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write James Rudolph Garfield. It was Garfield who taught Roosevelt the point-to-point walk—how you never let any obstacle get in the way when on a hike. Besides being a hunter and birdwatcher, Garfield loved the outdoors life almost as much as Roosevelt did. And although Roosevelt was only seven years older, he felt very paternalistic toward Garfield, whose father, President Garfield, had been assassinated. “Our imitation of your point-to-point walk went off splendidly,” Roosevelt wrote to Garfield on July 13. “I had six boys with me, including all of my own excepting Quentin. We swam the millpond (which proved to be very broad and covered with duckweed), in great shape, with our clothes on. Executed an equally long but easier swim in the bay, with our clothes on; and between times had gone in a straight line through the woods, through the marshes, and up and down the bluffs. The whole thing would have been complete if the Garfield family could only have been along. I did not look exactly presidential when I got back from the walk.” 46

In his letters during the summer of 1904, Roosevelt seemed prouder than ever of his work initiating conservation. Having established three new national parks in fairly short order, President Roosevelt, following Sully’s Hill, checked up on Yellowstone regarding wildlife protection management. Buffalo Jones reported back to him that the grizzlies at Yellowstone were thriving, and as a result a new problem had arisen: the bears were rummaging through garbage dumps at an amazing rate and getting tin cans stuck in their teeth and paws. “As many as seventeen bears in an evening appear at my garbage dump,” Jones wrote to Roosevelt. “Tonight eight or ten. Campers and people not of my hotel throw things at them to make them run away. I cannot, unless there personally, control this. Do you think you could detail a trooper to be there every evening from say six o’clock until dark and make people remain behind a danger line laid out by Warden Jones? Otherwise I fear some accident. The arrest of one or two of these campers might help.” 47

This bear “mussing,” as Roosevelt put it, gave him great joy and only a little concern. All of the Boone and Crockett Club’s fights of the 1890s to protect wildlife had paid off at Yellowstone. The bears had rebounded and then some; he looked forward to thinning them out. “Oom John,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs, laughingly, on August 12: “I think that nothing is more amusing and interesting than the development of the changes made in wild beast character by the wholly unprecedented course of things in the Yellowstone Park…. Buffalo Jones was sent with another scout to capture, tie up and cure these bears. He roped two and got the can off of one, but the other tore himself loose, can and all, and escaped, owing, as Jones bitterly insists, to the failure of duty on the part of one of his brother scouts, whom he sneers at as a ‘foreigner.’ Think of the grizzly bear of the early Rocky Mountain hunters and explorers, and then think of the fact that part of the recognized duties of the scouts in the Yellowstone Park at this moment is to catch this same grizzly bear and remove tin cans from the bear’s paws in the bear’s interest!”48

In that same letter to Burroughs, Roosevelt wrote about soldierly-looking redheaded woodpeckers, in black-red-and-white uniforms, seen flitting about the White House lawn. Honored to be active in a few state Audubon societies, dutifully keeping a “count” of birds seen at the White House, Roosevelt began lunching with ornithologists regularly. Merriam had informed the president that Breton Island was becoming “doable” as a refuge; the Department of Agriculture was ready to declare it a federal bird reservation. All technicalities were cleared up. Even the holes of fiddler crabs and bare mudflats could be protected. After speaking with Frank M. Chapman about some additional specifics, on October 4, 1904, Roosevelt created the Breton Island Federal Bird Reservation of the south east coast of Louisiana with another “I So Declare It.” The reservation