The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [619]
* Starting in 1932, the Boone and Crockett Club would distinguish itself as publicly promoting “record book” trophies based on a scoring system for big game. The club took as a model the English Rowland Ward records system. For moose the best score was 224–418 with an antler span of sixty-seven inches and a weight of over 1,800 pounds. A host of categories were soon developed. Take, for example, goats. By the time of World War II, the members of Boone and Crockett were encouraged to be “grand slammers” (i.e., to hunt one sheep from each of four individual subspecies: desert bighorn, Rocky Mountain bighorn, Dall’s sheep, and Stone’s sheep). The club also would disqualify submissions for a host of reasons: for example, hunting with a telescopic 4X scope was considered not “fair chase.”
* In 1875 Whitehead had won Phelps v. Racey, an important case against a Manhattan game dealer who was wholesaling quail shot out of season. It was considered a “landmark decision supporting state authority to limit the sale of game.”
* Unfortunately, Grant also fancied himself as a eugenicist, and he believed some deeply racist theories of Nordic superiority. His 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race caused widespread fear of a new wave of Italians and Slavic immigration coming to the United States after World War I. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald mentioned Grant by name as a race theorist. Others have claimed that Grant’s eugenicist works were studied in Germany during the Third Reich.
* Mackinac National Park—demoted to Mackinac State Park in the summer of 1895—was an exception. So was Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, slightly more than 1,000 preserved acres, saved only because Bathhouse Row (man-made facilities around therapeutic thermal springs) was what the U.S. government was intent on preserving. That Arkansas location probably should have been declared a national historic site, not a national park.
† Mayor William Strong, a Republican, actually appointed a four-man board of police commissioners. T.R. was selected as board president by his three peers.
* The existing Pacific Forest Reserve of Washington state was greatly enlarged and renamed Mount Rainier Forest Reserve on February 22, 1897.
* After devouring the book in a single sitting, Roosevelt had reviewed Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 positively in the October 1890 Atlantic Monthly. And in 1897 he praised Mahan’s biography of the British admiral Horatio Nelson in a review in The Bookman.
* Roosevelt was referring to the son of the great Louis Agassiz. Alexander Agassiz became famous for his numerous comparative zoology reports, including Marine Animals of Massachusetts Bay (1871). David Starr Jordan was a renowned ichthyologist who became president of Indiana University and then Stanford University. He went on to be a peace activist and was an expert witness in the Scopes trial of 1925.
* For conservationist-naturalists, visiting Mount Shasta—the sixth-tallest mountain in California—had become something of a rite of passage. John Muir wrote of Shasta that his “blood turned to wine” upon seeing the peak. Because it was a volcano Muir also called it a “fire mountain.” To the poet Joaquin Miller the summit was “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter of 1908, wrote that he considered “the evening twilight on Mt. Shasta one of the grandest sights I have ever witnessed.”
* Remember that George Bird Grinnell’s original Audubon was defunct. There were only state Audubon societies in the late 1890s. No real national “Audubon Society” was formed until the 1940s. And even as late as 2008, some state Audubons (like Connecticut’s) remain separate and independent of the National Audubon.
* Roosevelt loved absolutely everything about Japanese culture. As U.S. president he hired one of the premier Japanese jujitsu teachers as his personal trainer.