The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [56]
To fully comprehend the importance of R.B.R.’s legacy, it’s best to remember that he—like his nephew T.R.—relished slaying dragons, pounding away at adversaries. In political fights Robert B. Roosevelt was always taking on fiendish “rings” with “off with their heads delight.” These included the “Rivermen Ring,” the “District of Columbia Ring,” and the “Tweed Ring” he wanted to be a pallbearer for them all. Corruption of any kind was anathema to R.B.R.’s code of noblesse oblige. In his third conservation book, The Game Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America, R.B.R. merged the sportsman’s ethics with natural history and prosecutorial prose. Basking in his newfound literary celebrity, he spearheaded the preservationist agenda of the New York Sportsmen’s Club. In 1874, at R.B.R.’s urging, the club changed its British-sounding name, becoming the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG). Three years later R.B.R. was elected president (a post he held until his death in 1906).77 Whether the issue was white-tailed deer, mallard ducks, or brook trout the members of NYAPG were hunters who believed wholeheartedly in conservation. The organization was instrumental in the majority of New York legislation aimed at saving wildlife during the 1870s and 1880s.78
What distinguished R.B.R. from other members of NYAPG was that whereas they promoted preservation, he fought for “restoration.” In this regard R.B.R. was furthering the teachings of Henry W. Herbert, challenging the so-called big bugs of his day for killing off America’s waterways. There were many fine books published on fish culture in the nineteenth century—including the U.S. Fish Commission’s annual Reports, which began in 1871—but none had the literary flair of R.B.R.’s efforts.79
IV
Analyzing contemporary “fish culture” and heading a conservationist club weren’t enough for Robert B. Roosevelt. For twenty years, he served as the head of the New York State Fish Commission, an unpaid position. What enraged him most was the fine-mesh nets fishermen draped across the Hudson to catch huge schools of shad, thereby preventing any fish from swimming upstream to their spawning grounds. A firm believer in effecting change through the legislative process, R.B.R. lobbied state lawmakers in Albany, and soon it was decreed that nets could have a mesh no smaller than 4½ inches. Numerous laws followed: fines would be issued to fishermen who operated nets or traps on Sunday; fishing seasons for some species were established; rivers were ordered restocked; and catch limits were enacted to further protect shad during the two-month season (April 15 to June 15).80
Robert B. Roosevelt was a workhorse on the fish commission. Because he was independently wealthy, he had time to send his fellow commissioners a barrage of white papers on pisciculture, and his colleagues usually rubber-stamped his decisions. Nobody doubted that R.B.R. was the voice of the commission. Still, Robert was too much of an autocratic gentleman to persuade working fishermen who needed to troll long hours just to feed their families. A spokesman was needed who could talk with no hint of refinement about the virtues of artificial propagation of fish. R.B.R. recruited Seth Green—the fashion-defying “Fish King,” considered the premier angler in America around 1868—to join the commission and be his mouthpiece in promoting hatcheries.
Raised near Rochester, New York, Green learned to hunt and fish around the Genesee River’s lower falls. As an adolescent, he learned “fishing secrets” from the local Seneca Indians. By the time Green turned forty, in 1857, he was the top fish dealer in New York and was considered the ace commercial fisherman in America; he and his crew caught ten to twenty-five tons of fish a month.81
Meanwhile, Green developed the rudimentary science of artificial insemination. He stripped the female trout of her eggs, catching them in a