Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was born into a prominent and affluent New York family. He came of age as a passionate naturalist, exploring, recording, and collecting elements of the natural world around him. While his love of nature shaped much of his early life, it was the Dakota Territory to which he fled in 1884 following the nearly simultaneous deaths of his mother and his first wife, Alice —that shaped him most decisively[CITE]. He fled there as a hunter and an aspirational rancher and left years later a conservationist, having witnessed firsthand the near-extinction of the bison. (As president, he would translate these convictions into policy on a staggering scale: approximately 230 million acres placed under public protection, five national parks, 18 national monuments, 51 federal bird reservations, and the establishment of the US Forest Service.) It was his time in the Dakotas that also solidified his philosophy of the “strenuous life,” meaning that a good life is not one of ease and comfort but of challenge, vigor, and struggle willingly embraced, and his reverence for frontier life, which he considered to be at the heart of the American character [CITE].

When he returned to the East Coast in 1887, he was a harder and more resolute man [CITE]. He married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow, in 1886, and went on to have five children with her. He returned to public service, having served as a New York State Assembly member from 1881 to 1884. He served as US Civil Service Commissioner, then went on to be President of the New York City Police Board, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York before joining the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, which became known as the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and became a national hero. It was this experience and the reputation he gained from it that made him William McKinley’s choice for vice president [CITE}. Following McKinley’s assassination in 1901, he became president, serving until 1909, when he chose not to run for another term.

[Quote about the Dakotas]

Roosevelt’s time in the Dakota Territory (1883-1887) was transformative. He went as a hunter, shooting his first bison… (Jenkinson 154), [transformation info] but came away with a deep attachment to the landscape and a growing alarm at the pace of its destruction—nowhere more viscerally than in his witness to the near-extinction of the American bison.

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Timeline

Roosevelt, The Naturalist

As a child, he was fascinated and fixated on the natural world, hunting for animal specimens to taxidermy, having taken taxonomy lessons at age twelve, and mounting some for public display and others to be objects of study as he sought to better understand the intricacies of the natural world (Lunde 8). He meticulously managed his specimens like a curator, tagging them with descriptive information and cataloging them for his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” (Lunde 8). Writing in his autobiography, Roosevelt explained:

The collections were at first kept in my room, until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs. It was the ordinary small boy’s collection of curios, quite incongruous and entirely valueless except from the standpoint of the boy himself. (Roosevelt, autobiography, 15) 

His obsession with nature took him to Harvard, where he formally studied science, work that forced him out of nature into a lab (Lunde 16). Disappointed and dissatisfied, he left his studies and eventually attended Columbia Law School, which he left after a year to begin a life of public service, much of it devoted to conservation efforts (Lunde 16).

Roosevelt’s form of naturalism was adventurous, visceral, reverent, and yet bloody.

To really understand Roosevelt the naturalist, we need to locate him in the naturalist world that he revered—a world that wholeheartedly embraced guns, hunting, and taxidermy as vitally important tools in the naturalist crafts”   -Darren Lunde, in the chapter, “Beauty and Tragedy in the Wilderness: The naturalism of Theodore Roosevelt” (Lunde, 22)

List of shot game

[Movie of him in Louisiana]

[Sportsman-naturalist/Sportsman culture]

Roosevelt, The Conservationist

Conception of conservation… against market hunting, okay with “controlled hunting.”

Bibliography

The objects of the Club shall be: https://archive.org/details/americanbiggameh00roosev/page/6/mode/2up

  1. To promote manly sport with the rifle.
  2. To promote travel and exploration in the wild and unknown, or but partially known, portions of the country.
  3. To work for the preservation of the large game of this country, and, so far as possible, to further legislation for that purpose, and to assist in enforcing the existing laws.
  4. To promote inquiry into and to record observations on the habits and natural history of the various wild animals.
  5. To bring about among the members the interchange of opinions and ideas on hunting, travel, exploration, on the various kinds of hunting-rifles, on the haunts of game animals, etc.

[Kipling & Roosevelt link]

Veracious reader – The Boy Hunters by Captain Mayne Reid (RB 5)

SEE Document

  • Went west before it before it was “tamed”- wanted to shoot a bison, though heavily depleted because it was a symbol of the “old West” (RB 17)
  • Dakota Territory ranch 
  • friends with Jackson Turner (RB 143)