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limits on fish,” Cornelia Dean of the New York Times wrote, summarizing the report, “may all work against species health.”66 In a process called “micro-evolution,” species were apparently getting smaller, in part because hunters and fishermen were always zeroing in on the biggest game and catches. Not only was natural selection real, but Americans like Roosevelt, culturally obsessed with bigness, as typified by the Boone and Crockett Club, by fishing derbies, and by game management protocols that thinned out the largest species first, were completely wrong. The Proceedings of National Academy of Science report didn’t mince words: harvesting the largest organisms in the wild (whether these were Colorado bighorn sheep or Oregon salmon) was wrongheaded. Human predators—using guns and nets combined with technology—were causing species to shrink in size. “Our preference for largeness in vertebrates is culturally strong because now we can find the largest fish or the biggest brown bears with new gadgetry,” Professor Darimont explained in an interview. “It’s the worst thing a hunter or fisherman can do to aim for the biggest game or catch.”67

Meanwhile, in Alberta, Canada, for example, hunters targeting the largest specimens of Theodore Roosevelt’s beloved bighorn sheep had caused horn length and body mass to decrease by about 20 percent from 1979 to 2009. By the time Barack Obama became president, trophy hunting was also pushing polar bears and grizzly bears into the category of endangered species. What a strange twist of fate for hunters inspired by Roosevelt and Grinnell to contemplate! Killing the trophy game, taking out the alpha males, was adversely affecting the species they loved. At least, however, the Boone and Crockett Club had gotten some things right during Roosevelt’s presidency: it had fought for huge wildlife refuges, promoted seasonal hunting, insisted on licenses in every state, issued bag limits, and banned the killing of females during the breeding season and of young animals at any time.

Obviously, along the Tensas River in 1907, Roosevelt couldn’t have known about “micro-evolution.” Given how seriously Roosevelt took evolution, he might have reformed his hunting practices if he had read Proceedings of National Academy of Science. But such speculation is moot. All that history recorded of Roosevelt’s hunt was his need for a Louisiana black bear to donate to America’s growing natural history collection (and to satisfy his own desires). And the average American continued to cheer the president onward for his wilderness exploits. Roosevelt appealed to an almost mystical attachment that people had toward bears. The public both adored and feared them. Whether dead or alive, in zoos or as toys, bears were popular. The toy teddy bear remained the rage in 1907. And Roosevelt himself sometimes emitted bearlike grumbles when he was in the outdoors and pretended to be standing on haunches, mainly for comical effect. But now Twain was irritated that Roosevelt could so easily sell his bear act to the American people. It wasn’t Roosevelt’s charisma that Twain minded, but the way Roosevelt marketed himself as the “great bear hunter.” In face-to-face encounters, Twain continued to like Roosevelt. But he was nevertheless nauseated by the carnival atmosphere at the White House—a spotted pony in the elevator, a wolf-catcher at the dinner table, and a pet badger biting the ankles of visitors. Such ridiculous stunts were signs of arrested development—as was shooting a bear for no reason.

“Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century,” Twain wrote, “always showing off; always hunting a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off, and he would go to hell for a whole one.”68

Twain had a point. But he was blind to all the good work Roosevelt was doing for the wildlife protection movement. Twain simply never mentioned that work in his interviews,