Dan Flores

Although much of his story was set east of the Mississippi, with men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as its heroes, Roosevelt called the book The Winning of the West.

By this time in his life, Roosevelt had made a series of trips to outback Maine, and in 1880, he and his younger brother, Elliot, journeyed to Iowa and Minnesota, where, as was common at the time, they killed more than 400 birds and animals, yet were disappointed with their take.

To this point in his life, Roosevelt had not yet been to the actual West, where in his imagination it was still possible to experience the world of the frontier hunters he was writing about.

But in September 1883, after running his first political campaign and getting elected as an assemblyman to the New York legislature, he finally boarded a train with connections to the real West.

To Roosevelt, cultured men looked to Europe, but manly men looked to the West for their inspiration.

So his destination was as far in the Dakota Territory as trains would take him, and his mission was specific.

Roosevelt wanted to engage in that most Western of acts, shooting a buffalo before such a thing was no longer possible.

His younger brother by then was hunting tigers in India and had faced a stampeding buffalo herd in West Texas.

Everyone knew buffalo were almost gone by then, but there were a few, and a buffalo head on the wall of your study would convey where your sympathies lay.

Until the late 1880s, however, Roosevelt seems not to have faced the issue of declining animal populations with much awareness.

His soon-to-be friend in the conservation field, journalist George Byrd Grinnell, was already developing a much more progressive credo.

Roosevelt's and hence the country's ideas about the natural world we'd inherited were about to be shaped into a modern form by this Western experience.

Buffalo had become the mammalian representative of America for all the world in the 19th century, but their story had now taken a much darker tone.

Everyone knew that American market hunters were killing buffalo by the thousands on a daily basis.

The last of the buffalo became a phrase that defined the 1880s the way the roaring 20s would define a decade 40 years later.

It was the decade when William Hornaday collected bison specimens for the National Museum's diorama in the belief that this might be the only way future Americans would get to see buffalo.

The painter Albert Bierstadt finished his grand oil, The Last of the Buffalo, in 1890, the same year a band of Lakotas was massacred by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee for performing a dance to return buffalo to the West.

Grinnell also chose The Last of the Buffalo as the title for his widely read book from Scribner's and Sons.

The demise of America's most iconic animal was in the air, and many wondered what that meant.

In 1883, though, for Roosevelt, a Buffalo Trophy represented America's ultimate prize.