The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [6]
That same year John James Audubon hinted at the need for aviaries when he intrepidly journeyed around Florida, paint box and gun in hand, traveling from Saint Augustine to Ponce de Leon Springs and the Saint Johns River to Indian Key to Cape Sable to Sardes Key and finally to Key West and the Dry Tortugas.10 Yet he still wrote enthusiastically about massacring brown pelicans and legions of other shorebirds in the Florida Keys. “Over those enormous mud-flats, a foot or two of water is quite sufficient to drive all the birds ashore, even the tallest Heron or Flamingo, and the tide seems to flow at once over the whole expanse,” he wrote. “Each of us, provided with a gun, posted himself behind a bush, and no sooner had the water forced the winged creatures to approach the shore than the work of destruction commenced. When it at length ceased, the collected mass of birds of different kinds looked not unlike a small haycock.”11
Even though the vast majority of nineteenth-century U.S. conservationists enthralled by the “great Audubon” were elite hunters and anglers, there was also a slow-burning idiosyncratic group of naturalists, epitomized by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a careful student of the New England ecosystem and was deeply influenced by William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of Chactaws (1794). His own long, sulking sojourns at Walden Pond and lonely hikes in the dank woodlands of Maine had transformed this onetime Harvard man of letters into a semi-hermetic Concord naturalist. It was Thoreau, in a seminal article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, who most passionately articulated a need to save wilderness for wilderness’s sake. “Why should not we,” Thoreau asked with mounting enthusiasm, “have our national preserves…in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race [Indians], may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’—[and] our forests [saved]…not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?”12
Although this prescient article was added as a last chapter to Thoreau’s classic The Maine Woods after his death, our great national hermit, in truth, was an anomaly in pre–Civil War America. His condemnation of the “war on wilderness” was, as the conservation scholar Doug Stewart put it, “a mere whisper in the popular conscience.”13 Instead, the pilot-light credit for galvanizing what the conservationist Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac (1949), called “the land ethic” belonged to well-to-do Eastern Seaboard hunters who loomed over the early campaigns to create wilderness preserves. In other words, Thoreau the poet contemplated nature preserves in the Atlantic Monthly while hunting clubs like the Adirondack Club and the Bisby Club circa 1870 started actually creating preserves in the Adirondacks.14
Long before Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot were born, in fact, New York’s aristocratic hunters, using sportsmen’s newspapers and circulars to deliver their message, challenged loggers and sawmill operators and every other kind of forest exploiter to abandon their reckless clear-cutting. They wanted places like the Adirondacks saved for aesthetic and recreational pleasures. The precedent these pioneering gentlemen hunters started needed an indefatigable champion like Theodore Roosevelt to put the U.S. government