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III

Ever since Frederick Osborn had drowned in the Hudson River, a void had existed in Roosevelt’s life. He needed a close chum to share his enthusiasm for ornithology, someone with whom to prowl his favorite hunting grounds come summer break. Now, as a Harvard freshman, he found such a friend in Henry “Hal” Davis Minot of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Hal, a lanky young man with piercing blue-gray eyes and a thin brown beard, had already written a booklet: The Land and Game Birds of New England would be published the following spring. Together Theodore and Hal hatched plans to spend the next summer collecting warblers and thrushes. “Our lessons will be over by the twentieth of June,” Roosevelt excitedly wrote to his parents from Harvard, “and then Henry Minot and I intend leaving immediately for the Adirondacks, so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible, and in two or three weeks we will get down to Oyster Bay, where I should like to have him spend a few days with us. He is a very quiet fellow, and would not be the least trouble.”36

Haunted by his humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt—to improve his physique—boxed regularly during his freshman year. He learned how to throw a pretty good one-two punch, but his eyesight was terrible and he was never light on his feet. What made him quite remarkable in the ring, however, was his godawful ability to take a thrashing, to be pummeled unmercifully but still come back for more. This wasn’t a recipe for winning matches, but it did win the respect of his classmates. Clearly, Roosevelt had a genius for pushing the limits. Instead of hopping onto a streetcar to downtown Boston as most of his classmates would do, Roosevelt often chose to walk the three or four miles. As an oarsman, Roosevelt preferred rowing when a heavy nor’easter kicked up, seeking the challenge of advancing forward in rivers and lakes when the wind was least favorable.

As planned, during the summer of 1877—between his freshman and sophomore years—Roosevelt spent weeks camping in the Adirondacks with Minot. Because Edith had been excited about spending time with Theodore at Oyster Bay, the news that birds came first may have bruised her feelings. As the historian Edmund Morris joked in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edith “could compete with the belles of Boston, but what were her charms compared with those of the Orange-Throated Warbler, the Red-Bellied Nuthatch, and the Hairy Woodpecker?”37 As soon as classes ended at Harvard on June 21, Roosevelt and Minot headed straight to Saint Regis Lake “so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible.”38 Once again Moses Sawyer served as the trusted guide through the rugged Adirondack forests, on what turned out to be the most serious bird collecting trip of Roosevelt’s life. Spurred on by his classmate, he made careful notes and pulled together his own first publication on birds: it was modeled on Minot’s The Land and Game Birds of New England, which had just been published by Estes and Lauriat (in cooperation with the Naturalist Agency of Salem, Massachusetts) to fine peer reviews. In fact, Harper’s New Monthly, which had just been launched, commended The Land and Game Birds to “all who care for out-door sights and sounds.”39

The resulting booklet by Roosevelt, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, not much more than a broadside, was instantly the finest list on the subject in print. Although Minot was credited as coauthor, The Summer Birds was clearly Roosevelt’s accomplishment, the end product of four collecting trips to the Adirondacks. Roosevelt’s ample descriptions of nearly 100 species were based on firsthand outdoors observations. The Summer Birds, in fact, was impressive in its thoroughness. With an exacting eye, Roosevelt delineated everything from the sprightliness of juncos to the “strikingly” common on least flycatchers. With brevity he analyzed the nests of the Swainson’s thrush and Wilson’s warbler. It was clearly a work aimed