyoming antelope grazing on the open range. And although Van Dyke, Elliot, and Stone were coauthors, the dark green cloth cover read only: “The Deer Family by Theodore Roosevelt and Others.” In fact, President Roosevelt had written only one-third of the book, but his lively chapters were far and away the most popular. Upon opening The Deer Family the reader immediately encountered a brief “Foreword” by Theodore Roosevelt—written in June 1901, when he was vice president. “This volume is meant for the lover of the wild, free, lonely life of the wilderness,” he wrote, “and of the hardy pastimes known to the sojourners therein.”55
Roosevelt’s chapters in The Deer Family are beautifully written, combining a nearly childlike rapture for hunting with an adult conservationist philosophy.56 Not only did the president offer compelling scientific details of the exact bifurcations of a mule deer’s main prongs or the pugnacity of elk herds; he made his field observations discernible to the average American. When writing about these mammals the president insisted on biological precision, seamlessly weaving into his narrative a steady succession of scientific facts, big-bored .505 Gibbs flashbacks, and earthy descriptions of Western scenery. In The Deer Family were echoes of the naturalist prose that Roosevelt had first showed off in The Wilderness Hunter, to the hearty approval of John Burroughs. For example, here is Roosevelt on the North Dakota prairie in The Deer Family:
It was beautiful to see the red dawn quicken from the first glimmering gray in the east, and then to watch the crimson bars glint on the tops of the fantastically shaped barren hills when the sun flamed, burning and splendid, above the horizon. In the early morning the level beams brought out into sharp relief the strangely carved and channeled cliff walls of the buttes. There was rarely a cloud to dim the serene blue of the sky.57
Nostalgic passages like these, in which the writer is hungering for open spaces, made The Deer Family a minor best-seller for three or four weeks. Literally every review the book received was respectful. From the perspective of time, 100 years after it was written, The Deer Family—even more than The Wilderness Hunter—may be the most important of all Roosevelt’s books for our understanding of his evolved views on conservation. No longer does Roosevelt regale readers with his derring-do across the immensity of the continent. Nor does he champion mountain men in nativistic, white-man’s-burden fashion. In The Deer Family, Roosevelt—speaking