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New York), Roosevelt instead ended up hunting muskrats and squirrels. Each specimen he bagged was studied for coloration and markings back at what Sawyer called the “Great Camp” Darwin would have approved of the young man’s detailed approach to his wildlife studies. Minor revelations about mammalogy were plentiful for Roosevelt. For the first time he understood why farmers considered chipmunks such a menace; he pulled eighteen wild peas out of a single pouch of one he shot. A highlight that first summer was Roosevelt’s hearing the far-off howl of an eastern timber wolf. (According to a study by the University of Toronto, wolves howl more frequently in August than any other month; Roosevelt was the beneficiary of this zoological fact 28). After hearing the wolf’s lonesome contact and reunion call, Roosevelt kept a special eye on underground burrows and rock caves where he knew Canis lupus packs lived in dens. He wanted to see one of the lupines with his own eyes—a feat he never accomplished.

But that was about it. Roosevelt’s most detailed, lively, and interesting passages from the Adirondacks journals were his bird entries. Noting that there was a plethora of woodpeckers, Roosevelt successfully collected five species for his Roosevelt Museum. To Roosevelt, woodpeckers were an evolutionary link to a prehistoric era when giganotosauruses and stegosauruses roamed the prairies of North America. Each hammer of their beaks was interconnected to the world of trees and insects, and to time immemorial. The Adirondacks without an echo of a woodpecker sharpening its beak, he reasoned, would be deafening in their silence. “There is a grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin had written to end On the Origin of Species, “that, whilst this planet had gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” 29

Many of the birds Roosevelt collected and observed in the Adirondacks later became much less common and were placed on the National Audubon Society’s “Watch List.”30 There was, for example, the rare Bicknell’s thrush, a shy, buff-breasted, long-distance migrant whose call—“vee-ah”—Roosevelt enjoyed immensely. Even the wood thrush, common in the 1870s, found itself on the watch lists by late 2008, a casualty of the disappearance of extensive deciduous tracts of woodlands in upstate New York. To Roosevelt the wood thrush’s song at twilight—a rising and falling “ee-o-lee, ee-o-lay” as heard in the Adirondacks—was more beautiful than any other sound on earth.31

The world of the Adirondacks as presented by Sawyer and as heard with his own finely tuned ears caused Roosevelt to dream about heading out to Hawk’s Ridge in Duluth, to see great flocks of raptors in their autumnal glory. Like Audubon and Darwin, he would refuse to become an indoor naturalist. From Minnesota he could bundle up in fur and sheepskin like Zebulon Pike and go southward to rendezvous with the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers. The West was tugging on Roosevelt’s imagination like a mighty altar. “A naturalist can find employment any where—can gather both instruction and amusement where others would die of ennui and idleness,” Captain Mayne Reid had said in The Boy Hunters. “Remember! There are ‘sermons in stones, and books in running brooks.’”32

II

When young Theodore was growing up, the interior American West was still a raw wilderness of snow-choked mountains, pristine forest, black lava rock, unknown canyons, and a buffalo-trodden prairie larger than Europe. Because Roosevelt had never traveled west of the Erie Canal, his understanding of the American West in the 1870s derived primarily from newspaper accounts and photographs (with the invention of the portable wet-plate camera, images of Pikes Peak, Old Faithful, and the Three Sisters of the Tetons were now regularly appearing). Although the westward expansion of the 1870s had no artist to equal Mathew Brady during the Civil War, the photographer W. H. Jackson beautifully documented Yellowstone.