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it. The mapping and exploring of its passageways continued unabated. When Wind Cave National Park celebrated its centennial in 2003 only an estimated 5 percent of the cave had been explored. Visitors were routinely dumbstruck by its size and complexity. Like the ocean floor it once was, the cave complex remained an unfathomable mystery for future generations to take up. The Carnegie Institution was founded in 1902, and there was some hope that grants could be given to scientists to solve the cave’s mysteries. With Roosevelt’s new national parks—Wind Cave and Crater Lake—a fait accompli, under the safekeeping of the Interior Department and U.S. Army, two important links in the chain of American “wonders” had been strengthened. And President Roosevelt, as far as western sites were concerned, was just getting started.

III

Contributing to Roosevelt’s promotion of the American West was the publication of his friend Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains in 1902. Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt,* it told the story of a cowboy, a natural aristocrat, who was involved in Wyoming’s Johnson County War in the 1890s. Wister’s sophisticated use of cowboy imagery and the cowboy culture had echoes of Roosevelt’s own days in North Dakota. Wister, a Harvard graduate (summa cum laude) whose short stories in Harper’s were extremely popular, had hit the mother lode with this action-packed novel, where right (even vigilante justice) prevailed over wrong. The Virginian became an overnight sensation; more than 200,000 copies were sold in 1902–1903 alone. While it lacked the humor of Mark Twain and the sophistication of Henry James, The Virginian was nevertheless a novel of considerable distinction. (Unfortunately, it is usually remembered only for the Zane Grey pulp western phenomenon it inspired.)

President Roosevelt had proofread part of The Virginian before publication, wanting Wister to tone down the sadistic violence and gratuitous blood and gore. Roosevelt insisted that the protagonist—the heroic cowboy, who is never given a name—should become the arbiter of western culture and morals, a citadel of manly virtue. Amazingly, Wister agreed to make the changes. Like Roosevelt, Wister had traveled all over the West—in Arizona, California, and Washington, always going back to Wyoming—to study cowboys closely. Often depressed, failing to find a producer for his opera about Montezuma, Wister clung to his notebooks, which were filled with reportorial details of his ranch days north of Laramie. In The Virginian, Wister, with Roosevelt cheering him on, apotheosized the cowboy as the American hero, a Natty Bumppo writ large, redefining western mythology. Wister was in Wyoming during 1885, which the historian Walter Prescott Webb deemed the halcyon year of the “cattle kingdom”—and he masterfully captured the raw essence of that era with a realist’s eye for accuracy.

If President Roosevelt could have written one novel in his lifetime, it would have been The Virginian. Not only did Wister insist that the West was the mainspring of moral and political regeneration, but his narrative was full of observations about wildlife and “vanishing” big game. “For a while now as we rode,” Wister wrote (in the style of the Boone and Crockett Club), “we kept up a cheerful conversation about elk.” His writing about the geography of Wyoming also echoed Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. For example, Wister wrote, “We had come into a veritable gulf of mountain peaks, sharp at their bare summits like teeth, holding fields of snow lower down, and glittering still in full day up there, while down among our pines and parks the afternoon was growing sombre.”34

Besides naturalist ideas, Wister hammered home the theme of national unity. The Virginian, for example, came from the south but his love interest, Molly Stark Wood, was from an old Yankee family. Their marriage suggested healing after the Civil War, which had claimed more than 600,000 American lives. What replaced the sectional conflict, for Wister, was the West, which had redemptive