The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [577]
59. “Mount Olympus National Monument” (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service Archives, 1909).
60. “A Norwegian Explanation,” New York Times (May 7, 1910), p. 8.
61. Our National Parks (Pleasantville, N.Y., 1985), pp. 222–232.
62. T.R. to James Joseph Walsh (February 23, 1909).
63. T.R., “The Pigskin Library,” Outlook, Vol. 94, No. 18 (April 30, 1910).
64. Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism: Gifford Lectures Delivered at Aberdeen University, 1907 (Aberdeen, Scotland: Printed for the University, 1908), pp. 261–263.
65. T.R. to Robert Simpson Woodward (January 22, 1909).
66. T.R. to Jean-Jules Jusserand (February 25, 1909).
67. John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1910).
68. Timothy Egan, “This Land Was My Land,” New York Times (June 23, 2007).
69. T.R. to Gifford Pinchot (March 2, 1909).
70. Lucy Maynard, “President Roosevelt’s List of Birds,” Bird-Lore, Vol. 12, No. 2 (March–April 1910), pp. 53–54.
71. T.R., “White House Bird List,” in Lucy Maynard, Birds of Washington and Vicinity, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Woodward & Lothrop, 1909).
72. Jim Bendat, Democracy’s Big Day: The Inauguration of Our President, 1789–2009 (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse Star, 2008), p. 40.
73. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 544.
74. Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: Morrow, 1992), pp. 494–495.
75. “Wife to Ride with Taft,” New York Times (March 1, 1909), p. 1.
76. “Bible for Taft Inaugural,” New York Times (February 14, 1909), p. 10.
77. Morris, Theodore Rex, pp. 550–555.
78. Ibid., p. 554.
79. “Roosevelt Says Good-Bye,” New York Times (March 5, 1909), p. 3.
80. T.R. to William Allen White (February 19, 1909).
81. T.R., “Our Vanishing Wild Life,” Outlook (January 25, 1913). This was a book review of William T. Hornaday’s Our Vanishing Wild Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Naturalist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University has written about a human condition he calls biophilia, the desire to affiliate with other forms of life. If ever there was somebody possessed with biophilia, it was Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson surmises that Homo sapiens, as a rule, has a genuine love of nature which is biological. Almost everybody responds intuitively with oohs and ahs when viewing a gorgeous valley, hiking a red-rock canyon, or hearing a loon call from a mud bog. Wilson’s biophilia theory suggests that, at heart, humans want to be touched by nature in their daily lives. Wilson’s hypothesis is the key to understanding why Roosevelt added over 234 million acres to the public domain between 1901 and 1909. Roosevelt responded both scientifically and emotively to wilderness. Therefore, I’ve purposefully avoided the fairly shopworn debate over whether Roosevelt was a nature preservationist or a utilitarian conservationist. He was both. Roosevelt was too many-sided and paradoxical to be pigeonholed. If forced to attach a single label to Roosevelt, I’d go with “Darwinian naturalist” (albeit one imbued with excessive biophilic needs).
Roosevelt’s voluminous correspondence, books, articles, and diaries about his so-called outdoors life proved invaluable in writing this book. My institutional partner in tracking down all of Roosevelt’s leavings was Dickinson State University. Under the leadership of Professor Clay Jenkinson, this fine North Dakota higher-learning institution created the Theodore Roosevelt Center in 2007. The center has undertaken a complete digitization of the Library of Congress’s holdings of our twenty-sixth president. The center is also digitizing all T.R. photographs, films, audio, and ancillary papers.
The Library of Congress has also put T.R.’s papers on microfilm, an admirable move that made the collection user-friendly at