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City was the toughest town on this continent,” as T.R. put it), famously, was appointed a deputy marshal in New York City. With hopes of saving the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest, Roosevelt also promoted Ben Daniels—a former Rough Rider in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry—as U.S. marshal for the territory of Arizona. All three law enforcement officers—Abernathy, Masterson, and Daniels—epitomized the West as presented in The Virginian. Roosevelt saw their core moral values as reflecting his own. What Roosevelt wrote to Senator Clarence Clark of Wyoming about Daniels as being an American “Viking” also applied to Abernathy and Masterson.101

There are no letters like this of Roosevelt trying to insinuate himself into eastern establishment traditions except when he was applying to Harvard. Without question, Roosevelt wanted to be accepted as a westerner of the “West that was.” He wanted to be associated in history with Quanah Parker, Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp, Ben Daniels, Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, John Muir, and Joaquin Miller. Even the members of the east coast elite with whom he interacted—most noticeably George Bird Grinnell and C. Hart Merriam—had made their careers in the West. As for John Burroughs, he was sui generis, Oom John, an earnest American, the Transcendentalist in the modern conservation movement. And, to Roosevelt’s mind, his new buffalo pasture in Wichita Forest was a first step in preserving the historical memory of Oklahoma’s Wild West spirit. Lawton without buffalo on the plains was just another dull windswept Oklahoma town. Just as buffalo were roaming around Yellowstone National Park (between the Yellowstone and Lamar rivers), Roosevelt envisioned herds grazing along all the tributaries of the Missouri River.

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The return of the buffalo to the Wichita Mountains was officially begun on June 2, 1905, with a “proclamation.” A tract of 60,800 acres had been set aside by the Roosevelt administration approximately where the president had coursed for wolves and had ridden with Quanah. Although Roosevelt didn’t specifically mention buffalo, he said that wildlife in the Wichita Mountains—including birds and fish—were off-limits to hunters.102 The USDA’s Forest Service would police the game reserve. And the fifteen white-tailed deer in the park needed to become at least 500 strong. A deer rehabilitation project was started. Additionally, the creation of the Wichita Game Preserve (inside the federal forest reserve) was a historic event: America’s first national game preserve. The Bronx Zoo was at last fulfilling its mission of saving endangered species from extinction. Baynes’s plan was now official: buffalo would again be the lords of the Great Plains. The first wave of buffalo would go to Winter Valley in the west-central portion of the Wichita preserve. With buffalo grass, bluestem, and rock-capped roundabouts for buffalo to hide among in winter, the Wichitas were the God-ordained place for the Bronx Zoo’s bison.103

Credit for the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve must be given to William Temple Hornaday, who never threw in the towel. Ever since his study of 1889 lamenting that only 1,091 bison (wild and captive) remained in North America, he had worked overtime to save the bison as a species.104 He specialized in understanding herd dynamics and genetic integrity. Besides personally hand-feeding the Bronx Zoo herds, he and John Pitcher had encouraged restoration in Yellowstone National Park with domestic buffalo from the Goodnight Ranch in Texas and the Pablo-Allard Ranch in Montana. President Roosevelt’s positive firsthand report about the Wichita Forest Reserve in Comanche Country was important, but Hornaday wanted more specific information about the grasses on the reserve. Roosevelt agreed that this was advisable. On his return from Oklahoma Roosevelt dispatched J. Alden Loring—an energetic naturalist in his mid-thirties who worked for the New York Zoological Society and Biological Survey—to survey the exact part of the range ideal for buffalo.105 Roosevelt was impressed that Loring held