WEBVTT - Ep. 21: How You Create a New West, and a New America 0:00:01.480 --> 0:00:05.760 Along with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt was the American president 0:00:05.880 --> 0:00:10.200 most fascinated with nature and with the American West, and 0:00:10.360 --> 0:00:16.040 like Jefferson, Roosevelt transformed the region he loved. I'm dan Flores, 0:00:16.400 --> 0:00:20.120 and this is the American West, brought to you by 0:00:20.239 --> 0:00:23.959 Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A 0:00:24.040 --> 0:00:28.080 portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. 0:00:28.440 --> 0:00:50.200 Limited supply available at Velvetbuckvineyards dot com. Enjoy responsible how 0:00:50.280 --> 0:01:00.240 you create a new West and a new America. He 0:01:00.280 --> 0:01:03.680 was a former President of the United States and might 0:01:03.720 --> 0:01:08.039 hold that office again. He was also an internationally known 0:01:08.120 --> 0:01:12.560 sportsman and advocate of adventurous living whose demise would have 0:01:12.640 --> 0:01:18.800 caused shockwaves. But descending the unexplored Rio da Duvida the 0:01:18.959 --> 0:01:23.760 River of Doubt in early nineteen fourteen, Teddy Roosevelt was 0:01:23.920 --> 0:01:27.560 injured and ill, and had watched his Great South American 0:01:27.640 --> 0:01:33.760 adventure with legendary explorer Candido Rondon almost disintegrate in the 0:01:33.800 --> 0:01:37.920 Brazilian jungle. No novelists could have written the scene better 0:01:38.000 --> 0:01:41.320 for him. We've reached a point where some of us 0:01:41.440 --> 0:01:45.319 must stop, he told his son Kermit. I feel I 0:01:45.360 --> 0:01:49.760 am only a burden to the party. It was classic 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:54.480 Theodore Roosevelt, a romantic hero who, despite his fame, was 0:01:54.560 --> 0:01:58.800 willing to sacrifice himself for his companions. The Party had 0:01:58.840 --> 0:02:01.320 none of it, of course, but the incident is a 0:02:01.360 --> 0:02:04.760 window on the characteristics that led Theodore Roosevelt to the 0:02:04.840 --> 0:02:10.919 life of accomplishment and adventure. He created. Few things Teddy 0:02:11.000 --> 0:02:15.040 Roosevelt ever did, were easy. Maybe that is why he 0:02:15.200 --> 0:02:19.840 gloried so and challenge. By sheer force of will, he 0:02:19.960 --> 0:02:24.400 turned himself from a weak, sickly adolescent into a hearty 0:02:24.480 --> 0:02:29.519 and robust Harvard undergraduate who boxed and hunted, and eventually 0:02:29.600 --> 0:02:35.040 into a lifelong advocate of what he called the strenuous life. 0:02:35.080 --> 0:02:39.239 That same determination marked his administrations as President of the 0:02:39.360 --> 0:02:44.480 United States, enabling him to enact major progressive social policies, 0:02:44.919 --> 0:02:49.520 central to which was the first comprehensive environmental program in 0:02:49.560 --> 0:02:55.040 American history. Roosevelt's ideal image of an American was someone 0:02:55.080 --> 0:02:58.960 who knew the natural world, which was why conservation of 0:02:58.960 --> 0:03:03.919 an endangered nation was central to his accomplishments. As with 0:03:04.040 --> 0:03:08.280 Thomas Jefferson, whose goals for the West enabled Americans to 0:03:08.400 --> 0:03:12.120 grasp its outlines, we shouldn't be surprised to discover a 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:16.560 similar fascination with nature in the president who laid down 0:03:16.720 --> 0:03:22.919 America's and the West's environmental foundation. But in contrast to Jefferson, 0:03:23.200 --> 0:03:27.240 who sat on his mountain in Virginia and imagined the West, 0:03:27.800 --> 0:03:34.000 Roosevelt experienced the West and the world firsthand. Roosevelt was 0:03:34.120 --> 0:03:38.160 from one of the Eastern families of patrician elites so 0:03:38.440 --> 0:03:42.400 visible in the history of the West. His birth in 0:03:42.520 --> 0:03:46.080 eighteen fifty eight almost made him a Civil War baby, 0:03:46.640 --> 0:03:49.920 but as his mother was a Southerner, the Civil War 0:03:50.200 --> 0:03:57.000 and reconstruction were always forbidden topics. Nature, wild animals, and 0:03:57.040 --> 0:03:59.720 the West, on the other hand, were the focus of 0:03:59.800 --> 0:04:03.840 law long discussions between Roosevelt's father, who was an early 0:04:03.920 --> 0:04:07.440 disciple of Darwin and a founder of the American Museum 0:04:07.480 --> 0:04:11.080 of Natural History, and an uncle who was a nationalist. 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:15.680 When he was only ten, Roosevelt's family toured Europe, and 0:04:15.720 --> 0:04:19.440 despite young Teddy's frequent attacks of asthma, he and his 0:04:19.480 --> 0:04:23.919 father climbed Mount Vesuvius. Three years later, they were on 0:04:24.000 --> 0:04:27.440 a boat descending the Nile in Egypt, where, with a 0:04:27.480 --> 0:04:31.400 new shotgun, Teddy shot and collected more than one hundred 0:04:31.440 --> 0:04:36.039 birds for his own museum, as he called it. In 0:04:36.080 --> 0:04:39.200 a situation of many options, Teddy did not surprise his 0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:42.400 family when he announced that he wanted to train as 0:04:42.440 --> 0:04:46.599 a naturalist. Like a significant number though not all of 0:04:46.760 --> 0:04:51.359 nature obsessed Americans, Audubon was one, so were George Bird 0:04:51.400 --> 0:04:56.159 Grennell and Aldo Leopold Teddy. Roosevelt and his interest in 0:04:56.279 --> 0:05:00.880 nature began in a boyhood of observing, pursu pursuing, and 0:05:01.040 --> 0:05:06.840 hunting wild animals in wild country. His yearning to make 0:05:06.920 --> 0:05:11.440 natural history a profession was officially abandoned at Harvard. Though 0:05:12.200 --> 0:05:15.560 Teddy wanted a natural history career after the fashion of 0:05:15.600 --> 0:05:20.200 the great naturalists like Alexander von Humboldt or John James Ottoman, 0:05:20.880 --> 0:05:24.240 he wanted to explore exotic locales and hunt and collect 0:05:24.240 --> 0:05:28.600 new species. By his time at Harvard, natural history had 0:05:28.640 --> 0:05:34.240 become a Darwinian exercise of laboratory work. Teddy and a 0:05:34.279 --> 0:05:38.880 fellow ornithology enthusiast, instead worked on and published The Summer 0:05:38.960 --> 0:05:43.320 Birds of the Adirondacks, and by his junior year, Roosevelt 0:05:43.320 --> 0:05:47.840 had decided that the professional natural sciences was not going 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:52.320 to be his career. Long interested in history, and in 0:05:52.360 --> 0:05:55.480 writing interest that turned out to be a way to 0:05:55.640 --> 0:05:59.719 explore and hunt and collect in the imagination. With a 0:05:59.760 --> 0:06:03.120 heart over degree in hand, Roosevelt turned to a book 0:06:03.160 --> 0:06:07.560 project about how the American frontier had advanced from the 0:06:07.680 --> 0:06:11.960 Eastern seaboard westward. Although much of his story was set 0:06:12.160 --> 0:06:15.400 east of the Mississippi, with men like Daniel Boone and 0:06:15.600 --> 0:06:20.560 Davy Crockett as its heroes. Roosevelt called the book The 0:06:20.600 --> 0:06:25.240 Winning of the West. By this time in his life, 0:06:25.320 --> 0:06:28.880 Roosevelt had made a series of trips to outback Maine, 0:06:29.240 --> 0:06:32.360 and in eighteen eighty he and his younger brother Elliott 0:06:32.760 --> 0:06:36.400 journeyed to Iowa and Minnesota, where, as was common at 0:06:36.440 --> 0:06:40.120 the time, they killed more than four hundred birds and animals, 0:06:40.360 --> 0:06:44.320 yet were disappointed with their take. To this point in 0:06:44.360 --> 0:06:48.200 his life, Roosevelt had not yet been to the actual West, 0:06:48.720 --> 0:06:52.200 where in his imagination it was still possible to experience 0:06:52.240 --> 0:06:56.320 the world of the frontier hunters he was writing about. 0:06:56.480 --> 0:07:00.640 But in September eighteen eighty three, after running his first 0:07:00.680 --> 0:07:04.560 political campaign and getting elected as an assemblyman to the 0:07:04.600 --> 0:07:08.600 New York Legislature, he finally boarded a train with connections 0:07:08.720 --> 0:07:15.040 to the real West to Roosevelt. Cultured men looked to Europe, 0:07:15.400 --> 0:07:18.800 but manly men looked to the West for their inspiration. 0:07:19.520 --> 0:07:23.320 So his destination was as far in the Dakota territory 0:07:23.600 --> 0:07:27.240 as trains would take him, and his mission was specific. 0:07:27.760 --> 0:07:31.920 Roosevelt wanted to engage in that most western of acts, 0:07:32.400 --> 0:07:36.320 shooting a buffalo, before such a thing was no longer possible. 0:07:37.200 --> 0:07:40.720 His younger brother, by then was hunting tigers in India 0:07:41.040 --> 0:07:44.920 and had faced a stampeding buffalo herd in West Texas. 0:07:45.800 --> 0:07:49.360 Everyone knew buffalo were almost gone by then, but there 0:07:49.360 --> 0:07:51.920 were a few, and a buffalo had on the wall 0:07:51.920 --> 0:07:57.200 of your study would convey where your sympathies lay. Until 0:07:57.200 --> 0:08:01.240 the late eighteen eighties, however, Roosevelt else seems not to 0:08:01.280 --> 0:08:06.200 effaced the issue of declining animal populations with much awareness. 0:08:07.120 --> 0:08:10.400 His soon to be friend in the conservation field, journalist 0:08:10.520 --> 0:08:14.920 George Bird Grenelle, was already developing a much more progressive 0:08:15.000 --> 0:08:20.120 credo Roosevelt's, and hints the country's ideas about the natural 0:08:20.160 --> 0:08:23.760 world we'd inherited were about to be shaped into a 0:08:23.880 --> 0:08:31.080 modern form. By this Western experience, buffalo had become the 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:34.800 mammalian representative of America for all the world in the 0:08:34.880 --> 0:08:38.160 nineteenth century, but their story had now taken a much 0:08:38.320 --> 0:08:42.360 darker tone. Everyone knew that American market hunters were killing 0:08:42.400 --> 0:08:46.160 buffalo by the thousands on a daily basis. The Last 0:08:46.240 --> 0:08:49.559 of the Buffalo became a phrase that defined the eighteen 0:08:49.600 --> 0:08:53.680 eighties the way the Roaring Twenties would define a decade 0:08:53.720 --> 0:08:57.600 forty years later. It was the decade when William Hornaday 0:08:57.640 --> 0:09:01.920 collected bison specimens for the Nash Museum's diorama, in the 0:09:01.960 --> 0:09:04.960 belief that this might be the only way future Americans 0:09:05.000 --> 0:09:09.080 would get to see buffalo. The painter Albert Berstott finished 0:09:09.120 --> 0:09:13.440 his grand oil The Last of the Buffalo in eighteen ninety. 0:09:13.760 --> 0:09:17.600 The same year, a band of Lakota's was massacred by 0:09:17.640 --> 0:09:21.760 the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Need for performing a dance 0:09:21.840 --> 0:09:26.240 to return Buffalo to the West. Grinnell also chose The 0:09:26.400 --> 0:09:29.720 Last of the Buffalo as the title for his widely 0:09:29.800 --> 0:09:34.080 read book From Scribners and Sons. The demise of America's 0:09:34.120 --> 0:09:38.199 most iconic animal was in the air, and many wondered 0:09:38.200 --> 0:09:43.520 what that meant. In eighteen eighty three, though for Roosevelt, 0:09:43.559 --> 0:09:49.160 a buffalo trophy represented America's ultimate prize. Stepping off the 0:09:49.200 --> 0:09:53.680 train in North Dakota, he hired a guide named Joe Ferris, who, 0:09:53.720 --> 0:09:58.120 in perfect symmetry for that decade, was from eastern Canada 0:09:58.480 --> 0:10:01.200 and had himself only been on the scene in the 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:05.120 West for a year. They made the Maltese Cross Ranch 0:10:05.240 --> 0:10:08.640 their headquarters and set out on horseback on what turned 0:10:08.679 --> 0:10:14.319 into a fifteen day quest. The days of Audubon describing 0:10:14.360 --> 0:10:17.520 the sound of the vast herds in this same country 0:10:17.840 --> 0:10:23.840 as resembling continuous rolling thunder were now gone forever. That 0:10:23.960 --> 0:10:27.160 year of Roosevelt's hunt, the Fort Benton shipper I. G. 0:10:27.360 --> 0:10:31.360 Baker sent a grand total of five thousand buffalo hides 0:10:31.640 --> 0:10:35.760 down the Missouri River. The next year he shipped none 0:10:35.920 --> 0:10:40.679 at all. The bison story was already exemplifying that in 0:10:40.720 --> 0:10:44.520 the scope of world history, the United States had engaged 0:10:44.559 --> 0:10:47.560 in a more complete destruction of wild animals and a 0:10:47.600 --> 0:10:51.640 wider diversity of them than any modern country in existence. 0:10:53.120 --> 0:10:57.320 Roosevelt's bison hunt was a revelation to him. Initially, he 0:10:57.400 --> 0:11:01.160 wrote his wife Alice, that buffalo are too rare for 0:11:01.200 --> 0:11:04.200 me to hope to get one. Over the course of 0:11:04.280 --> 0:11:08.400 two weeks of horseback travel that took them into Montana territory. 0:11:08.559 --> 0:11:13.160 They found a handful. Roosevelt wounded one bison he never found, 0:11:13.400 --> 0:11:17.600 and missed shots at another pair before finally downing an 0:11:17.720 --> 0:11:23.280 unsuspecting bull barely fifty yards distant, a handsome animal whose 0:11:23.480 --> 0:11:27.120 glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:31.360 the rays of the sun. He said, the celebration became 0:11:31.400 --> 0:11:35.319 the stuff of Western romance. Teddy did a freestyle Indian 0:11:35.440 --> 0:11:38.800 dance and paid Ferris one hundred dollars on the spot, 0:11:39.880 --> 0:11:43.360 hooked on the curious, fantastic beauty of the bad lands, 0:11:43.720 --> 0:11:46.920 before he departed, he bought an interest in his first 0:11:47.000 --> 0:11:50.920 ranch there, the Maltese Cross. On a return trip the 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:54.559 next year, eighteen eighty four, he bought a second property, 0:11:54.840 --> 0:11:59.320 he called the Elkhorn, along the Little Missouri, the nearest 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:05.080 neighbor twelve miles away. These Western experiences were pivotal in 0:12:05.160 --> 0:12:09.000 Roosevelt's life. They gave him a base of operations in 0:12:09.040 --> 0:12:12.640 the West and put him in contact with individuals whose 0:12:12.760 --> 0:12:17.240 characters stood naked in that setting. He later commented that 0:12:17.360 --> 0:12:21.000 he learned how to evaluate people in those years, an 0:12:21.080 --> 0:12:25.280 affirmation of his evolving belief and strength directness and the 0:12:25.320 --> 0:12:30.120 will to make things happen. He also learned much more 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:35.040 now about the Western animals he had read about from Elkhorn. 0:12:35.200 --> 0:12:38.760 He hunted deer and pronghorns, and farther west in the 0:12:38.760 --> 0:12:42.480 Big Horns and the Bitter Roots, grizzlies, elk and moose. 0:12:43.240 --> 0:12:46.600 He hunted mountain goats in the Curdelanes, and caribou in 0:12:46.640 --> 0:12:50.640 the Selkirk Range. Working on the grand history that became 0:12:50.720 --> 0:12:54.120 the Winning of the West, Roosevelt concluded that this kind 0:12:54.120 --> 0:12:57.960 of life, a life roaming the wilderness and hunting, was 0:12:58.040 --> 0:13:02.280 the very path that had allowed Europeans to become Americans. 0:13:03.000 --> 0:13:07.319 Living it, he felt, as he put it, absolutely free 0:13:07.440 --> 0:13:12.000 as a man could feel. But experiencing the West of 0:13:12.040 --> 0:13:17.640 the eighteen eighties was accompanied by a sadder realization. In 0:13:17.679 --> 0:13:21.880 a violation of his Western fantasies, Roosevelt was discovering that, 0:13:21.920 --> 0:13:26.679 in fact, there is not much game. Buffalo were gone, 0:13:27.000 --> 0:13:30.360 elk and deer, and grizzlies weren't far behind. When it 0:13:30.480 --> 0:13:33.520 shot his buffalo, he knew full well that it was, 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:36.680 as he put it, part of the last remnant of 0:13:36.760 --> 0:13:40.840 a doomed and nearly vanished race. Yet he had still 0:13:41.000 --> 0:13:44.200 shot his bull. That had to have been on his 0:13:44.360 --> 0:13:47.760 mind when he began to realize that, in fact, everything 0:13:47.840 --> 0:13:52.200 seemed to be disappearing. This onslaught on Western nature was 0:13:52.240 --> 0:13:56.320 being delivered by what Roosevelt now referred to as skin 0:13:56.520 --> 0:14:01.240 hunters and greasy nimrods, all of them products of greed 0:14:01.400 --> 0:14:07.120 and self interest. The wild, wild West afforded remarkable freedom 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:12.360 that was evident, but frontier anarchy without restraint was devouring 0:14:12.400 --> 0:14:16.720 the world with no regard whatsoever, either for its perpetuation 0:14:17.200 --> 0:14:23.440 or for future generations. This was unexpected and depressing, so 0:14:23.760 --> 0:14:28.640 was losing both his wife and his mother almost simultaneously 0:14:28.720 --> 0:14:33.720 that decade, which set him into an emotional spiral, calling 0:14:33.760 --> 0:14:37.280 on the sunshine and champagne air of the West. To 0:14:37.360 --> 0:14:41.040 help overcome these tragedies. Roosevelt turned to writing articles for 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:44.280 a magazine called Outing, and working on a book he 0:14:44.320 --> 0:14:47.880 would title Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, which appeared in 0:14:47.960 --> 0:14:51.720 print in eighteen eighty five. By the time the Winner 0:14:51.760 --> 0:14:55.720 of eighteen eighty six eighty seven ruined his ranching operation, 0:14:56.200 --> 0:14:59.440 he had enough material for another pair of hunting books, 0:15:00.280 --> 0:15:03.720 Life and the Hunting Trail in eighteen eighty eight and 0:15:03.800 --> 0:15:08.440 The Wilderness Hunter in eighteen ninety three. These were the 0:15:08.440 --> 0:15:11.880 books that established Roosevelt's reputation as someone who knew the 0:15:11.920 --> 0:15:16.120 West and understood what was happening to it. They also 0:15:16.200 --> 0:15:18.960 brought him into contact with people who were about to 0:15:19.000 --> 0:15:23.520 push him much farther along the road to environmental thinking. 0:15:25.120 --> 0:15:30.280 Roosevelt met Grennell, editor of a famous conservation themed magazine 0:15:30.320 --> 0:15:35.840 called Forest and Stream, following Grennell's quite critical review of 0:15:35.960 --> 0:15:40.560 hunting Trips of a Ranchman, bursting into Grenell's office demanding 0:15:40.560 --> 0:15:44.200 to know why the journalists had been underwhelmed, Roosevelt ended 0:15:44.280 --> 0:15:47.920 up impressed with his fellow ivy leaguer's knowledge of the 0:15:48.000 --> 0:15:52.280 state of the West and its fast declining wildlife. With 0:15:52.440 --> 0:15:55.920 Grennell's coaching and friendship over the next fifteen years of 0:15:55.920 --> 0:16:00.880 his career, Roosevelt launched the intellectual journey that was ultimately 0:16:00.960 --> 0:16:05.240 transform America and bring it into the twentieth century. Their 0:16:05.400 --> 0:16:09.760 organization of elite hunters, the Boone and Crocket Club, along 0:16:09.800 --> 0:16:14.880 with Grennell's automn Society, provided platforms that translated their Western 0:16:14.960 --> 0:16:22.280 experiences into a rethinking about freedom and nature. The particular 0:16:22.480 --> 0:16:27.160 epiphany that became the foundation for this rethinking wasn't an 0:16:27.200 --> 0:16:31.200 easy one, but for those who loved American nature, the 0:16:31.360 --> 0:16:36.280 evidence for it was everywhere. Pure self interests of the 0:16:36.400 --> 0:16:40.440 Adam Smith sort, which had driven capitalism for most of 0:16:40.480 --> 0:16:44.680 American history, was growing close to leaving nothing for the future. 0:16:45.800 --> 0:16:49.320 Largely through witnessing the loss of the wild animals he loved, 0:16:49.600 --> 0:16:53.920 Roosevelt was coming to an undergirding principle for the political 0:16:54.000 --> 0:17:01.040 revolution known as progressivism. Capitalism's excesses, it turned out, we're 0:17:01.080 --> 0:17:05.040 going to have to be curbed and regulated, and the 0:17:05.200 --> 0:17:09.560 lesson then being offered by railroad and oil company domination 0:17:09.720 --> 0:17:14.000 of state governments meant to Roosevelt and progressives that the 0:17:14.080 --> 0:17:18.800 only entity truly powerful enough to regulate capitalism was the 0:17:18.840 --> 0:17:22.840 federal government. In search of a word that might symbolize 0:17:22.840 --> 0:17:27.080 what he had in mind, Roosevelt borrowed the term conservation 0:17:27.480 --> 0:17:32.720 from British governance of India. To conserve something meant to 0:17:32.920 --> 0:17:38.800 save it, to ensure its perpetuation. As an American, Roosevelt 0:17:38.840 --> 0:17:43.960 saw conservation in democratic terms. He would develop programs wherein 0:17:44.000 --> 0:17:47.840 the federal government would conserve American nature for what he 0:17:47.960 --> 0:17:52.119 called the greatest good, for the greatest number, and for 0:17:52.200 --> 0:17:56.080 the longest period of time a great country and a 0:17:56.119 --> 0:18:02.520 great civilization, Roosevelt believed needed to understand Danned itself. The 0:18:02.560 --> 0:18:06.600 first step involved taking some sort of action to curb 0:18:06.680 --> 0:18:09.960 the market hunt for wildlife that for three centuries had 0:18:10.000 --> 0:18:15.160 systematically destroyed everything from deer, turkey, great auks, passenger pigeons, 0:18:15.200 --> 0:18:18.679 and plume birds like snowy egrets in the East, to 0:18:18.800 --> 0:18:24.680 a near obliteration of Western wildlife, most shamefully America's iconic animal, 0:18:24.720 --> 0:18:28.879 the bison. Until nineteen hundred, the US federal government had 0:18:28.920 --> 0:18:33.000 stood by and allowed unregulated capitalism to have its way 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:37.040 with wildlife. But in that year an Iowa congressman named 0:18:37.119 --> 0:18:41.640 John Lacy stepped forward with a plan to engage Washington 0:18:42.000 --> 0:18:47.679 in halting these abominations. Lacey acquired his status with the 0:18:47.760 --> 0:18:52.600 new wildlife activists following a series of celebrated incidents in 0:18:52.720 --> 0:18:57.879 Yellowstone Park in the early eighteen nineties. US Army game 0:18:57.960 --> 0:19:02.400 warden Ed Wilson had tested a notorious park poacher, whom 0:19:02.480 --> 0:19:06.480 a local judge promptly released, citing a lack of any 0:19:06.640 --> 0:19:10.840 law to prosecute him. A few weeks later, Wilson vanished 0:19:10.840 --> 0:19:15.919 without a trace. Other wardens found Wilson's hidden remains. A 0:19:16.000 --> 0:19:20.440 year later, that story brought a forest and Stream reporter 0:19:20.560 --> 0:19:24.560 to Yellowstone, who soon elicited from another poacher that his 0:19:24.760 --> 0:19:29.440 own arrest and release had involved the massacre of eighty buffalo, 0:19:30.000 --> 0:19:33.480 most of the bison still left in the park at 0:19:33.480 --> 0:19:37.239 that point, Lacey introduced and secured passage in Congress of 0:19:37.280 --> 0:19:42.160 the eighteen ninety four Yellowstone Park Protection Act with one 0:19:42.160 --> 0:19:47.800 thousand dollars fines for killing wildlife. Six years later, Lacey 0:19:47.880 --> 0:19:51.000 decided to take on the biggest monster of them all, 0:19:51.480 --> 0:19:55.440 a practice that since colonial days, could have made fair progress, 0:19:55.520 --> 0:19:58.480 filling the Grand Canyon with the bodies of all the 0:19:58.560 --> 0:20:04.000 American birds and animals killed for money. White haired, bearded slender. 0:20:04.520 --> 0:20:08.239 Lacey was about to turn sixty in history and in 0:20:08.280 --> 0:20:12.680 his career. The time had come calling on the federal 0:20:12.720 --> 0:20:18.119 government's constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. Lacey drew up 0:20:18.160 --> 0:20:22.600 an act he called the wild Birds and Game Preservation 0:20:22.720 --> 0:20:26.600 Act that at last landed a body blow on the 0:20:26.640 --> 0:20:31.920 wild animal's economy. At long last, a federal law stopped 0:20:31.960 --> 0:20:35.679 the shipping of slain birds, animals, and their body parts 0:20:35.880 --> 0:20:39.639 from states where market hunting was still legal to states 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:44.280 where it wasn't. It was already too late for passenger 0:20:44.320 --> 0:20:48.399 pigeons and wild bison. It verged on too late for 0:20:48.560 --> 0:20:53.359 snowy egrets, Carolina parakeets, and a lengthening list of others. 0:20:54.240 --> 0:20:57.640 But the Lacy Act finally put a long hesitant US 0:20:57.720 --> 0:21:02.359 federal government in play. His speech describing the bill before Congress, 0:21:02.680 --> 0:21:06.879 Lacey referenced both passenger pigeons and bison, but he proclaimed 0:21:07.000 --> 0:21:11.160 that all was not lost, that there still remains much 0:21:11.240 --> 0:21:15.000 to preserve. As he put it in truth, the Laciact 0:21:15.000 --> 0:21:19.120 put the burden for enlightened laws on the states. Following 0:21:19.119 --> 0:21:22.720 a Supreme Court case that ruled that wildlife was the 0:21:22.760 --> 0:21:27.440 property of the states where the animals resided. States now 0:21:27.520 --> 0:21:32.359 began creating what they called game departments and enacting policies 0:21:32.400 --> 0:21:35.960 on behalf of at least some of their wild animals. 0:21:36.600 --> 0:21:39.760 For guidance in that endeavor, they looked to the New 0:21:40.160 --> 0:21:45.560 US Biological Survey, headed up by another Ivy leaguer, C. 0:21:46.040 --> 0:21:55.159 Heart Miriam. In nineteen oh one, when an assassin's bullet 0:21:55.200 --> 0:21:59.399 cut down President William McKinley early in his second term, 0:21:59.640 --> 0:22:03.760 his vice president was a forty two year old former 0:22:03.880 --> 0:22:08.480 New York congressman and city mayor who Republican Party operatives 0:22:08.520 --> 0:22:14.200 referred to as that damned cowboy. Teddy Roosevelt, the youngest 0:22:14.240 --> 0:22:18.080 man ever to serve as president, with a prodigious, manic, 0:22:18.119 --> 0:22:23.639 depressive personality, had the chance to transform America fall into 0:22:23.720 --> 0:22:27.760 his lap. Here was a stunning opportunity to take on 0:22:27.800 --> 0:22:32.800 the issues that had dominated his life since childhood. If celebrated, 0:22:32.800 --> 0:22:36.159 individual freedom was the very cause of the destruction of 0:22:36.160 --> 0:22:41.000 America's animals, not to mention its forest, its grasslands, its fisheries, 0:22:41.080 --> 0:22:46.040 its archaeological sites. Then expanding government power to regulate such 0:22:46.080 --> 0:22:49.880 freedom was the only course that could preserve the country. 0:22:51.040 --> 0:22:56.200 What he and his policymakers called conservation became his personal 0:22:56.320 --> 0:23:01.240 campaign to save the animals and landscapes he believed had 0:23:01.320 --> 0:23:07.640 created Homo Americanus in the first place. The whole standpoint 0:23:07.720 --> 0:23:11.400 of the people toward the proper aim of government, Roosevelt 0:23:11.400 --> 0:23:15.920 would write, were brought out first by this conservation work. 0:23:16.800 --> 0:23:19.800 The proper aim of government, he was now convinced, was 0:23:19.880 --> 0:23:24.879 to moderate the selfishness and thoughtlessness inherent in human nature. 0:23:26.880 --> 0:23:30.679 What conservation and progressivism would do was set America on 0:23:30.760 --> 0:23:34.600 a different path a sharp detour from the three century 0:23:34.640 --> 0:23:37.560 attempt to make the US a clone of the countries 0:23:37.560 --> 0:23:40.760 of Western Europe. The idea was to create a nation 0:23:40.880 --> 0:23:45.880 that stood separate and new. Nothing in Roosevelt's programs said that, 0:23:46.119 --> 0:23:51.000 quite like his enthusiastic endorsement once he became president of 0:23:51.080 --> 0:23:56.800 the existing public land system, Roosevelt's massive additions to this 0:23:57.000 --> 0:24:01.800 distinctly American form of land ownership and public access, in 0:24:01.880 --> 0:24:06.000 the form of new national parks, national forests, wildlife and 0:24:06.080 --> 0:24:11.200 bird refuges, and national monuments amounted to a wholesale reset. 0:24:12.080 --> 0:24:14.200 I'll have more to say in the next episode about 0:24:14.240 --> 0:24:17.600 the origins and direction of America's public lands. One of 0:24:17.680 --> 0:24:21.280 our very best contributions to world ideas and policy. But 0:24:21.359 --> 0:24:25.080 it was Teddy Roosevelt who took that embryonic system and 0:24:25.200 --> 0:24:30.159 made it a badge of American uniqueness. Histories of the 0:24:30.240 --> 0:24:34.960 presidency tend to label Roosevelt's conservation programs as one of 0:24:34.960 --> 0:24:39.720 the nation's grand transformative policy triumphs, and that claim is 0:24:39.760 --> 0:24:47.200 no exaggeration. Conservation's successes were breathtaking. To begin, Roosevelt oversaw 0:24:47.240 --> 0:24:51.480 the creation of six new national parks, a form of 0:24:51.560 --> 0:24:57.480 preserved wildlands America had invented with Yellowstone and Yosemite three 0:24:57.560 --> 0:25:03.280 decades earlier, with Pelican Island in Florida, which he designated 0:25:03.320 --> 0:25:06.960 by executive order in nineteen o three as a reserve 0:25:07.040 --> 0:25:10.439 and breeding ground for native birds, and continuing with a 0:25:10.480 --> 0:25:15.040 pair of National Bison Ranges in Oklahoma and Montana to 0:25:15.200 --> 0:25:19.840 rescue our iconic mammal. Then on through his Lame Duck period, 0:25:19.960 --> 0:25:23.600 when new bird reservations, a total of fifty one of them, 0:25:23.800 --> 0:25:27.480 seemed to precipitate like rain from the heavens, Roosevelt created 0:25:27.520 --> 0:25:32.280 a national wildlife refuge system that preserved millions of acres 0:25:32.320 --> 0:25:37.040 of prize bird and mammal habitat. The forest reserves that 0:25:37.119 --> 0:25:40.440 he and Grenell celebrated in the eighteen nineties were at 0:25:40.600 --> 0:25:45.719 forty two million acres when Roosevelt assumed the presidency. Renamed 0:25:46.000 --> 0:25:51.160 National Forests by Roosevelt's Chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, they swelled 0:25:51.280 --> 0:25:56.120 to one hundred and seventy two million acres, including Tongas 0:25:56.560 --> 0:26:00.480 a seventeen million acre monster in Alaska by the time 0:26:00.560 --> 0:26:05.640 Roosevelt left office. Using the New Antiquities Act of nineteen 0:26:05.640 --> 0:26:10.040 oh six to protect America's archaeological sites, and to set 0:26:10.040 --> 0:26:15.240 aside landscapes of unique geological importance. He proclaimed another extensive 0:26:15.320 --> 0:26:18.760 body of preserves from the public lands in the form 0:26:18.920 --> 0:26:25.639 of eighteen National monuments, a new conservation category. Devil's Tower 0:26:25.720 --> 0:26:29.920 in Wyoming, one of many scores of nature spots Christian 0:26:29.960 --> 0:26:34.760 Americans had assigned a Satanic association, became the first of these, 0:26:35.240 --> 0:26:38.480 but the Grand Canyon itself was another of those early 0:26:38.560 --> 0:26:44.600 national monuments. In just eight years, Roosevelt removed more than 0:26:44.720 --> 0:26:48.720 two hundred and thirty million acres of General Land Office 0:26:48.760 --> 0:26:53.760 holdings from private entry, retaining them in public ownership, setting 0:26:53.760 --> 0:26:57.879 aside more public lands than any other president, and transforming 0:26:57.920 --> 0:27:01.720 the future of the country in the process. Us Providing 0:27:01.760 --> 0:27:05.160 refuges for America's big mammals and birds was a primary 0:27:05.200 --> 0:27:10.680 reason he did almost all of it. Douglas Brinkley's Wilderness Warrior, 0:27:11.119 --> 0:27:15.280 probably the best recent biography of him, lays that triumphant 0:27:15.359 --> 0:27:22.200 story out in point by point detail. But Roosevelt was human, and, 0:27:22.480 --> 0:27:26.439 as are we all, a product of his time and place. 0:27:27.480 --> 0:27:31.199 While he could explain the tragedy of wildlife loss with 0:27:31.400 --> 0:27:36.000 lovely analogies, the destruction of the wild pigeon and the 0:27:36.000 --> 0:27:40.400 Carolina parakeet has meant a loss as severe as if 0:27:40.440 --> 0:27:44.520 the catskills or the palisades were taken away. He wrote, 0:27:44.960 --> 0:27:45.800 when I hear of. 0:27:45.760 --> 0:27:49.080 The destruction of a species, I feel just as if 0:27:49.240 --> 0:27:53.800 all the works of some great writer had perished. But 0:27:53.920 --> 0:27:58.960 despite that, he resisted drawing the conclusions from Darwin that 0:27:59.040 --> 0:28:04.359 many disciples thought the great naturalists intended. Roosevelt had grown 0:28:04.440 --> 0:28:07.560 up verse in Darwin read Darwin himself when he was 0:28:07.600 --> 0:28:11.080 a young teenager floating the Nile, believed from that point 0:28:11.119 --> 0:28:14.960 onward that humans were indeed primates that had evolved from 0:28:15.040 --> 0:28:20.480 earlier forms. Nonetheless, the animals he hunted did not, perhaps 0:28:20.600 --> 0:28:26.400 for him, simply could not become evolutionary near ken of humans. 0:28:27.640 --> 0:28:32.600 While Roosevelt was president, his writer friend John Burrows precipitated 0:28:32.600 --> 0:28:37.520 a public controversy about the accuracy of a popular new genre, 0:28:38.000 --> 0:28:41.840 a form of literary natural history that attempted to provide 0:28:42.160 --> 0:28:46.360 insight into the lives of wild animals. Most of the 0:28:46.400 --> 0:28:50.400 new authors of animal stories were not scientists, but many 0:28:50.480 --> 0:28:54.880 of them, notably John Mure, Jack London, and Canadian writer 0:28:55.080 --> 0:29:03.000 Ernest Thompson Seaton, had extensive outdoor experience and employed scientific methodology. Setan, 0:29:03.160 --> 0:29:08.120 ironically enough, won the John Burrows Medal for his Comprehensive 0:29:08.400 --> 0:29:10.440 Lives of Game Animals book. 0:29:11.200 --> 0:29:16.920 William T. Horneby praised Setan's work. Looking back on this 0:29:17.360 --> 0:29:22.840 nature Faker controversy, labeled so by Roosevelt from today's vantage, 0:29:23.080 --> 0:29:26.920 what seems apparent is that its practitioners were trying to 0:29:27.000 --> 0:29:31.080 take on the big implications of Darwinism in the world 0:29:31.120 --> 0:29:34.960 around them. Theirs was a response, and it strongly appealed 0:29:35.000 --> 0:29:38.560 to the reading public to the bleak nature read in 0:29:38.640 --> 0:29:43.680 Tooth and Claw conclusions that Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and 0:29:43.880 --> 0:29:49.560 Alfred Lord Tennyson drew from evolution. Instead of finding humans 0:29:49.680 --> 0:29:54.040 condemned because we'd turned out to be mere animals, nature 0:29:54.080 --> 0:29:57.840 writers like Seaton looked for examples among birds and mammals 0:29:57.840 --> 0:30:04.480 of traits Humans admired compassion, cooperation, loyalty, and ability to 0:30:04.560 --> 0:30:10.000 reason and to transfer cultural learning across generations, and most 0:30:10.040 --> 0:30:15.160 of all, self awareness and individuality. In one of Setan's 0:30:15.240 --> 0:30:19.640 stories and Scribner's in nineteen hundred, a captured female coyote 0:30:19.720 --> 0:30:23.920