Dan Flores

From Elkhorn, he hunted deer and pronghorns, and farther west in the Bighorns and the Bitterroots, grizzlies, elk, and moose.

He hunted mountain goats in the Coeur d'Alene and caribou in the Selkirk Range.

Working on the grand history that became the winning of the West, Roosevelt concluded that this kind of life, a life roaming the wilderness and hunting, was the very path that had allowed Europeans to become Americans.

Living it, he felt, as he put it, absolutely free as a man could feel.

But experiencing the West of the 1880s was accompanied by a sadder realization.

In a violation of his Western fantasies, Roosevelt was discovering that, in fact, there is not much game.

Buffalo were gone.

Elk and deer and grizzlies weren't far behind.

When he'd shot his buffalo, he knew full well that it was, as he put it, part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race.

Yet he had still shot his bull.

That had to have been on his mind when he began to realize that, in fact, everything seemed to be disappearing.

This onslaught on Western nature was being delivered by what Roosevelt now referred to as skin hunters and greasy nimrods, all of them products of greed and self-interest.

The wild, wild West afforded remarkable freedom.

That was evident.

But frontier anarchy without restraint was devouring the world with no regard whatsoever, either for its perpetuation or for future generations.

This was unexpected and depressing.

So was losing both his wife and his mother almost simultaneously that decade, which set him into an emotional spiral.

Calling on the sunshine and champagne air of the West to help overcome these tragedies, Roosevelt turned to writing articles for a magazine called Outing and working on a book he would title Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which appeared in print in 1885.

By the time the winter of 1886-87 ruined his ranching operation, he had enough material for another pair of hunting books, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail in 1888 and The Wilderness Hunter in 1893.

These were the books that established Roosevelt's reputation as someone who knew the West and understood what was happening to it.