The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [578]
Another fine resource is the eight-volume The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–1954), selected and edited by Elting E. Morison. When convenient, I have quoted from the hundreds of missives in this outstanding primary source set. Morison and his associate editors, however, only partially tapped the reservoir of Roosevelt’s brilliant correspondence. Bird watching, big game hunting, Interior and Agriculture department reforms, and Marshian conservation got short shrift in the Letters compared to political campaigns, foreign affairs, and trust busting. This gave me quite an opening: many of the excerpts of Roosevelt’s letters and diary entries in this volume are appearing in print for the first time. Nobody before had systematically gone through Roosevelt’s complete correspondence with an eye trained on his observations of the natural world. The result is that the intellectual influence of Charles Darwin on Roosevelt looms larger than previously discerned.
Special thanks to Aunna Carlton of Austin for helping me go through rolls and rolls of T.R. microfilm. When I taught at Tulane University, Andrew Travers did the same with reels of the Gifford Pinchot papers (courtesy of the Library of Congress).
Wallace Dailey, curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at Harvard University, was a marvelous facilitator. An old-school archivist extraordinaire, Wallace helped me track down obscure photographs and boyhood diaries. The bulk of T.R.’s correspondence is held at the Library of Congress in letterbooks (which he started in 1897). Originals of these typed letters, however, are scattered about various institutional collections or held in private hands. A significant number of letters to family members are housed at Harvard, where I conducted research in the Houghton Library’s reading room. All told, Roosevelt wrote more than 150,000 letters. I’ve read most of them with a keen eye for information pertaining to conservation. Meanwhile, the reader should be aware of my occasional use of Latin binomials to designate wildlife in taxonomic terms, which is limited to instances when Roosevelt used the Linnaeusian classification himself (or when it was absolutely pertinent to the narrative flow).
Since 1992, I’ve spent summers in the Badlands of North Dakota (first started as a Civilian Conservation Corps project in 1934, it became Theodore Roosevelt National Park in 1978). My family considers Medora—the park’s gateway hamlet—our second home. When Roosevelt first arrived in the Badlands in September 1883, the area was still a frontier wilderness. Today, it’s the easiest place in the Great Plains to encounter wild horses, buffalo, antelope, and prairie dogs. Numerous Roosevelt conservation sites in the Badlands have deeply inspired me (such as his Elkhorn Ranch, located thirty-five miles north of Medora). Everybody needs to discover a landscape that speaks to them, and mine is the washed-out prairie, rock-strewn slopes, and thick woody draws along the Little Missouri River. My true-blue friendships in North Dakota run extremely deep. I’d like to thank and send love to my North Dakotan friends, especially Sheila Schafer (an angel); Randy and Laurie Hatzenbuhler (T.R. Medora Foundation); Ed Schafer (former U.S. secretary of agriculture); Byron Dorgan (U.S. senator); Kent Conrad (U.S. senator); and Douglas and Mary Ellison (Western Edge Books). Valerie Naylor, the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, dutifully read chapters pertaining to the American West. She is an amazing public servant.
Dr. John Allen Gable of the Theodore Roosevelt Association (TRA) of Oyster Bay, New York, was largely responsible for my writing this book. As longtime executive director of the TRA, John knew more minutiae about our twenty-sixth president than all the award-winning biographers combined. Back in April 1990, John and I cohosted the Theodore Roosevelt Conference at Hofstra University. (We later coedited a conference volume of the academic papers with