A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open

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A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open

Book excerpt

Date: 1916

Source: Roosevelt, Theodore. A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open. New York: Scribner's, 1916.

About the Author: Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), the twenty-sixth President of the United States and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was known for his advancement of conservation and other progressive causes. He was born to a wealthy New York family and entered politics after studying at Harvard University and dropping out of the Columbia University law school, serving as a state assemblyman in New York. His wife and mother both died on the same day in 1884, after which he temporarily abandoned his political career and purchased a range in the Dakota Territory. During that time he also became an avid big game hunter and advocate of vigorous outdoor living. Two years later he returned to New York, married again, and returned to the political arena. Roosevelt served on the federal Civil Service Commission, was appointed assistant secretary of Navy by William McKinley, and led a volunteer cavalry regiment known as the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. He was elected governor of New York in 1898 and was nominated as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1900. He succeeded William McKinley as president after McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and was elected to a full four-year term in 1904. Roosevelt believed that it was the responsibility of government to actively balance competing economic interests. He was also a strong proponent of arbitration and mediation to settle international differences, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to settle the ongoing war between Russia and Japan. Dissatisfied with the state of politics, Roosevelt left the Republican Party to form the progressive Bull Moose Party and ran again for the presidency in 1912. He survived an assassination attempt during the campaign but lost the election to Woodrow Wilson.

INTRODUCTION

Roosevelt was a leader in the early twentieth century conservation movement, which sought to reverse the prevailing philosophy that natural resources existed in order to be exploited with minimal government intervention. He actively supported the Newlands Reclamation Act that established the precursor to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1902, established the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, and signed the Antiquities Act of 1906 (subsequently using his authority under the act to declare the Grand Canyon and other areas national monuments).

Conservationists of Roosevelt's day supported controlled and planned exploitation, not strict preservation, of natural resources. Their pragmatic philosophy of multiple, but rational, use of public lands for their forests, minerals, and water differs from the objectives of the modern conservation movement, which places a heavier emphasis on preservation with little or no exploitation.

In many respects, the conservation movement was closely related to progressivism, which advocated the use of scientific knowledge to identify and solve social and economic problems. Early conservation movement accomplishments included the establishment of a national park, the world's first, in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming and Montana in 1872 and passage of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. John Wesley Powell, the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, advocated small-scale agrarian development of semi-arid western lands on the basis of his scientific observations. Another conservation movement leader, Gifford Pinchot, was appointed by Roosevelt to head the newly created U.S. Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture.

Wildlife preserves were a conservation movement response to widespread over-hunting and decimation of wild game populations during the nineteenth century. As president, Roosevelt established fifty-one bird reserves and four wild game preserves in addition to eighteen national monuments, five national parks, and 150 national forests. His progressive and conservationist philosophy is evident in the opening paragraphs of the following excerpt, which is a description of his visit to an early twentieth century game preserve in Quebec, Canada. In addition to describing in detail the preserve and his day-to-day activities, Roosevelt discusses the establishment of game preserves and discusses factors such as the role of predators and disease in wildlife populations.

PRIMARY SOURCE

In 1915 I spent a little over a fortnight on a private game reserve in the province of Quebec. I had expected to enjoy the great northern woods, and the sight of beaver, moose, and caribou; but I had not expected any hunting experience worth mentioning. Nevertheless, toward the end of my trip, there befell me one of the most curious and interesting adventures with big game that have ever befallen me during the forty years since I first began to know the life of the wilderness.

In both Canada and the United States the theory and indeed the practise of preserving wild life on protected areas of land have made astonishing headway since the closing years of the nineteenth century. These protected areas, some of very large size, come in two classes. First, there are those which are public property, where the protection is given by the State. Secondly, there are those where the ownership and the protection are private.

By far the most important, of course, are the public preserves. These by their very existence afford a certain measure of the extent to which democratic government can justify itself. If in a given community unchecked popular rule means unlimited waste and destruction of the natural resources—soil, fertility, water-power, forests, game, wild-life generally—which by right belong as much to subsequent generations as to the present generation, then it is sure proof that the present generation is not yet really fit for self-control, that it is not yet really fit to exercise the high and responsible privilege of a rule which shall be both by the people and for the people. The term "for the people" must always include the people unborn as well as the people now alive, or the democratic ideal is not realized. The only way to secure the chance for hunting, for the enjoyment of vigorous field-sports, to the average man of small means, is to secure such enforced game laws as will prevent anybody and everybody from killing game to a point which means its diminution and therefore ultimate extinction. Only in this way will the average man be able to secure for himself and his children the opportunity of occasionally spending his yearly holiday in that school of hardihood and self-reliance—the chase. New Brunswick, Maine, and Vermont during the last generation have waked up to this fact. Moose and deer in New Brunswick and Maine, deer in Vermont, are so much more plentiful than they were a generation ago that young men of sufficient address and skill can at small cost spend a holiday in the woods, or on the edge of the rough backwoods farm land, and be reasonably sure of a moose or a deer. To all three commonwealths the game is now a real asset because each moose or deer alive in the woods brings in, from the outside, men who spend among the inhabitants much more than the money value of the dead animal; and to the lover of nature the presence of these embodiments of the wild vigor of life adds immensely to the vast majesty of the forests.

In Canada there are many great national reserves; and much—by no means all—of the wilderness wherein shooting is allowed, is intelligently and faithfully protected, so that the game does not diminish. In the summer of 1915 we caught a glimpse of one of these great reserves, that including the wonderful mountains on the line of the Canadian Pacific, from Banff to Lake Louise, and for many leagues around them. The naked or snow-clad peaks, the lakes, the glaciers, the evergreen forest shrouding the mountainsides and valleys, the clear brooks, the wealth of wild flowers, make up a landscape as lovely as it is varied. Here the game—bighorn and white goat-antelope, moose, wapiti, and black-tail deer and white-tail deer—flourish unmolested. The flora and fauna are boreal, but boreal in the sense that the Rocky Mountains are boreal as far south as Arizona; the crimson paint-brush that colors the hillsides, the water-ousel in the rapid torrents—these and most of the trees and flowers and birds suggest those of the mountains which are riven asunder by the profound gorges of the Colorado rather than those which dwell among the lower and more rounded Eastern hill-masses from which the springs find their way into the rivers that flow down to the North Atlantic. Around these and similar great nurseries of game, the hunting is still good in places; although there has been a mistaken lenity shown in permitting the Indians to butcher mountain-sheep and deer to the point of local extermination, and although, as is probably inevitable in all new communities, the game laws are enforced chiefly at the expense of visiting sportsmen, rather than at the expense of the real enemies of the game, the professional meat and hide hunters who slaughter for the profit.

In Eastern Canada, as in the Eastern United States, there has been far less chance than in the West to create huge governmental game reserves. But there has been a positive increase of the big game during the last two or three decades. This is partly due to the creation and enforcement of wise game laws—although here also it must be admitted that in some of the Provinces, as in some of the States, the alien sportsman is judged with Rhadamanthine severity, while the home offenders, and even the home Indians, are but little interfered with. It would be well if in this matter other communities copied the excellent example of Maine and New Brunswick. In addition to the game laws, a large part is played in Canadian game preservation by the hunting and fishing clubs. These clubs have policed, and now police many thousands of square miles of wooded wilderness, worthless for agriculture; and in consequence of this policing the wild creatures of the wilderness have thriven, and in some cases have multiplied to an extraordinary degree, on these club lands.

In September, 1915, I visited the Tourilli Club, as the guest of an old friend, Doctor Alexander Lambert, a companion of previous hunting trips in the Louisiana canebrakes, in the Rockies, on the plains bordering the Red River of the south, and among the Bad Lands through which the Little Missouri flows. The Tourilli Club is an association of Canadian and American sportsmen and lovers of the wilderness. The land, leased from the government by the club, lies northwest of the attractive Old World city of Quebec—the most distinctive city north of the Mexican border, now that the creole element in New Orleans has been almost swamped. The club holds about two hundred and fifty square miles along the main branches and the small tributaries of the Saint Anne River, just north of the line that separates the last bleak farming land from the forest. It is a hilly, almost mountainous region, studded with numerous lakes, threaded by rapid, brawling brooks, and covered with an unbroken forest growth of spruce, balsam, birch and maple….

SIGNIFICANCE

Roosevelt's essay, "A Curious Experience," presents a detailed picture of an early twentieth century game preserve. Much of the essay describes details of day-to-day camp life on the preserve, but Roosevelt also discusses the importance of public game preserves within the context of the conservation movement with which he was so closely associated.