The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [618]
* Although the words “bison” and “buffalo” are often used interchangeably, these are very different animals. Bison have a proportionately large head, short horns, and variable hair length and shed seasonally. They’re found in North America and Europe. Buffalo, by contrast, have proportionately average-size heads, long horns, and uniform hair and never shed in any significant way. They are found in Africa and Asia.
* Originally consisting of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska, some of the Dakota Territories were broken up into the Idaho Territory, Wyoming Territory, and Nebraska Territory. On November 2, 1889, the remaining Dakota Territories split to become the separate states of North Dakota and South Dakota.
* Billings County was created by the 1879 territorial legislature. The first government, however, wasn’t organized until May 4, 1886.
* In an article in Harper’s Round Table titled “Ranching” (August 31, 1897) Roosevelt admitted that being a shepherd was hard work: “A good deal of skill must be shown by the shepherd in managing his flock and in handling the sheep-dogs, ordinarily it is appallingly dreary to sit all day long in the sun, or loll about in the saddle, watching the flocks of fleecy idiots. In times of storm he must work like a demon and know exactly what to do, or his whole flock will die before his eyes, sheep being as tender as horses and cattle are tough.”
* Four of Canada’s first national parks—Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Yoho, and Banff—are all part of the Selkirks.
* Amazingly, that same year Roosevelt published two other books: Life of Gouverneur Morris and Essays on Practical Politics.
* Dr. C. Hart Merriam, Results of a Biological Survey of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Ornithology and Mammology, No. 3, (Washington Government Printing Office, 1890).
* Burroughs usually took the train to the Hyde Park station and then caught a little ferry across to his farm at West Park, in Esopus. In the winter, he’d simply walk across the ice.
* The reserves would be renamed national forests in 1907, during Roosevelt’s presidency. Besides the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve in Wyoming these new federal lands included the White River Plateau timberland reserve (Colorado), Pecos River forest reserve (New Mexico), Sierra forest reserve (California), Pacific forest reserve (Washington), Pike’s Peak timberland reserve (Colorado), Bull Run timberland reserve (Oregon), Plum Creek timberland reserve (Colorado), South Platte forest reserve (Colorado), San Gabriel timberland reserve (California), Battlement Mesa forest reserve (California), Afognak Forest and Fish Culture reserve (Alaska), Grand Canyon forest reserve (Arizona), Trabuco Canyon forest reserve (California), San Bernardino forest reserve (California), Ashland forest reserve (Oregon), and Cascade Range forest reserve (Oregon). The difference in designations was fairly simple: trees weren’t allowed to be cut in forest reserves, but in timberlands limited government-supervised logging was allowed.
* The National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame’s first inductee was Theodore Roosevelt, in 1964.
* The “new western history” of 1990 was different from Roosevelt’s “new history” of 1890. All Roosevelt wanted was for the West to be brought into the larger national narrative. Limerick and White had no problem with this, per se. What they objected to was Roosevelt’s one-dimensional characterization of the West as all manifest destiny and triumphalism. Their new western history correctly brought in Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and others who had been cut out of the Rooseveltian Anglo-American “new history.”
* William F. Cody first called the troupe (in 1893) “Buffalo Bull Cody’s Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” But, in truth, Roosevelt also had fair claim to the term. In August 1883 he