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and Burroughs’s adventures at Pine Knot. But he couldn’t help feeling that Roosevelt was questioning the veracity of his ornithology with respect to the grosbeaks. He was already unusually defensive, partly because in early 1908 a Biological Survey report on grosbeaks had deviated from some of his published ornithological observations of the species.64 Chapman had taken a series of photographs of blue grosbeaks, showing their resplendent blue plumage and the pale gray bill and black and chestnut wing bars. He had also taken photos of female blue grosbeaks, with their brown body and pale beige breast. He volunteered to come to Oyster Bay and put on a slide show for Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Sagamore Hill still had no electricity and no suitable screening room—Roosevelt wanted it to feel rustic—but he invited Chapman to visit the White House in August. Because Roosevelt was planning an African trip for March 1909, he wanted advice on photography from the author of Birds with a Camera for Kermit. Perhaps sensing Chapman’s distress, Roosevelt took pains in his reply to put the ornithologist at ease.

“As regards the blue grosbeak, your description of the habits was exactly borne out by the conduct of the individuals we saw,” Roosevelt wrote on June 7. “They did not behave at all like indigo buntings or rose-breasted grosbeaks, but stayed by preference along the bushy sides of a ditch in the middle of an open pasture, frequently going out into the open grass. Both males and females would sit solemnly on the tops of some thin stalk or small twig a couple of feet high beside the ditch. The Bewick’s wrens were very tame and confiding. To our ears not only their song but their subdued conversational chirping had a marked ventriloqual effect; seeming to be much further away than it was. It had no resemblance to the song of the house wren, and none whatever to the Carolina wren. I do not understand the principles upon which the sparrows are genetically divided. The swamp sparrow to me in color scheme and even in voice to be more like a spizella than a zonotrichia.”65

V

That Roosevelt continued to make birds his hobby in 1908 is indisputable. They were the reason why he had no patience with symphonies or operas. For Roosevelt, warblers were harmonicas, the doves flutes, the jays clarinets, and certain combinations string quartets. There was a feeling among many of the U.S. governors, in fact, that the president was more enthusiastic about birds than about the Constitution, limited government, private property, or corporations. Many business interests interpreted Roosevelt’s national forests, federal bird reservations, buffalo parks, and national monuments as yet another unneeded expansion of his already huge federal regulatory blanket, smothering land development and entrepreneurship. Roosevelt’s real object with these monuments, these critics claimed, was to broaden executive power by sabotaging checks and balances. In the Arizona Territory, for instance, not only had he turned some 800,000 acres of private land into the Grand Canyon National Monument by presidential fiat, but he had also dispatched armed former Rough Riders to oversee it. Also, Alexander Brodie, Arizona’s governor from 1902 to 1905, was one of Roosevelt’s former lieutenant colonels and had been appointed by Roosevelt. (Three territorial governors appointed by Roosevelt, in fact, had served with him in the Cuban campaign.) After stepping down from the governorship in 1905, Brodie had joined the War Department at Roosevelt’s request.

Over the decades confusion has reigned over a group of nine former Rough Riders who joined the Arizona Rangers. They weren’t employed by either the Department of the Interior or the U.S. Army; they were troubleshooters for Roosevelt in Arizona. These men drifted around like a Secret Service outfit within the Texas Rangers, ferreting out information about illegal mining in the Kaibab National Forest and about vandals at Montezuma Castle near Sedona. The Arizona Rangers were known to have direct access to Roosevelt through Governor Brodie,