The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [617]
* By 2009 the naturalist E. O. Wilson of Harvard University had documented 14,001 ant species. See Nicholas Wade, “Scientist At Work: Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans,” New York Times, July 15, 2008.
* Other allies of Bergh included the poet William Cullen Bryant, the industrialist Peter Cooper (who formed Cooper Union), and the politician John A. Dix (whom Fort Dix, New Jersey, was named after).
* According to the historian Patricia O’Toole, Henry Adams was touring the Nile River at the same time as the Roosevelt family.
* Theodore noted that these “seven species” were “in easy shot” but did not raise his rifle to them, as December 29 was a Sunday and his father forbade shooting.
* The voyage of the Beagle lasted from December 1831 to October 1836. Its mission was a hydrographical survey of South America and the South Pacific. Besides the Galápagos, Darwin got to visit the Falkland Islands, Cape de Verde Islands, Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand, and dozens of other nirvanas for an aspiring naturalist.
* Charles Waterton (1856–1912) was a British naturalist and explorer who influenced Charles Darwin, publishing a number of books recounting his specimen collecting missions. Nikolaus Brahm (1751–1812) was an eccentric German zoologist who was obsessed with naming larvae. Roosevelt liked the stories about Waterton—another eccentric, to put it mildly—who pretended to be a dog biting dinner guests on their legs. Waterton also invented a way to preserve animal skins, molding them to create caricatures of his opponents. A fierce opponent of the British soap factories that polluted a lake near his house, Thomas Waterton eventually had a national park named after him in Alberta, Canada. Waterton turned his own estate into the world’s first waterfowl and nature reserve. Roosevelt may have later taken his ideas about federal bird reservations from Waterton.
* When it was created in 1885 by Congress the Biological Survey was for “economic ornithology.” The following year mammals were incorporated. In 1896 the unit’s name was changed to the Division of Biological Survey. On March 3, 1905 T.R. officially upgraded the outfit to the Bureau of Biological Survey. Throughout the text I use simply Biological Survey.
* Ironically, in 1919 R.B.R.’s brownstone became headquarters for the Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Association.
* Originally published as Forest and Stream in 1873, the magazine changed its name to Field and Stream in 1930.
* Probably Roosevelt meant snow buntings, which would have been rare indeed in New York in May.
* Some scholars question whether Roosevelt was using “bully” at this early point in his life. Certainly he was saying it in the early 1880s. Other expressions that he constantly used during his college years were “By Jove” and “My Boy.”
* Much of Mount Desert Island became preserved. It was originally established as Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916, then as Lafayette National Park in 1919, and was renamed Acadia National Park in 1929.
* Throughout the entire Midwest tramp Theodore kept regular diaries, which have (strangely) remained unpublished. They are permanently housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. A university press should jump at the chance of publishing an edition.
* There are actually three Raccoon rivers in Iowa: North, South, and Middle. They are tributaries of the Des Moines River and part of the Mississippi River watershed.
* Although the game birds of western Iowa seemed plentiful in 1880, that was an illusion. Overhunting would by 1932 cause the extinction of the heath hen, and by 2009 Attwater’s prairie chicken would top the endangered species list.
* The essay remained unpublished until 1988, when the scholar John Rousmaniere unearthed it from the Library of Congress’s T.R. Collection and published it in Gray’s Sporting Journal. (Rousmaniere had