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By 1874 the bard of Long Island was Walt Whitman, who wrote poetically about the clouds drifting over sand dunes and eagles dallying in the sky. In his old age Whitman, in fact, would claim that he had “incorporated” Long Island into himself.17 Now, at every chance possible, Roosevelt would tramp around rural Glen Cove and Lloyd Neck as if he were Whitman on the prowl, jotting down wildlife sightings with scientific exactitude. His ear was always cocked to catch a vireo’s robinlike warble or a pesky gull’s squawk. His notebooks were no longer travel diaries: the two he kept in Oyster Bay between 1874 and 1876 were labeled “Journal of Natural History” and “Remarks on the Zoology of Oyster Bay.”18 Inside, amid long lists of birds he observed in Oyster Bay, were symbols used to identify the avians as male or female. Struggling to be a professional, he jotted down sightings of prairie warblers perched in cedars and yellowthroats eating caterpillars. “My contributions to original research were of minimum worth,” Roosevelt recalled of his fieldwork; “they were limited to occasional records of such birds as the dominica warbler at Oyster Bay, or to seeing a duck hawk work havoc in a loose gang of night herons, or to noting the bloodthirsty conduct of a captive mole shrew.”19

Although Oyster Bay appealed to Roosevelt’s fancy for birds, the forested environment of the Adirondacks tugged at him in a more primordial way. Long Island had woods. The Adirondacks had wilderness. What exactly did or didn’t constitute wilderness has long been debated, with no definitive verdict. Certainly, just hearing somebody utter the word “wilderness” conjures up remote landscapes—that is, sparsely populated or untraveled areas undisturbed by too many footprints or other obtrusions of human beings. One imagines wild—not domestic—animals in a wilderness area. Yet, just when you start homing in on a definition, you have to contend with the hard reality that both outer space and oceans are often referred to as wilderness. To many people, in fact, wilderness is nothing more or less than a state of mind. Basically, wilderness is a subjective concept, as the historian Roderick Frazier Nash noted in his landmark study Wilderness and the American Mind, first published in 1967. Trying to arrive at a “universally acceptable definition of wilderness,” Nash wrote, is nothing short of impossible. “One man’s wilderness may be another man’s roadside picnic ground,” he believed. “The Yukon trapper would consider a trip to northern Minnesota a return to civilization while for the vacationer from Chicago it is a wilderness adventure indeed.”20

Given the fact that Roosevelt was a Manhattanite, it’s easy to assume that the Adirondacks, where he headed next, were his idea of a genuine wilderness. The Adirondacks embodied what the ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold would define as “wilderness” in 1921: the ability of a certain geographical terrain to “absorb a two weeks’ pack trip” away from human-centered activities.21 The historian Patricia Nelson Limerick in Something in the Soil described the western wilderness as a place where “mass society’s regimentation and standardization” find a “restorative alternative.” 22 (The Wilderness Act of 1964 officially defined wilderness as being “untrammeled by man and where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”23)

So when young Theodore arrived in the Adirondacks in August 1874, he wasn’t looking for the silken comfort of Paul Smith’s hotel, perched on a bank of the Lower Saint Regis Lake. Only by “roughing it” in the backcountry could he encounter bears, deer, and raccoons up close in a wilderness setting. Rhapsodically and steadfastly, he began keeping a diary called “Journal of a Trip to the Adirondacks” about the millions of acres west of Lake Champlain and north of the Mohawk River. Hiring a rugged Canadian backwoods guide, Mose Sawyer (from Keese’s Mill, New York), as his hiking companion, Roosevelt intended to hike the highest mountains—Algonquin, Marcy, and