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a few vegetables while writing essays about rural neighbors, salt breezes, and maple syrup. All the features of farm life in the Catskills (and the universe at large) were Burroughs’s bailiwick. Of course, the two naturalists chatted about birds. “That warbler I wrote you about yesterday was the Cape May warbler,” Roosevelt told Oom John. “As soon as I got hold of an ornithological book I identified it. I do not think I ever saw one before, for it is rather a rare bird—at least on Long Island, where most of my bird knowledge was picked up. It was a male, in the brilliant spring plumage; and the orange-brown cheeks, the brilliant yellow sides of the neck just behind the cheeks, and the brilliant yellow under parts with thick blade streaks on the breast, made the bird unmistakable. It was in a little pine, and I examined it very closely with the glasses but could not see much of its back. Have you found it a common bird?”22

There was a warmth and kindness to Roosevelt in spring 1906 that had been missing since the hurly-burly of becoming president. He seemed proud that talented outdoorsmen like Burroughs, Wister, Remington, Chapman, and Merriam were his real friends—not those New York money changers deformed by “swinish greed” and by “vulgarity and vice and vacuity and extravagance”23; or, for that matter, those Chicago meatpackers whose astonishing workplace uncleanliness Roosevelt called “revolting.”24 Writing to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Roosevelt, as if taking stock of his friends, boasted that his “intimate” fellows were “men I met in the mountains and backwoods and on ranches and the plains.” He meant Bat Masterson, Will Sewall, Joe and Sylvane Ferris, Seth Bullock, John Willis, Jack Abernathy. If you had a biographical history in the West—the old West—Roosevelt was sympathetic.

Echoing Grinnell, Roosevelt insisted that Native American tribes had to be treated fairly under his administration. Sometimes Roosevelt acted as if America had been better off before Wounded Knee, when the Indians still rode freely in the Great Plains. There was something in the president of John Ermine of Yellowstone. Roosevelt worked with Inspector James McLaughlin of the U.S. Indian Service to negotiate more than forty tribal agreements on behalf of his administration. Native Americans were opposed to land allotments, but the federal government was allotting land anyway. Roosevelt worked to keep fraud out of the system.* And, almost miraculously, the planned reintroduction of buffalo at Wichita Forest and Game Preserve in southwestern Oklahoma scheduled for 1907 was welcomed by both cowboys and Indians.

Roosevelt also continued to encourage his naturalist friends to write big popular zoology. For example, he sent Henry Bryant Bigelow, a junior staff member at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (who had written about caribou and wolves), a glowing note of endorsement, urging him to try composing gorgeous zoological prose like On the Origin of Species or Birds of America. “We need that the greatest scientific book shall be one which scientific laymen can read, understand, and appreciate,” Roosevelt wrote. “The greatest scientific book will be a part of literature; as Darwin and Lucetius are.”25

All this natural history and yearning for the high country awakened Roosevelt to new possibilities for preservationism. By June 1906, as Congress adjourned for the summer, Roosevelt grew anxious about the fate of United States’ western sites, particularly the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Devils Tower, and Mesa Verde. With regard to these, getting commitments out of legislators was like tearing tin. Arrogantly, Congress was also stalling on whether to accept from the state of California two magnificent gifts: Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove. What in hell were the stingy western senators thinking? That’s what Roosevelt wanted to know. Piqued at Congress’s hesitation over further preservation of Yosemite, Roosevelt wrote to Senator George Clement Perkins of California, a Republican who was an embarrassment to