The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [7]
Even though Roosevelt’s alliance with Chapman (and other visionary naturalists like Hornaday) launched the modern conservation movement between 1901 and 1909, Roosevelt’s preservationist vein, first developed in 1887, has been unfairly minimized by scholars. Partly that’s due to a left-leaning bias against aristocratic hunters. In addition, historians studying the progressive era have been confused by, or failed even to recognize, the distinction between hunting game birds and helping save song birds that are unfit to eat. Crowds of scholars have unfairly rounded on Roosevelt for having a bloodlust. Nevertheless, to Roosevelt, gentleman hunters were the true front line in the nature preservation movement. Over the years, however, historians have usually deemed Roosevelt first and foremost a “conservationist”—a term first seriously coined in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature but not popularized until the publication, in 1910, of Gifford Pinchot’s manifesto The Fight for Conservation (to which ex-President Roosevelt provided an introduction). “Conservation,” Pinchot famously wrote, “means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”16
A wildlife enthusiast since childhood, Roosevelt in 1887 cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with George Bird Grinnell in order to create bison, elk, and antelope preserves for future generations of Americans to enjoy. Smitten with “the chase,” he had also written a fine trilogy of books largely about his hunting experiences in the Dakota Territory: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). While living at the Elkhorn Ranch thirty-five miles north of Medora, North Dakota, for extended periods between 1883 and 1892 (and shorter ones thereafter), Roosevelt developed a highly original theory about land management and wildlife protection. As president he promoted the pro-wildlife approach with revolutionary zeal. The immortal beauty of America’s rivers and its vast prairies, rugged mountains, and lonely deserts stirred him to nearly religious fervor. Yet he remained a proud hunter to his dying day. In fact, Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, New York, had walls lined with trophy heads and skins of birds and mammals. Boom (an elk), Pow-Pow (a buffalo head stuffed for library display), and Pop-Pop-Pop (a massive 28-point blacktail buck head spanning more than fifty inches) were his to showcase.17 They represented Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for big game hunting.
On the other hand, President Roosevelt, with scholar’s fortitude, kept detailed lists of birds he saw grace the White House lawn. An avid birder, he spied on Baltimore orioles as they flicked their orange-edged tails and on crimson cardinals building sturdy nests. Dutifully he would record their numbers and habits in notebooks. Paradoxically, even though Roosevelt hunted game birds, when songbirds were the issue he agreed with the naturalist John Burroughs, who wrote in Signs and Seasons (1886) that the “true ornithologist leaves his gun at home.”18 He understood the clear distinction between game birds (like ducks and ruffled grouse), which were hard to drop, and songbirds (like robins and mockingbirds), which were easy to shoot on the wing but not dinner table fare.
Certain bird species—herons, terns, and ibises, for example—mesmerized Roosevelt. As president, he insisted that killing one of these Florida exotics was a federal crime. And although he wasn’t an expert on