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By Root 3804 0

Forester’s instructive style. To him, outdoor writing meant pushing one’s limits, seeking danger, and developing survivalist instincts in the brutal wild. Forester was too tame for him, too concerned with what was proper hunting attire for flushing grouse after noontime tea. T.R. was drawn to the more adventurous stories of Captain Mayne Reid. (Roosevelt also fell under the spell of the founder of Forest and Stream,* Charlie Hallock, whose 1877 Vacation Rambles in Michigan made him curious about the Great Lakes islands and grayling.70) Eight-pound trout, snarling cougars, grizzly-bear paws larger than a human’s head, virgin forest that even Lewis and Clark hadn’t trampled—these were the kind of “manly” pursuits the teenager wanted to read about in the 1860s and early 1870s. He wanted to experience outdoor life before the telegraph wire spoiled it all. “Unfortunately, [Forester] was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports,” T.R. later wrote, “and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself.”71

Following Herbert’s suicide in 1858, R.B.R. eased away from his other civic obligations and focused on protecting the fish populations. He wrote a Herbert-like tract on New York and New England angling. Game Fish of the Northern States of America, and British Provinces was a sensational critical hit, blending personal experiences and conservationist convictions with recipes for cooking fish.72

Young Roosevelt was only four years old in 1862, when the success of Game Fish resulted in Uncle Rob’s being praised as the “Izaak Walton of America.”73 Although R.B.R.’s main concern was recreational fishing, his book included chapters about how millions of Americans would become deprived of a great foodstuff if U.S. rivers and lakes were fished out. Much of the book was about fish hatching. The editor of London’s Land and Water, in fact, credited R.B.R. with introducing American fish into English waters, feeling he deserved more public credit for this transatlantic pisciculture.74 Usually fishing books, even Walton’s venerable The Compleat Angler, appealed only to a select audience of patrician sportsmen. But Game Fish managed to have a profound influence, becoming the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Only Thaddeus Norris’s encyclopedic American Angler Book (1864) came close with regard to celebrating the fish found in the United States’ waters.

What worried R.B.R. most was the scarcity of fish. The two waterways flanking Manhattan—the East and Hudson rivers—for example, had become cesspools for industrial waste and raw sewage. The situation wasn’t much better for the waterways of Long Island, which were serving as garbage dumps. In the Hudson, river men used to netting tons of shad were coming back to land empty-handed. Regarding the Great Lakes Robert worried the walleye and trout might soon go the way of the dodo and the great auk. Ferociously, he corresponded with fellow gentlemen anglers in New Hampshire and Vermont, who had toyed with scientific concepts like “artificial propagation” to replenish their fished-out lakes and streams.75

Wildlife management was embryonic in the mid-nineteenth century, but R.B.R. pioneered in introducing scientific concepts relating to fish. Refusing to temporize, in a torrent of lucid (if self-indulgent) books, articles, and harangues, R.B.R. urged fishermen to develop “moderation, humanity, patience, and kindness under all circumstances.” He promoted fly-fishing mainly because it’s far harder and more of a sporting challenge than bait fishing (it also resulted in fewer ancillary kills), as he simultaneously awakened the nation to the perils of overharvesting lake fish. In his second book, Superior Fishing; Or, the Striped Bass, Trout, and Black Bass of the Northern States (1865), which recounted a trip to Lake Superior and its tributaries (plus other freshwater fishing sites), Roosevelt jumped to the then radical conclusion that fish “poachers,” those scoundrels who netted whitefish