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no outward signs of guilt, hesitation, or concern over misplaced priorities. After reading the zoologist Edgar Alexander Mearns’s Mammals of the Mexican Boundary of the United States (1907), Roosevelt appointed Mearns as chief naturalist and physician for the African expedition. Mearns had acquired his impressive reputation while on duty as a major in the Philippines. Wielding a machete with the same prowess as Bill Sewall using an ax, he was the ideal lead scout for jungle exploration. Roosevelt also extended an invitation to two younger American Darwinian naturalists: J. Alden Loring (an authority on small mammals), and Edmund Heller (the Chicago Field Museum’s specialist on big game). Heller in particular interested Roosevelt, as he had been trained on an extended expedition to the Galápagos.73 Mearns, Loring, and Heller were all fine taxidermists, and taxidermy was a skill crucial to the expedition’s serious work. As this was taking place, Roosevelt wrote more than thirty letters about the African trip to Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History, oftentimes asking him for such hard-to-find items as books on Ugandan gorillas and snakes of the Nile River.74 And Roosevelt gladly accepted an invitation, offered annually to naturalists of high esteem, 75 to deliver the prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford University for 1910. The world-renowned biologist Thomas Huxley had previously delivered the lectures, so Roosevelt was immensely pleased.

When he returned to the White House from Sagamore Hill in September 1908, Roosevelt met with Congressman John Lacey to discuss possible southwestern Indian ruins in need of rescue by the federal government. Lacey also promoted the admirable idea of preserving the crumbling Spanish colonial missions of Arizona in Tumacacori, along the border with Mexico: Santos Angeles de Guevavi and San Cayetano de Calabazas. To save these adobe-style architectural gems, the federal government would need to seize them. Until this time, no historic Spanish buildings or structures had been declared national monuments, but the Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde had been designated part of a national park, and Roosevelt was now smitten with the idea of Tumacacori. The memory of Spanish rule in Arizona shouldn’t be effaced by misplaced national pride or triumphalism. Americans needed to better understand the decades when imperial Spain colonized parts of their Southwest. On September 15, Roosevelt signed the Tumacacori National Monument into law. One signature designated three landmarks.

The first weeks of September were exceptionally busy for Roosevelt. Collier’s was publishing an essay by Jack London, “The Other Animals,” in which London attempted to cut Roosevelt down to size for attacking the realism of his fictional dogs—a point of great pride for him—and for calling him a “nature faker.” London skewered Roosevelt for supposedly stating that animals did not reason, were below mankind in the biological pecking order, and could perform only mechanical and reflexive actions. London believed that accident counted for much in nature and that Roosevelt’s certainty was arrogant.

London insisted that his two novels about dogs—Call of the Wild and White Fang—were consistent with evolution. He had been in Hawaii when he heard that Roosevelt considered him a nature-faker. Embarrassed, London said he had “climbed into my tree and stayed there.” But by the time he sailed to Tahiti on the Snark, London was ready to exchange blows with both Roosevelt and Burroughs. For starters, he insinuated that they had old-school European tendencies: “They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that ever does reason,” he wrote. “This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is not modern at all. It is distinctly mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a view, are homocentric…. Had not the world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well