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well regarding the timber thieves,” Muir later bragged to a friend, “and the destructive work of the lumbermen, and other spoilers of the forests.” As for Roosevelt, he admired Muir’s dedication to California’s beauty. Muir, he knew, was a hero and a live wire when it came to preserving Yosemite; Muir spoke directly and from the heart at all times. At one point, by the campfire, Roosevelt began telling his yarns about big game hunting. Muir, however, was bored and was singularly unimpressed. “Mr. Roosevelt,” he asked, “when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things…. Are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” After a moment’s pause Roosevelt, in a softer voice than usual, replied, “Muir, I guess you are right.”117 (But while Roosevelt did start promoting the camera instead of the rifle, he never gave up the sport of shooting big game.)

Because Muir was the California mountain man, Roosevelt embraced him as a fellow advocate of the strenuous life. Muir’s philosophical concept of God as being found in nature likewise earned Roosevelt’s approval. They were joined at the hip in both regards. But Roosevelt was truly at odds with Muir over sport hunting. When Muir, for example, received a solicitation to support a society called the Sons of Daniel Boone (which was like the Boy Scouts), he demurred. Young Americans, Muir wrote, needed to mature away from “natural hunting blood-loving savagery into natural sympathy with all our fellow mortals—plants and animals as well as men.” And this wasn’t an isolated antihunting statement. Muir’s correspondence after 1903 is laden with criticisms of “the murder business of hunting,” and with demands that the “rights of animals” be enforced as ethical standards. This was a far cry from Roosevelt’s and Burroughs’s belief that sportsmanlike hunting and fishing provided “ideal training for manhood” and would in the end “save the nation” from effeminacy.118

Hunting wasn’t the only intellectual division between Roosevelt and Muir. Roosevelt liked Gifford Pinchot too much for Muir’s comfort. Ever since the dispute in Portland Muir saw Pinchot as—for the most part—a deadly enemy. Muir didn’t recognize the Pinchot who helped save wonders like Crater Lake or Wind Cave; he saw only a featureless scoundrel who had once said that forests were a factory for trees.119 And soon to come was Muir’s tragic disagreement with Pinchot over Hetch Hetchy—the glacial valley filled by the Tuolumne River in 1923 with the construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam. Why didn’t Roosevelt use an executive order to save Hetch Hetchy? Still, some historians have mistakenly downplayed Roosevelt and Muir’s mutual admiration society. There was a very real tenderness between them. Ever since Muir formed the Sierra Club in 1892, Roosevelt had kept a close eye on his courageous actions; Roosevelt was, in fact, a New York cheerleader for Muir. While Roosevelt always saw Ulysses S. Grant as the “father of the national parks,” he knew that Muir was California’s watchdog. In particular Roosevelt’s famous essay “Wilderness Reserves” echoes Muir’s 1901 book, Our National Parks. However, Roosevelt was disappointed that unlike Burroughs, Muir simply didn’t know his birds; he was focused on “the trees and the flowers and the cliffs.”120

Because Roosevelt considered himself “many-sided” he unhesitatingly and admiringly accepted Muir’s self-description as a Californian “poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc!—etc!—etc!”121 By 2009 the John Muir National Historic Site had created a Web site featuring dozens of “Muirisms” arranged alphabetically. Whether you looked under “Age” or “Rough It” or “Water Ouzel,” all of these pearls of wisdom could have been written by Roosevelt; their viewpoints on nature were that closely shared. With great enthusiasm, Roosevelt read Muir, savoring lines like: “Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better every way.”122 And Muir wrote to his wife that Roosevelt was “so interesting,” overflowing with “hearty & manly