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location in southeastern Oklahoma for the game reserve. The Senate approved the plan. The part of the Wichitas that seemed to be the most highly recommended site was Winter Valley. So on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration, which was to be followed by his hunting trip to the Wichitas, the buffalo project was on a fast track. Baynes’s articles promoting it, first published in the Boston Evening Transcript, had been widely syndicated. An Adrian, Michigan fence company, had huge spools of product ready to ship off at the president’s beck and call.13 It had been a long, hard fight since the 1880s to establish federal sanctuaries for the vanishing big game of North America. But all the efforts by the Boone and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological Society had finally paid off in the spring of 1905.14

On April 1, the president’s specific travel plans became known to reporters. Things were happening quickly. Instructions had been received at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, from the White House to have a detachment of soldiers ready at the railroad outpost of Frederick (population 200 at best) for April 8. They would serve as the president’s Secret Service detail in the Big Pasture–Wichitas. After touring Texas (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, etc.), Roosevelt planned to cross the Red River to hunt in the Indian Territory with Chief Quanah. Thoreau had preferred nature in winter, but Roosevelt (like Burroughs) was a springtime man. With “thoroughly congenial company” he would ride on “the flats and great rolling prairies which stretched north from our camp toward the Wichita Mountains and south toward the Red River.”15

Roosevelt was also eager to visit Fort Sill. On January, 8 1869, Major General Phil Sheridan had chosen this strategic site for a cavalry fort; he named it after a friend. It had been his headquarters during his successful effort to quash the Plains Indians’ border raids. Comanche and Apache had been pillaging pioneer communities in Texas and Kansas even after the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 had declared the frontier closed. Fort Sill was a form of revenge. Hiring Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok as scouts, Sheridan used the fort as U.S. Army headquarters in the Indian wars. Eventually, the army pacified all the Indians on the South Plains. In 1867 the Medicine Lodge Treaty was signed by the chiefs—all under duress—of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who thereby agreed to reservations in southwestern Oklahoma. After being recalcitrant for a difficult eight years, in June 1875 Quanah Parker had his Quohada Comanche surrender at Fort Sill. With no buffalo herds present for sustenance, his people couldn’t go on. Quanah considered escaping as Chief Joseph had done with Nez Perce, disappearing into the Guadalupe Mountains between Carlsbad, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. But he didn’t. He couldn’t put his people through the necessary deprivations and ordeals. A new, less bloody era had arrived in Comanche country.16

With the Comanches pacified and McKinley’s homesteading lottery operating, approximately 29,000 Americans moved to Oklahoma. No hill or knoll was unclaimed. Suddenly, Lawton, the town attached to Fort Sill, grew into the third-largest city in Oklahoma. Sensing the closing of the frontier, and aware that raids were a thing of the past, Roosevelt soon transformed the mission of Fort Sill from cavalry to field artillery. On many days in Lawton, china cupboards would shake from cannon blasts. Curiously, after four or five years of mortar rounds, the usually skittish songbirds seemed to decide that the army practice wasn’t a menace: they paid little attention to the loud artillery. The birds had adapted; call it Darwin’s natural selection at work. As a western historian, Roosevelt was deeply interested in studying the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers, and the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers. And, in keeping with his hobby, he wanted to see with his own eyes where Sheridan had once trained troops. Therefore, Fort Sill was a special American place to Roosevelt—like Valley