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Chapter 1: What role did Theodore Roosevelt play in shaping American conservation?
Along with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt was the American president most fascinated with nature and with the American West. And like Jefferson, Roosevelt transformed the region he loved. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly. How you create a new West and a new America. He was a former president of the United States and might hold that office again. He was also an internationally known sportsman and advocate of adventurous living whose demise would have caused shockwaves.
But descending the unexplored Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, in early 1914, Teddy Roosevelt was injured and ill and had watched his great South American adventure with legendary explorer Candido Rondon almost disintegrate in the Brazilian jungle. No novelist could have written the scene better for him. We've reached a point where some of us must stop, he told his son Kermit.
I feel I am only a burden to the party. It was classic Theodore Roosevelt, a romantic hero who, despite his fame, was willing to sacrifice himself for his companions. The party had none of it, of course, but the incident is a window on the characteristics that led Theodore Roosevelt to the life of accomplishment and adventure he created. Few things Teddy Roosevelt ever did were easy.
Maybe that is why he gloried so in challenge. By sheer force of will, he turned himself from a weak, sickly adolescent into a hardy and robust Harvard undergraduate who boxed and hunted and eventually into a lifelong advocate of what he called the strenuous life.
That same determination marked his administrations as president of the United States, enabling him to enact major progressive social policies, central to which was the first comprehensive environmental program in American history. Roosevelt's ideal image of an American was someone who knew the natural world, which was why conservation of an endangered nature was central to his accomplishments.
As with Thomas Jefferson, whose goals for the West enabled Americans to grasp its outlines, we shouldn't be surprised to discover a similar fascination with nature in the president who laid down America's and the West's environmental foundation. But in contrast to Jefferson, who sat on his mountain in Virginia and imagined the West, Roosevelt experienced the West and the world firsthand.
Roosevelt was from one of the Eastern families of patrician elites so visible in the history of the West. His birth in 1858 almost made him a Civil War baby, but as his mother was a Southerner, the Civil War and Reconstruction were always forbidden topics.
Nature, wild animals, and the West, on the other hand, were the focus of long discussions between Roosevelt's father, who was an early disciple of Darwin and a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, and an uncle who was a naturalist. When he was only 10, Roosevelt's family toured Europe, and despite young Teddy's frequent attacks of asthma, he and his father climbed Mount Vesuvius.
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Chapter 2: How did Roosevelt's early experiences influence his views on nature?
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. Stepping off the train in North Dakota, he hired a guy named Joe Ferris, who in perfect symmetry for that decade, was from eastern Canada and had himself only been on the scene in the West for a year.
They made the Maltese cross-ranch their headquarters and set out on horseback on what turned into a 15-day quest. The days of Audubon describing the sound of the vast herds in this same country as resembling continuous rolling thunder were now gone forever. That year of Roosevelt's hunt, the Fort Benton shipper I.G. Baker sent a grand total of 5,000 buffalo hides down the Missouri River.
The next year, he shipped none at all. The bison story was already exemplifying that in the scope of world history, the United States had engaged in a more complete destruction of wild animals and a wider diversity of them than any modern country in existence. Roosevelt's bison hunt was a revelation to him. Initially, he wrote his wife, Alice, that buffalo are too rare for me to hope to get one.
Over the course of two weeks of horseback travel that took them into Montana territory, they found a handful. Roosevelt wounded one bison he never found and missed shots at another pair before finally downing an unsuspecting bull barely 50 yards distant. A handsome animal whose glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of the sun, he said.
The celebration became the stuff of Western romance. Teddy did a freestyle Indian dance and paid Ferris $100 on the spot. Hooked on the curious, fantastic beauty of the Badlands, before he departed, he bought an interest in his first ranch there, the Maltese Cross.
On a return trip the next year, 1884, he bought a second property he called the Elkhorn along the Little Missouri, the nearest neighbor 12 miles away. These Western experiences were pivotal in Roosevelt's life. They gave him a base of operations in the West and put him in contact with individuals whose character stood naked in that setting.
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Chapter 3: What were the pivotal moments in Roosevelt's journey to becoming a conservationist?
With Grinnell's coaching and friendship, over the next 15 years of his career, Roosevelt launched the intellectual journey that would ultimately transform America and bring it into the 20th century.
Their organization of elite hunters, the Boone and Crockett Club, along with Grinnell's Audubon Society, provided platforms that translated their Western experiences into a rethinking about freedom and nature. The particular epiphany that became the foundation for this rethinking wasn't an easy one. But for those who loved American nature, the evidence for it was everywhere.
Pure self-interest of the Adam Smith sort, which had driven capitalism for most of American history, was growing close to leaving nothing for the future. Largely through witnessing the loss of the wild animals he loved, Roosevelt was coming to an undergirding principle for the political revolution known as progressivism.
Capitalism's excesses, it turned out, were going to have to be curbed and regulated. And the lesson then being offered by railroad and oil company domination of state governments meant to Roosevelt and progressives that the only entity truly powerful enough to regulate capitalism was the federal government.
In search of a word that might symbolize what he had in mind, Roosevelt borrowed the term conservation from British Governance of India. to conserve something meant to save it, to ensure its perpetuation. As an American, Roosevelt saw conservation in democratic terms.
He would develop programs wherein the federal government would conserve American nature for what he called the greatest good for the greatest number and for the longest period of time. A great country and a great civilization, Roosevelt believed, needed to understand itself.
The first step involved taking some sort of action to curb the market hunt for wildlife that for three centuries had systematically destroyed everything from deer, turkey, great auks, passenger pigeons, and plume birds like snowy egrets in the east, to a near obliteration of western wildlife, most shamefully America's iconic animal, the bison. Until 1900, the U.S.
federal government had stood by and allowed unregulated capitalism to have its way with wildlife. But in that year, an Iowa congressman named John Lacey stepped forward with a plan to engage Washington in halting these abominations. Lacey acquired his status with the New Wildlife Activists following a series of celebrated incidents in Yellowstone Park in the early 1890s. U.S.
Army Game Warden Ed Wilson had arrested a notorious park poacher whom a local judge promptly released, citing a lack of any law to prosecute him. A few weeks later, Wilson vanished without a trace. Other wardens found Wilson's hidden remains a year later.
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Chapter 4: How did Roosevelt's presidency impact environmental policies?
Well, he and I were doing an event in Nashville on February 19th at the Safari Club International Convention. Even when we were hunting, we were like, man, we should do a presentation about our time in Africa at SCI. So we're doing that. This is February 19th, Safari Club International Convention in Nashville. We're going to do two things.
From 9.30 to 10.30, we're going to do a meet and greet at the Robin Hertz Safari's booth. Our actual event's at 2 o'clock in the Omni Ballroom. After the event, I'll be happy to sign any books or take pictures, whatever's on your mind if you come on down. To get tickets, you've got to go to the Safari Club International website and get a ticket to the convention.
Once you do that, you're prompted to go get a ticket to our event. All the ticket price goes to SCI. It's a nonprofit conservation group. All ticket prices go to SCI. They don't go to me and Morgan. But we're going to be there. Guaranteed laughs. Come check it out. Can't wait to see you. February 19th, Nashville Safari Club International Convention.
In 1901, when an assassin's bullet cut down President William McKinley early in his second term, his vice president was a 42-year-old former New York congressman and city mayor who Republican Party operatives referred to as that damn cowboy.
Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest man ever to serve as president with a prodigious manic depressive personality, had the chance to transform America fall into his lap. Here was a stunning opportunity to take on the issues that had dominated his life since childhood.
If celebrated individual freedom was the very cause of the destruction of America's animals, not to mention its forests, its grasslands, its fisheries, its archaeological sites, then expanding government power to regulate such freedom was the only course that could preserve the country.
What he and his policymakers called conservation became his personal campaign to save the animals and landscapes he believed had created Homo Americanus in the first place. The whole standpoint of the people toward the proper aim of government, Roosevelt would write, were brought out first by this conservation work.
The proper aim of government, he was now convinced, was to moderate the selfishness and thoughtlessness inherent in human nature. What conservation and progressivism would do was set America on a different path, a sharp detour from the three-century attempt to make the U.S. a clone of the countries of Western Europe. The idea was to create a nation that stood separate and new,
Nothing in Roosevelt's programs said that quite like his enthusiastic endorsement once he became president of the existing public land system. Roosevelt's massive additions to this distinctly American form of land ownership and public access in the form of new national parks, national forests, wildlife and bird refuges, and national monuments amounted to a wholesale reset.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of Roosevelt's hunting expeditions?
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.
Looking back on this nature faker controversy, labeled so by Roosevelt, from today's vantage, what seems apparent is that its practitioners were trying to take on the big implications of Darwinism in the world around them.
Theirs was a response, and it strongly appealed to the reading public, to the bleak nature-read-in-tooth-and-claw conclusions that Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Alfred Lord Tennyson drew from evolution. Instead of finding humans condemned because we'd turned out to be mere animals, nature writers like Seton looked for examples among birds and mammals of traits humans admired.
Compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and ability to reason and to transfer cultural learning across generations. and most of all, self-awareness and individuality. In one of Seton's stories in Scribner's in 1900, a captured female coyote named Tito sits chained in a ranch yard observing the techniques stockmen are using to wipe out the coyote kind.
When she escapes and has litters of her own, she passes on her knowledge about how to avoid traps and poison, which, in Seton's telling, was why coyotes were surviving when so many other creatures were not. In his famous wolf story, Lobo, King of Karumpaw, Seton wrote about a canny New Mexico wolf with one fatal flaw, his fidelity to his mate.
As he put the matter, in Wild Animals I Have Known, Satan's theme was, we and the beasts are kin.
Given the perspective of contemporary 21st century bird and mammal research, with its emphasis on self-awareness, tool use, theory of mind, perceptions of fairness, cultural transmission, grief over the loss of mates, and individuality, all those things these writers seem to be working with, all that seemed to be lacking in the best writings of the Seton-London-Muir genre were double-blind, replicable experiments.
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Chapter 6: How did Roosevelt's views on wildlife evolve during his lifetime?
This is February 19th, Safari Club International Convention in Nashville. We're going to do two things. From 9.30 to 10.30, we're going to do a meet and greet at the Robin Hertz Safari's booth. Our actual event's at 2 o'clock in the Omni Ballroom. After the event, I'll be happy to sign any books or take pictures, whatever's on your mind if you come on down.
To get tickets, you've got to go to the Safari Club International website and get a ticket to the convention. Once you do that, you're prompted to go get a ticket to our event. All the ticket price goes to SCI. It's a nonprofit conservation group. All ticket prices go to SCI. They don't go to me and Morgan. But we're going to be there. Guaranteed laughs. Come check it out. Can't wait to see you.
February 19th, Nashville Safari Club International Convention.
Dan, at the beginning of this episode, as I was reading through the script, one thing really struck me. And I think when I When all the real famous anecdotes about Teddy Roosevelt come to mind, he sort of has this boyish quality to him. Yeah. And as I'm reading this script... You realize just how young he was when he's doing a lot of this stuff.
Like when he goes to hunt the last buffalo, he's 25. Yeah, that's right. And you think about when he bursts into George Bird Grinnell's office to argue with him. He's still in his 20s. That's right. And that sort of behavior all of a sudden starts to make a little more sense. Obviously, he carried that with him.
But even the Boone and Crockett Club, he's less than 30 years old when he establishes that. And that really struck me in the first part of this episode was... how active he was from finishing at Harvard up until, you know, his early 30s.
Yeah, I mean, he becomes president when he's 42, and that's in 1901. So those scenes in the beginning of this particular episode happen in the 80s. And so it's like he, as you said, he's in his 20s. And so he's a very young man, and he's sort of got what almost certainly one would argue is a kind of a manic depressive state.
kind of personality, and fortunately for America and the world, he's in the manic stage for most of his life. I mean, he certainly has some moments of depression, but yeah, so he's a very young guy, and he's ambitious, and of course, he comes out of this kind of patrician
elite uh new york family that enables him to kind of view the world as his oyster he can do anything he wants to do he can be any kind of person he wants to be and what he decides he wants to be from a very early age is he wants to be a naturalist he wants to sort of be alexander von humboldt or or uh
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Chapter 7: What controversies surrounded Roosevelt's conservation efforts?
Yeah, that's a useful question to be sure to provide some context. I mean, what I did with the script for this particular episode was to couch progressivism for Roosevelt primarily in conservation. And I think that's the natural direction from which he comes to it. But progressivism was a kind of a bigger movement in American life in those years, a political movement. It was a
It was a movement that prevailed in both parties, both the Republican and the Democratic parties. I mean, Roosevelt was a Republican, but he was certainly strongly influenced by progressivism. And it was kind of an argument at the turn of the century that capitalism, particularly big corporate capitalismā
that was emerging in those days, was a pretty scary force in American life, and it needed to be corralled and reined in some, and the argument became in the conservation realm and in several other realms, too, that the federal government was the primary force
player in doing that although many of the states had strong progressive kind of um political developments as well but the idea was to insert the the government whether at the state level or the federal level into the economic life of the country uh in order to do thing like uh
regulating drugs that were sold in pharmacies and having the government begin to intervene in making sure that the food that was sold in grocery stores was healthy. And it extended to child labor laws and a variety of different things. What I try to do in this particular script
as I mentioned a minute ago, is to couch what Roosevelt's particular passion about progressivism is in the conservation movement that establishes very much the beginnings of the whole environmental movement in the United States. And this, of course, is 125 years ago that this happens. But much of what becomes the kind of framework of
conservation and environmental thinking in America comes out of this particular period. And it does involve, as Roosevelt said, a different role for the government than had been the case in American life up to this point.
So if you're a fan of kind of the anarchy of the wild, wild west, this is the point at which Americans, and particularly someone like Teddy Roosevelt, who thinks, as he says, a great civilization and a great
country needs to understand itself that you have to step in and say okay you know that level of freedom is great but we're going to have to regulate things and make sure that just kind of pure selfishness doesn't prevail to the detriment of the future especially and the other the other sort of intellectual thread that shapes roosevelt's worldview is as you point out that a darwinism
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Chapter 8: How does Roosevelt's legacy influence modern conservation movements?
But at some point in my thinking over the years, I began to sort of look at American presidents and say, okay, so among them, who are the ones who are sort of interested? And the kind of values that I'm interested in, in nature, in wilderness, in landscapes, in wild animals. And the two, of course, who immediately pop to the top of that list are Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt.
And since Roosevelt, it's difficult to really find him. another American president. I mean, for one thing, we don't have very many presidents coming from the West, where as a result of the lifestyle we get to have in the American West, it's probably more possible for someone to be interested in those kinds of subjects. But
Yeah, it's almost as if Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson are almost the only ones who have that kind of concern. And so that makes them kind of particular heroes of people who are interested in Western history.
Yeah, and last question here, which dovetails nicely with that answer. We do often think about Roosevelt as a hero hero. On the other hand, he's one of these figures, as you point out, the big controversy over his statue outside of the American Museum of Natural History. Yeah.
And he's one of those figures where I think he's obviously, you can read things that he's written and he espouses viewpoints and values. They're at odds with my own viewpoints and values. On the other hand, you can't help but acknowledge that the tremendous amount of good he did for wild places, wild animals and all that.
And so I don't know if there's necessarily a question there, but he's sort of like an uncle where you don't really agree with everything he says, but you don't dismiss him out of hand for what some might chalk up today as like these horrible things. racial views, things of that nature, especially when you lump them in with characters like Madison Grant. Yeah.
Yeah, and it was unfortunate that he blurbed Madison Grant's book, of course, which is a book that a lot of people regard as an unfortunate production from someone in the United States who shouldn't have been thinking in those terms. Mm-hmm.
But, you know, what I will say, and I said it in the script here, is that you, you know, as someone who's interested in historyāand I know, Randall, you know this, too, because we used to talk about it in graduate classesā You have to think about people in terms of the times they live in.
And, I mean, you can't look at someone like Teddy Roosevelt and say, okay, so this guy, he should be smart enough to understand the way we think in the 2020s. I mean, the truth is, a century from now, we have no idea what ā thoughts and expressions and values that we have that might be regarded as completely unsatisfactory to somebody living 100 years in the future.
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