Dan Flores

Roosevelt created a national wildlife refuge system that preserved millions of acres of prized bird and mammal habitat.

The forest reserves that he and Grinnell celebrated in the 1890s were at 42 million acres when Roosevelt assumed the presidency.

Renamed National Forests by Roosevelt's chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, they swelled to 172 million acres, including Tongass, a 17 million acre monster in Alaska by the time Roosevelt left office.

Using the new Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect America's archaeological sites and to set aside landscapes of unique geological importance, he proclaimed another extensive body of preserves from the public lands in the form of 18 national monuments, a new conservation category.

Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

One of many scores of nature spots Christian Americans had assigned a satanic association became the first of these.

But the Grand Canyon itself was another of those early national monuments.

In just eight years, Roosevelt removed more than 230 million acres of general land office holdings from private entry, retaining them in public ownership, setting aside more public lands than any other president, and transforming the future of the country in the process.

Providing refuges for America's big mammals and birds was a primary reason he did almost all of it.

Douglas Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior, probably the best recent biography of him, lays that triumphant story out in point-by-point detail.

But Roosevelt was human, and as are we all, a product of his time and place.

While he could explain the tragedy of wildlife loss with lovely analogies, the destruction of the wild pigeon and the Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if the Catskills or the Palisades were taken away, he wrote.

When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer had perished.

But despite that, he resisted drawing the conclusions from Darwin that many disciples thought the great naturalists intended.

Roosevelt had grown up versed in Darwin, read Darwin himself when he was a young teenager floating the Nile, believed from that point onward that humans were indeed primates that had evolved from earlier forms.

Nonetheless, the animals he hunted did not, perhaps for him simply could not, become evolutionary near kin of humans.

While Roosevelt was president, his writer friend John Burroughs precipitated a public controversy about the accuracy of a popular new genre, a form of literary natural history that attempted to provide insight into the lives of wild animals.

Most of the new authors of animal stories were not scientists, but many of them, notably John Muir, Jack London, and Canadian writer Ernest Thompson Seton, had extensive outdoor experience and employed scientific methodology.

Seton, ironically enough, won the John Burroughs Medal for his comprehensive Lives of Game Animals book.

William T. Hornady praised Seton's work.