 Douglas Brinkley earned his PhD from Georgetown University. He's taught at a number of institutions. He's now a professor at Rice University. The list of his books is extraordinarily long. Tour of Duty, John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Wheels for the World, Henry Ford, his company and a Century of Progress, 1903 to 2003, The Unfinished Presidency, Jimmy Carter's journey beyond the White House, the one most closely related so far, to us, the magic boss in American Odyssey. That's what brought him here for the first time, I believe in 1992. My favorite, Dean Atchison, The Cold War Years, 1953 to 1971. Most recently, The Great Deluge, Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and that's just the short list. He's one of the most prolific American historians. He has written on a breathtakingly wide range of subjects, think of it, Rosa Parks and Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the inventor of Gonzo Journalism. Ronald Reagan and his editing of the diaries of Ronald Reagan is just an extraordinary achievement. Ronald Reagan has a very mixed presidential reputation, but when you read his diaries and his private letters, you gain such deep respect for Ronald Reagan. He was a gifted writer and his heart is always carefully modulated in all of the writings that are his. It's an extraordinary achievement and it shows not only the range of Professor Brinkley, but the tolerance and the capacity for generosity on a very wide range of fronts. Think of Ronald Reagan meeting Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I wish we could see that actually happen. We are so honored that Professor Douglas Brinkley is here to give us our keynote speech tonight. The speech comes out of the research that he's been doing on his new book. We can't wait to hear it. Its title is I So Declare It, Theodore Roosevelt, The Boone and Crockett Club, and the Making of a Conservationist. Please welcome Douglas Brinkley. Good evening. It's gonna be tough to follow Theodore Roosevelt, but I'm gonna try and I wanna thank the president of this wonderful university. Thank you so much for hosting us and for people that are here from out of town that are part of environmental movement, conservationist here, people that work for the National Park Service or U.S. Fish and Wildlife, et cetera. We really wanna thank you. We don't have enough universities doing programs on conservation, let alone what your special things you're doing here with Theodore Roosevelt. I come here as Clay just mentioned and Clay Jenkinson is really doing an incredible job here, not just being Theodore Roosevelt, but of getting momentum to make this, the center in your community. This is gonna become a center for research for Theodore Roosevelt. So all of us participating here tonight and tomorrow and the next day. This is really opening salvos, what's going to be a major project. They're digitizing all of Roosevelt's papers. So scholars all over are gonna be able to use them. I don't wanna eat up all my time promoting their program here at Dickinson State, but I make a real effort to come back here all the time. I was telling somebody, I once read a book by Erskine Caldwell when Caldwell came to Dickinson and fell in love with the community and the people here. I first discovered North Dakota because I used to take these young people in my crazier days. I got tired of teaching in a classroom, so I'd take the students on the road and we would live on a bus and travel America and study American history by reading books, read Willa Cather and Nebraska or Steinbeck in California. We'd visit Independence, Missouri, to Walkworth, Harry Truman was, or we'd go up to Seattle to look at the International District and talk about Asian immigration to the Pacific Coast on and on and we would stop in the town of Midora here in Shilah Shaffer, who Clay mentioned, who was in the hospital. She used to give us free food and that was enough to win us. She'd give us steaks, free salad bars for my students and they would put us up in the Badlands Motel for free and we were doing a lot of camping out and stuff so the time we'd reach the Badlands Motel it was nirvana to us of hot showers and it's just a hospitality of the people. I edited Jack Kerouac's diaries in a book called Wind Blown World and this is not hyperbolic. If you read On the Road of Jack Kerouac, great American novel, he talks and writes a lyric, actually Tom Waits has recently recorded it about Old Midora and he connected it to all these great American places but when he took a Greyhound, he went from Seattle down to, actually ended up making his way to Michigan but cut through here in a blizzard. Talk about this Saturday, not to scare people but he was stuck in a blizzard and Kerouac's bus broke down and all these people from Dickinson came out and helped Jack Kerouac's bus out of a hole and Kerouac wrote about the people of Dickinson. It's in the book Wind Blown World and he said I wanna be buried in Dickinson, North Dakota because the people here are the nicest and the friendliest. This isn't me just being Chamber of Commerce like or being nice but the fact that people as attuned to America as Jack Kerouac and Erskine Caldwell have felt some of the magic in the Western Dakotas and how special the people are, speaks highly. I come back here a lot and it's a very busy semester for me. I'm the historian for CBS News. We've got Obama McCain going on. I'm teaching three classes at Rice and in the history of the presidency, Cold War and a conservation class for senior PhD students. And it's not all that easy to get up here even though you can get the eagle flight out of Denver and land but when I saw that Clay was organizing this and a professor that I've admired his books and I've used in such a fulsome way in my upcoming book on theater, Roseville called The Wilderness Warrior that's Donna Worcester who is here and read all of his books. I mean, one they have for sale up here is Nature's Economy but everything he's done he just finished biography of John Muir. His biography of John Wesley Powell is just magnificent. He wrote a bankcroft prize winning book on the Dust Bowl. He's written endless pioneering work on environmental and conservation history which I'm a newcomer to. The only thing I've done conservation wise before this Roseville book is I edited a group of essays with Patricia Limerick. We co-did it on Bernard DeVoto, a historian's conservationist essays with Harper's Magazine but my love has been for the land. I come to Medora to hike the badlands to bring my kids there to see the Buffalo and as I'm getting older here I feel more and more I've got to speak out about things that have mattered to me. My parents were high school teachers. We had a trailer growing up, a 24 foot coachman trailer and I spent my childhood three summers every month in our national parks. I got to camp as a kid. My dad had a shortwave radio and we were Tiger fans and we'd get in WJR out of Detroit and I got to go to Crater Lake or in Yosemite, Yellowstone Grand Canyon but also we'd go to National Monuments, et cetera. So I've been, I was a childhood beneficiary of our park system and all the great work our Interior Department in particular has done and so I'm just kind of coming to it tonight and for the first time really publicly talking about conservation history in Theodore Roosevelt. I've identified with TR probably more than healthy for a biographer because one reason was his childhood. I had terrible bronchial asthma growing up and so when you read people like David McCullough or Edmund Morris on Theodore Roosevelt, those childhood chapters and that inability to breathe in humidity and a freedom of lungs that one gets I get in Oklahoma, Kansas, the Dakotas, the interior great planes for some reason takes a lot of stress off of me and it helps me breathe. I remember told anybody this before but I think it's one of my attractions to this region is the air quality. In Montana, you get those forest fires that come blowing down and the air quality in the summer there, I was doing an interview of evil Knievel before he died about two years ago and bewed and was trapped. It was Bob Knievel day in butte and he used to jump over cougars and pits on his motorcycle to get his start up there and I got trapped there and I had a horrible asthmatic problem from the forest fires that are going on there. So I had a bit of a connection with Roosevelt and he's helped me now appreciate birds in a way that I haven't, you know he's born in 1858 in a brownstone in New York, you can tour it today, the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace and at a very early age he became enamored with animal life, less children can but in birds in particular. He was almost blind from seeing, even with his eyeglasses, they were just, his eyesight was awful. In fact, he was never really a very good hunter even though he used to, he had trained himself pretty well but he didn't really have, he could shoot wildly off the mark. So mythology that this was a superb shot, he wasn't but he really loved birds. His father was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Okay, that's the first thing to keep in mind. Dad is the creator in the brownstone, the funder, the sponsor of having a New York, the American Museum of Natural History but a person that I'm writing about in my book, The Wilderness Warrior never really written about in detail and I've got all this papers that haven't been seen of him and this is Uncle Robert Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt's father was a bit pious. He was a very moral man, some of Roosevelt's sense of morality comes from his father. Uncle Rob was a rogue, a skirt chaser. He was married but had another family on the same street of his that was a secret family so there's Roosevelt kin floating around which the family's just starting to do the genealogical work with. Uncle Robert Roosevelt was a fisherman and a fishing fanatic. He created the fish movement in New York. The Hudson River had been fished out of Shad and Uncle Rob was working to work with a man named Seth Green upstate New York just for the first time start finding out all the intricacies of how you could have fish hatcheries. In fact, Robert Roosevelt runs for Congress there's one term to do one thing and that's to create a national fish hatchery. Beyond that, his house was a doctor do little menagerie. He had a German shepherd that used to they tuck a napkin in at the dinner table. They had monkeys in the house. They had parrots in the house. They had a pony that would come in. All of this is Uncle Robert Roosevelt who lived next door to the young Theodore Roosevelt. Uncle Rob was a Democrat unlike his nephew was Republican. He was Grover Cleveland's ambassador to the Netherlands. He was the head of the finance of the Democratic National Committee, Robert Roosevelt. And he wrote stunning books on wildlife and fish. I'm gonna talk a little bit today about Florida. Uncle Rob's book on wild of Florida and wild birds in game life has a profound effect later in his nephew's creation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife. And he wrote the best books on the Great Lakes fishing today in Minnesota Press, Abracame and Fitch and these organizations are some of his books are still in print. He was considered the number one fish expert in America during the Civil War in the decade after. Widely published, he also became deeply interested in frogs. He went to Illinois once to count about 10,000 of them and that he would do counts just like Theodore Roosevelt. The president would do bird counts with the Audubonist. He was doing frog counts. He was raising eels and wanted to be considered the world's greatest expert on eels. He bought Lotus Lake, a mansion out on Long Island which TR tried to turn Sagamore Hill his home into a Lotus Lake where animals were running around and kids were running around and there were animal stuffed taxidermy animals everywhere. This is all Uncle Rob. He's been written out of the Roosevelt family history due to the fact of his problem with women and his incorrigible manner. When I say this, he used to go and sleep of Robert Roosevelt with prostitutes and also with women who were so-called looser morals for the era and he had once bought bulk green gloves from a bulk like Macy's like store and would give women that he slept with green gloves and they were seen with a green glove on the streets of New York. They know Robert Roosevelt had gotten to them. So you can see why Theodore Roosevelt with political ambitions wanted to stay very far from Robert B. Roosevelt but the good news is he's left a bunch of papers, letters. Later, the first time Theodore Roosevelt fully embraces Uncle Rob, he went to do sneak visits to him all through his life but he did it in a first time in a public way. 1904, Uncle Rob was with him when he was inaugurated president of the United States and when he knew he wasn't gonna run again in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt embraced Uncle Rob and said, you are for me the old generation, dad's generation. Keep in mind the father and Theodore Roosevelt's father and Uncle Rob did not get along. So Roosevelt drifted away from him but in all the correspondences, TR is going to Harvard and it becomes a naturalist. Everybody from Spencer Fullerton Baird to Dr. C. Hart Miriam know Theodore Roosevelt as the nephew of Robert B. Roosevelt, leading cutting edge conservation naturalist. That's the early link. When Theodore Roosevelt was a boy, he would go up to the Adirondacks in the Catskills and got rejuvenated by that beautiful landscape in New York. He would, his father would sit by a campfire and read Last of Mo Higgins. There've been some good environmental history articles written in recent years about James Fenimore Cooper but if you read some of Cooper's language, many of us think of it as just kind of a Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett kind of outdoorsman but there's some beautiful nature writing in there that Theodore Roosevelt loved and James Fenimore Cooper. And TR becomes, starts his own museum as a boy. He creates the Roosevelt Museum. He gets trained to become a taxidermist president of Theodore Roosevelt by John Bell. Bell was a student of Audubon and Roosevelt is an excellent taxidermist and he does very intricate job with birds. In fact, he always took taxidermy as the high, a very high art and would study the world's great people at taxidermy. Famously when Theodore Roosevelt got a gun, he only went over to Europe. He is a fierce nationalist from a very early age. You may think of it as immaturity or you might admire it in a lot of his life. It is about how much better our wildlife is. You were mentioning big, big, big clay. We've got better wildcats than you do. We have bigger mountains. Your Elbs are nothing compared to our Rockies. There was a pro-American nationalism towards his conservationism. Our trees are bigger than your trees. You know, that's really fundamental to understanding his love. He is not talking lightly when he uses the word heirlooms all the time, Theodore Roosevelt. Grand Canyon is our heirloom. Crater Lake is an heirloom. You know, the Smoky Mountains are an heirloom. Wike the Louvre in Westminster Abbey. Europe has that, has the Louvre in Westminster Abbey. And we've got these as our gifts to pass on to future generations. So there was a core nationalism to his conservation. He goes to, he goes, I don't have the time today to talk about Roosevelt's early childhood in birding, but it'll give you an idea. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he does a booklet. It's a book in an Aquarian terms. It's really a pamphlet on the summer birds of the Adirondacks. Here's an undergraduate writing the best bird key yet done on birds in the Adirondack Mountains. He's reading every naturalist he can, but the seminal person in Theodore Roosevelt's life at Harvard, if you just cut to, he enters Harvard in 1876. Beyond Robert Roosevelt's influence, his great love of his father was Charles Darwin. It is Darwin and one of the best in nature's economy is one of the best chapters on Darwin and ecology and it's spot on. And I was doing my research and then read Professor Worcesters and I just would take it even one notch further with Theodore Roosevelt. He was an ideologue. People today, McCain saying it's him and progressives are saying he's this. What is Theodore Roosevelt politically? He was a Darwinian. And the problem his reputation has had and on the left has been a lot of historians in the 60s coming at the environmental movement at the time of the anti-Vietnam War criticized Theodore Roosevelt a lot because they see his gung-ho war-like roughrider. Let's go to the Philippines. Imperialism connected to the Vietnam War and they look at some of Roosevelt's writings which reek of social Darwinism and at times lurch into the field of eugenics as Darwin did to a degree. But they've left out the second component that it was the belief in biology, the Theodore Roosevelt had of Darwin's origins of species and that species matter and that he wanted Roosevelt if he wasn't president and didn't write his hunting books with what's kind of a cop out for his great skill. He should have been the great biological writer of the United States. Roosevelt's dream is to inventory every species and every plant in the U.S. What he grew up in an era after the Civil War when the Geological Survey was what every, Roosevelt's first impressions of where you guys live in the West are photographs coming to New York from the Geological Survey of Yellowstone or California or Utah. And the Geological Survey of John Wesley Powell who one of the heroes of TR, they're out there mapping the Western United States. What Roosevelt felt they didn't do when he was a naturalist major, naturalist studies major at Harvard was go out and do like what Francis Parkman did in the Oregon Trail, go out there, live with the Native Americans, live with the Buffalo and document all the species. Where is our American book that shows what animals we got? Now, Lewis and Clark started that as you all know in 1803 of doing this inventorying of the West but it wasn't done in a professional way post Darwin. And it becomes in my opinion the key link to understanding Theodore Roosevelt's view towards what we would call today ecology or conservation is the connection between Darwin and then Dr. C. Hart Miriam who runs the biological survey of the United States which is today's US Fish and Wildlife. Because Dr. Miriam is the one who reviewed Theodore Roosevelt's first book. The summer birds of the Adirondacks and gave him a rave review said it's the top line. Welcome America to a star new ornithologist Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a narcissist of sorts. How one, that's a sloppy term to throw around these days. It's used a lot. But it was the fact of the matter is that by the praise that Miriam got and this feeling now of not just going to the West but documenting what's out here. And Roosevelt's mixing that strain of Darwin and Miriam in biology with David Crockett, Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, Zebulin Pike who he worshiped, explorers of the West. And people that carried the gun with them and hunted and lived off their own a highly romanticized Western mythological cowboy, naturalist wilderness man. He's morphing at Roosevelt that whole tradition of the frontier of its men with modern biology. He's our great transition figure, TR. He takes that, not that there weren't others from Bartholomew, Maryweather Lewis, we could list a lot. But Roosevelt's the one who gets the political power to make a difference, not these other writers. After Harvard, Roosevelt's of course here, as you all know and I don't need to tell you that the dramatic, toys with politics, he becomes a great reformer in New York. But his great love is for the outdoors. Every chance he can get, he wants to hike and hunt. He loved nature. Absolutely loved it. You can't exaggerate it. It was his lifeblood he felt most himself traipsing into the wilderness in his whole life. In fact, much of his presidency, just like FDR spent much of his presidency on ships and yachts, 40% of FDR's time was spent on boats. Theodore Roosevelt's time in the presidency, he went on a hunt and disappeared as often as he could into the wild, if you'd like. But his famous North Dakota experiences, and it's been dramatized more than I will do today, but I do want you to maybe feel it viscerally, the love of his life, his wife, Alice and Mitty, his mother, his wife, about to have a baby, mother, die the same day in his birthplace home in New York, one on one floor, one on the other. He lose his mom and wife the same day. Roosevelt is depressed. As a historian, I don't like psychobiography a lot, but I do respect psychiatry, and the head of Johns Hopkins School of Psychiatry, today K. Jameson has written a book called Exuberance, and says that TR's coping with depression was through exuberance, which is a form of manic depression. It is when you go, go, don't stop, don't reflect, constant motion, move, and it is a great genius depression to get. If you're gonna get one, get exuberance. The problem with it is it burns your organs out, and many people that she says get it, die young, die in their 40s or 50s, heart attacks, heart disease, strokes, et cetera, because you never give your body or mind a rest. Added to the fact that Theodore Roosevelt drank a gallon of coffee a day and had zero liking of alcohol, he was a pumped up guy. Okay, he didn't, couldn't turn his mind. There was no ambient to put him to sleep, and he didn't ever turn to chemicals. His brother dies of alcoholism at a young age through to deeply depressed his brother. TR fights that, and he finds a cure in the outdoors. People could say that we shouldn't romanticize the West as having curative possibilities. It's an easy idea to make fun of, but it works for some people, and it worked for Theodore Roosevelt because he took the train ride, and you guys are the beneficiary of having Roosevelt Day here because the Northern Pacific Railroad wasn't completed. TR was taking the road to escape the depression and get out of New York to go as far west as he could where the rail dumped him off in Medora, North Dakota. He had connected it because he had met a person who had invested in a sportsman's resort out here. So there were other reasons in his strategy, but by and large he went to the end of the line at that point and got lost, got lost in Medora. Yes, he became a ranch, the Elkhorn, in the Maltese Cross, two ranch homes that are out of town visitors are gonna probably visit the sites. There's a movement going on to call it the cradle of conservation here in the Dakota Badlands. Roosevelt, in his trilogy of hunting books about North Dakota, which you should be very proud of being here, to have somebody of a quality at Theodore Roosevelt, write three books largely about your area. And I've never cared for some of Roosevelt's when he gets to the exact hunt stories that Chase, at his best though, for Roosevelt, is a wonderful way to write natural history. And he's superb at it. I think in some ways we've underestimated Roosevelt as a writer of natural history because suddenly you get hit by an awful paragraph and it makes you wanna close the book. But if you wanna cherry pick some great writing on the American West, he's up there, Theodore Roosevelt, with people of the quality of John Muir and Edward Abbey and Mary Austin and others. I mean, he's top tier naturalist writer of the West. Lot of flaws. There are not too many flaws in his biological observations. And this, when he came out here to hunt his buffalo, he was depressed as you all know and he was essentially a commuter. He started shuttling back North Dakota to New York. Keep in mind, the cities were awful back then. Slums were developing in New York and there was squalor in the streets and people were dying of or getting diseases and dysentery with it. They weren't a health zone. And Roosevelt, like many people, felt better in the woods. And so he created a psychological aversion to urban living, which is where the benefits of due to our national park system because of this. He wasn't comfortable and staying too long in an urban setting. Even as Washington got too big for him, he would go wandering around Rock Creek Park. About two weeks ago, I was at Pine Knot, his little cabin that he used to go with John Burroughs to south of Charlottesville, middle of nowhere. This was his camp, David. Just the most primitive shack you could find. This is when he was at his element. But he got his buffalo right near from where we're at and he created the idea here in Madura or in Dickinson slash Madura, Western Dakotas. He got the idea of creating the Boone and Crockett Club, which was going to be the first major national club. There were sportsmen's associations, sportsmen's magazines, the Adirondacks had had a movement to save part. But he created Boone and Crockett Club as a hunters, as conservationists, specifically to save big game. He thought America denuded of bison, for example, or elk, or antelope, or whitetail, or bacterial, et cetera, was a horrific idea and that we had a moral obligation to save the species of America. And where yet, so once he got his buffalo head, he worked assiduously from 1887 all the way to 1907 when he creates the American Bison Society to repopulate the plains with buffalo. And he does it, I'm gonna tell you one quick story and I'm leaping chronologically forward, but Roosevelt is the founder, like his father created the American Museum of Natural History, TR's the founder of the Bronx Zoo, the New York Zoological Society, and he hired William Temple Hornaday, who was the number one, he is today's version of Crocodile Dundee, kind of used to wrestle animals, grab them. He was an incredible animal handler who was also considered with the exception of a man named C.J. Jones, Buffalo Jones, who was domestically breeding buffalo in Kansas and then also up at Yellowstone. Hornaday was the number one buffalo man in the United States. He did the taxidermy of buffalo for the Smithsonian. He goes, runs the Bronx Zoo in Roosevelt with Hornaday and George Bird Grinnell, his co-founder of Boone and Crockett, says, breed buffalo and we've gotta be careful of their genetic bloodlines so we don't have inbreeding. I wanna healthy herd of buffalo in the Bronx to move to the plains. This project goes on. The first group of buffalo died because they had the wrong grasses for them. Hornaday starts hand feeding them prairie grasses, nurtures the herd. In 1905, right after the day he's inaugurated on his own, as Clay mentioned, he wins in 1904, he had the Comanche Chief, Kwanaparker, at his side at the inaugural, told Kwanaparker in a month he was coming to go coyote hunting or wolf prairie wolf hunting in Oklahoma near the Wichita Mountains, which is by Lawton, Oklahoma, and a big area there is called the Big Pasture, and he told Kwanaparker in an idea to bring the buffalo back to Oklahoma. If you go to Wichita Mountains, which is our nation's first game reserve that Roosevelt creates, there's a place called Mount Scott. It's about 2,300 foot mountain. The Kiowa and Comanche believed the buffalo had disappeared through the top of the mountain. It was a medicine woman's story. That's why all the buffalo were slaughtered. I mean, yes, the, you know, the telegraph companies, railroad companies, buffalo hunters, U.S. Army, all exterminated the herds, but some of the buffalo went single column down at the mountain. Roosevelt wanting to integrate Comanche and Kiowa and Apache into American life on this one American took railroad cards with padded compartments used for show horses and shipped all the buffalo back to Oklahoma and put them on Wichita Mountains. The buffalo today, whether you go to Wind Cave National Park or you go up here in North Dakota, if you see buffalo around Sully's, the, they're all from this Roosevelt herd. The one herd that didn't get exterminated was in Yellowstone Park, but they weren't supposed to be there. The buffalo today that Ted Turner can open up Buffalo Burger shops. It's Theodore Roosevelt's reintroduction. He imagined the Buffalo Commons back into the middle of America, which is becoming talked about now. He did similar things for elk, antelope. He wanted to create a moose reserve, which never got, not, never occurred, but it probably should be rethought of in some ways right now. He then, Roosevelt, if I cut back from that creating a boon and Crockett, he's really the leading conservationist, but what he's doing is engaging in Miriam and biological Darwinian species, their debates at the Cosmos Club. Roosevelt's looking at the tales of animals and their coloration and how many whiskers and the size, he used to go, people talk about Roosevelt's big game hunting, and I have a lot of stories about him all. I know him, each Roosevelt hunt insider, you know, he also used to go shrew hunting to do little tiny shrews to find variations in the shrews to ship back to the biological survey. He was, by the time Roosevelt becomes governor of New York, America's expert on deer and elk, not just a hunter, but an expert. He was a scientific expert naturalist on America's big game, and he was excellent on birds. He was his co-partner in boon and Crockett, George Byrne Grinnell. It was the original founder of the Audubon Society. Roosevelt was an Audubonist. He was the honorary chairperson of the Florida Audubon Society when Pelican Island got saved, when he saved the birds. Roosevelt creates, as first as governor, when he comes in 1900, he saves once Niagara Falls, void of commercialism, saves the Palisades cliffs in New York Harbor, and leads the charge to save the Catskills and Adirondacks. He was considered wildlife crazy, conservation crazy by most people. A lot of companies tolerated him in New York, but it was considered a weird aspect of his personality. When William McKinley is shot, Roosevelt was lost on the top of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks. He could not be found. He wanted to climb, a Gifford Pinchot climbed it in the winter with a man named Lafarge. And Roosevelt couldn't believe he hadn't climbed New York states high as mountain, and so he was lost in the woods when he finally comes back to the final time. He went twice to Buffalo, but the final time to Buffalo McKinley dies. Roosevelt does not stop for a second on his conservation agenda and ideas. I argue that Roosevelt's the beginning in 1901, in December, of wildlife protection in the United States, and he made a lot of mistakes with it, and he did a lot of things right. But his UREED, Roosevelt's first address to Congress, it's not just about forest for him, it becomes about animals. And early on, he is a believer in bird flyaways that birds don't know boundaries, that you can't have bird laws for Maine, because if you're allowed to shoot them in Maine, they'll never make it to Florida, or if they're slaughtered in Florida, you won't have birds in North Dakota, that you had to have a systematic way because birds didn't know boundaries. And famously, and it's hard to imagine that this millinery industry, women's apparel, hats and feathers was that big a deal. But all over Florida, if any of you go, you know how all the islets off of little places around Florida, what would happen, and you started having semi-automatic weapons coming into the picture by time Roosevelt's president in 1901, these mafias would come and just gun down every bird on the islands while they were nesting, killing generations all at once. And Roosevelt was watching the flamingo gone from Florida. You know, the passenger pigeon, once a billion of them are whatever extinct now. Watching the aqua extinct, watching all these bird species die. And his sense of Darwin, and we all can interpret Darwin differently, is that there was a moral obligation to save these species. That Darwin never tackled in Roosevelt's mind who God was, so Roosevelt believed fully that there was a God who created all of this. But each species to Roosevelt was like a masterpiece of God. And if you were gonna extinguish the egrets or the rosette spoon bills, then that was a crime against nature because you weren't shooting them to eat or for subsistence, you were slaughtering them for vanity, to wear on your hat. And so he comes in strong and tries to create Florida. Part of my book, not an Impelican Island story when he creates the first one, he creates a string of pearl strategy, creates 17 federal bird reservations in Florida, from Key West to Passage Key at Tampa Bay. There would be no wild Florida today without Theodore Roosevelt's federal bird reservations. And guess what? This is not the argument about, is he a utilitarian or a preservationist. This is preserving birds. There was no utilitarian aspect to Pelican Island or Passage Key or Key West. Roosevelt tells the Navy not to put a bomb anywhere near where the sea turtles are on an island and where the turns are at the dry tortugas which he saves. So we've got to, I think, come into focus here of Roosevelt's preservation aside, in addition, because when you turn a pinch show on the forestry, it's all utilitarian. That's all is conservation, irrigations, Newland's Act, waters in the West, it's all. But there was a serious aesthetic streak in Roosevelt and it tend to focus on birds in big game. In addition, if you go down to Pelican Island guys today it's the headquarters of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, it's where they were born and it creates all of these refuge system around our country today. In addition, as you know, Roosevelt is, he wouldn't say no to any of this. He did not, the key other thing to understand about Theodore Roosevelt, he is a huge believer in the federal government. He was, hero was Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Sheridan from him in the, what happened in the Civil War. And Roosevelt finds redemptive value where you guys are in the West because Roosevelt sees North and South killing each other. 600,000 dead in the Civil War. He takes, he creates a Western myth of the regeneration of the countries in the West that in the West is where we may not screw it up. And part of it is his disdain of over-industrialization of factories that are polluting. He has a natural abhorrence to it in a sense that's visceral almost. The great book for TR to read is the great Western novel bio in Worcester, The Virginian. What happens in The Virginian? A Northern girl marries the Southern boy and they get married in Yellowstone where love and, you know, the deserts bloom, the flowers bloom due to a reclamation. And it comes with it also, Roosevelt, one of the things he does as president. As you all know, he's famous for his war record of going into the Spanish-American war in 1898 physically putting himself on the line. Trains down in San Antonio. You may not realize, while he went to war, the Rough Riders had a pet eagle named Teddy, a golden eagle. He had a cougar pet and a dog named Cuba that he adopted. He always had to have animals around him, like Uncle Rob always. As president of the United States, he had two birds, two parrots, that used to be with him. When you read his correspondence and all, he would bring the parrot with him. One was named Eli out of Yale, from Yale University. Do you know what the First National Forest Theodore Roosevelt ever created? Puerto Rico. He created to save the tropical jungle because of the Puerto Rican parrot, which is today National Forest, it's Caribbean National Forest, is Theodore Roosevelt's first, because he had no political blowback down there. You could do whatever the hell you wanted down in Puerto Rico back then. And he was so fascinated by parrot's intelligence. He wrote about them and creates the first one over a bird. They're only 37, I believe, of these Puerto Rican parrots alive today. They are almost an exterminated species. The first National Monument, as mentioned by Clay, near here, Devil's Tower. Part of what Roosevelt was doing in National Monuments and it's a longer conversation, we don't have time for it in this talk with George Bird Grinnell, and I'm gonna frame it in a way I don't in my book. There's something very odd about Roosevelt's, but now I understand it because I actually talked to a guy who's an Iraq War veteran who has become an expert on Shiites and Sunnis and is getting books and collecting things on them after he saw some of the worst situations there. Roosevelt was a triumphalist of the West. The best thing that ever happened was civilization coming west of the Mississippi and all of these settlements, European settlements, the conquering of the West, he's the chronicler of it, the winning of the West, unabashed about it and an unabashed expansionist. Yet, now that we had from sea to shining sea, he started becoming obsessed with Indian cultures and cliff dwellings and native Pueblo places. Near the end of his life, he wrote an excellent piece on Hopi dances. George Bird Grinnell turned into an ethnographer, one of our great people who wrote a major book on the Cheyenne and Roosevelt fell into all of this. He identified a lot with a lot of attributes of Native Americans in their regards to nature and things which are interesting and curious for wanting to be the conqueror. Keep in mind when Roosevelt's writing about Indian in the West, he never killed an Indian. Roosevelt never killed anybody on American soil. He fought in the Spanish American War in Cuba, but he was not part of that. He was a later generation and he tended to romanticize the great Indian wars from both sides, from the Sherman and particularly Sheridan side, but also for the great Indian chiefs. One exception to that was Geronimo, who he couldn't stand and thought was a terrorist and would not do anything to help Geronimo, where he did a great deal for other Native leaders and started working with Indian Rights Improvement Associations as president. But I wanna just tell you, I mean think of our national monuments today, that the Grand Canyon that people as part of, part of this was territories. I mean, Oklahoma became a state when TR was president, New Mexico became a state, Arizona became a state, and Roosevelt's trying to play with these territories is almost quid pro quos. For example, in Oklahoma, when he created the Indian territory in Oklahoma as one state, he was able to grab a Senator Platt died, so he creates Platt National Park and grabs a piece of land, grabs the Wichita Mountains when he can. He grabs a lot. He grabs once the Grand Canyon. Famously in 1903, Roosevelt takes this cross country trip and he goes with John Burroughs to Yellowstone and John Muir to Yosemite. These are two men that he loves and respects for being naturalist. It really loves John Burroughs. Only guy Roosevelt calls in a kind of nicknamey way as John Burroughs is always Um John, Uncle John, and he read all of his books from Wake Robin on down. Couldn't wait, and in fact, he gets involved theodore Roosevelt in a nature faker argument, over flexing his muscles on it, but criticizing anybody who writes about wilderness and animals and have any of their factual detail wrong are nature fakers. President of the United States writing just brutal letters to even Jack London's publisher and because his wolves habits are all wrong. Part of it is the defense of John Burroughs because a man that would sign his name in field and stream or field and forest or whatever magazine, forest at any rate, but it would do his sporting magazine, had a column, would sign at the hermit and never put his name on there and this man criticized John Burroughs. One side of TR, if you criticize the friend of his, look out. He was probably the single most loyal person I've ever encountered, TR. If he liked you and you were honest with them and you were one of his men or women or you were on his side, he is loyalty is phenomenal and Burroughs for anybody to attack Burroughs in the public print, he became the pit bull on it even though he was president. So anyway, he takes Burroughs out to Yellowstone. Roosevelt did not create Yellowstone Park, Grant does in 1972, but my hero of my book is a congressman from Iowa named John Lacey and Lacey and the Boone and Crockett Club preserved the segregation of Yellowstone. The railroads wanna cut it in half. Roosevelt got on board fighting against the cutting of Yellowstone and becomes the big fighter for the wilderness in what he doesn't want any of Yellowstone marred. He wants it saved as a world wonder. The story of the, when he goes out west is amazing. Look, we're looking at Barack Obama guys right now. Every day he's drawing 15, 20,000. 1903, Roosevelt going across country to the west was drawing 10, 15, 20,000 people of speech wherever he showed up, he'd walk out of a depot. People had the teddy bear incident had already occurred when he didn't kill the bear, although the bear was actually killed by somebody else. It's a longer story, but people are doing teddy bear things. They're waving big sticks as signs of unity with him and he's giving conservationist speech after conservationist speech on the lip of the Grand Canyon. He goes to Count Los Angeles and he's giving this huge welcome. He is floored by the redwoods and I think gives his most extraordinary environmental speeches a don't chop them down. These groves are too magnificent to be treated and he puts religious imagery of cathedrals. At one point he takes, makes them take down because people would put signs on the trees like, you know, Long John and this is little Pete or whatever, he'd say, please, you're desecrating these trees. Take the signs down, leave them alone. And his time with the mirror in Yosemite is very healing for him to understand the beauty of that area. But he goes then and saves Mount Shasta after meeting with the mirror, heads up to Oregon and Washington and hooks up with the head of the Audubon Society, William Finley, who founded the Washington Audubon and Audubon starts showing, they start the Audubon Societies in the West now have White House audiences showing Roosevelt pictures of birds in Washington and Oregon, 1907 and 08. Roosevelt does for Florida, when he did in Florida with bird reserves, he saves the coast of Oregon and Washington. Bird reserve, after bird reserve, after bird reserve draped down to protect the key nesting areas of seabirds, colonial seabirds in that part of the country and an unsung environmental hero, William Finley, who if you dig you can find stuff on, but he was another one. Roosevelt listened to these guys. Look, we haven't had anybody that listened to ornithologists like Roosevelt did. Now I could tell you how wrong TR is on a lot of things. For example, his belief in wolves and coyotes as just being nothing but predators that should be killed. The early biological survey used to have bags of strict nine with skull and bones on it and they poison carcasses to kill them. Roosevelt personally would go shoot all the time on hunting things for cougars. He would always say he was doing it for science but he had a bloodlust that's undeniable. It is true that if he killed 14 cougar, he would then ship their claws and their heads back to Miriam at Biological Survey. All the things he'd kill, he'd ship their skins back because without, and there is some writing of TR's belief in the Kodak or camera. At one point he writes an essay about that cameras are far superior, photography of nature is far superior than hunting. There to Roosevelt. And at the end of his administration, he does another report on Yellowstone and finally comes to the conclusion that cougar should be part of an ecosystem. This came very late for some people's minds but there's a Eureka moment when he realized they weren't doing the damage to his beloved elk. Roosevelt's whole life, he had to be symbolized with animals. On the 1903 train trip through the west that he did as president, people would give him animals wherever they went. Josiah was a baby badger. The president of the United States is feeding with a milk bottle and becomes the family pet at Sagamore Hill in the White House, a badger. Pony, Algonquin in the elevator, a pony in the White House, dogs and cats running everywhere, just may ham of animals around Theodore Roosevelt. He identified, when he was on that, came out to Colorado, he picked up a dog named Skip. He'd bring Skip with him then wherever he went. Always had dogs running at his heels. It was a big part of it. But what's interesting is it wasn't just dog, he wouldn't just have a dog, he'd want to know about their bloodlines and how far it went back in each habit. And even at night, he would write sometimes when he'd get bored about habits of his cats in the house. He was that intrigued by animals, by the end of his presidency, the statistics stand for themselves. I mean, when you talk about 150 million acres of national forest and talk about all these national monuments, the Grand Canyon he saved, zinc mining and abestos industries had it. They were gonna mine it. Congress didn't want to save the Grand Canyon and Roosevelt used it as an executive order creating the, with the Antiquities Act for National Monument and just declares it. My title and your program is I So Declare It. The hubris of Roosevelt because he saw Lincoln freed the slaves through abolition and emancipation proclamation. Roosevelt's view was there was no limit to the federal government, what we can do. And so people that are big states, rights people, you don't like theater Roosevelt. And I know that disappoints a lot because TR's won over a lot of people due to a lot of his annex. He's a big government guy and believes in government management of natural resources, of fish, of streams, of forest, of seas. He's looking to create a model society for what he would say for future generations unborn because he had a singular distrust for big business Wall Street and the fact of greed as a dominant factor. And that greed had to be stopped and agreed on the landscapes. Remember, this is a deforested area as we're dealing with. He creates a huge tree farm in Nebraska to start repranning trees. And FDRCCC is really an extension of things theater Roosevelt was starting to do. There's a trivia question. What's the first book ever written by an American president as president? A book called The Deer Family by Theodore Roosevelt. The president of the United States is bringing out a book on Deer. And to explain the hunting for Roosevelt, it's a belief that hunters were the true conservationist that and incidentally has always believed in hunting grouse, wild turkey, pheasants. He was probably loved hunting more than anything else but he also believed hunters had an obligation because they knew the land and knew these species to make sure that other generations had pheasants. Here the motels are filling up in Dickinson for pheasant season and Roosevelt's idea was to make sure a hundred years from now they're pheasants here. You know, that's part of what, because he felt a romanization of identity with the land and that strenuous life and hunting that outdoors brought out character and that the hunting put a relationship between the animal. Roosevelt never disrespected an animal he hunted. Now it's controversial for modern environmentalist and groups like PETA to deal with somebody who loved hunting as much and no one will ever change their view on that but I will say that today's modern environmental movement could use the voices of hunting groups to talk about the need for wildlife preserves and preserving things they're needed, Boone and Crockett exist today and they do a good job on a lot of those issues. Roosevelt is ex-president when he leaves the White House of course left Gifford Pinchot being in the forestry and he's in Europe and Roosevelt finds out that William Howard Taft his successor, Republican, is starting to do water down Roosevelt's acres trying to cut new deals for developers. Roosevelt goes ballistic and it's the firing of Pinchot and Pinchot's problems that makes Theater Roosevelt create the Bull Moose Party. The Bull Moose Party is created because Roosevelt says my view of conservation and land and there were other issues but that was central or different than the modern Republican Party and that's when he forms the Bull Moose Party over it. Roosevelt, as you know, goes to Africa as ex-president for the Smithsonian on a big game hunting, wrote a very bloody memoir on the other hand a very informative memoir when he would get on ecosystems and habitat and animals which he wrote about stunningly well. He wrote a book as you know about the Amazon in Brazil. He gets very ill on that Amazon trip and an insect bite scalore gets a kind of malaria-like condition and he dies in 1919 many ways due to the arduousness of a South American trip. I write about other trips he took here in America. I don't know how many people know that Roosevelt couldn't wait to go see his bird preserve in Florida and he goes, I have unpublished photos of him with all the gopher tortoises. He saved a habitat for gopher tortoises, the manatee where it's an animal that was very important to Theodore Roosevelt in Florida. He went to Bretton Island and the Louisiana Islands he saved and he would go out with his game wardens. I'll leave you with the fact that Theodore Roosevelt dies. The last letter he writes is about birds. He's buried in a bird sanctuary that's run by the Audubon groups of Oyster Bay at Long Island. But the Roosevelt's conservation accomplishment is not a face on Mount Rushmore. It's not seeing his name carved in granite at the Museum of Natural History and it's not per se even in Theodore Roosevelt National Park which he would have loved. He would have loved that this area was preserved. He loved it. But it's in our park rangers and our wardens because Roosevelt was a cop. He was a white hat hating the black hats of life. He loved, he appointed people like that, that Masterson or the wolf expert Jack Abernathy of Oklahoma to be federal marshals. He gave a job to Pat Garrett who killed Billy the Kid and the fact of the novel The Virginian by Winster, Roosevelt sees that the Westerner, the Virginian, the transplanted you guys are the heroes of America and a real Westerner is never a mean newest horse and doesn't abuse the land and make sure and make sure that future generations that are inherit America's heirlooms and that that was his idea of a Western ethos. He put nerve in wardens and rangers. He hired a bunch of rough riders who these guys that served with Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, these guys would have gone off a cliff for TR. I have never seen a military commander that had the men behind them the way TR did with those rough riders. He appointed some of our first rangers in Black Mesa and places in Arizona and New Mexico were former rough riders, which is meaning he believed that the rangers and the protectors had to come from towns like Dickinson. You couldn't just say make policy in Washington if local people all over the West weren't gonna be the custodians. So his first wave of rangers were locals and people that made government memos of this left and right I want so and so Seth Bullock. Bullock knows the bad lands better than anybody is an old cow puncher and he was an old law enforcement man. I want him to tell the people no, that's federal property. You cannot go timber. No, you cannot go poach. And you'll be arrested because you're breaking the federal government. Roosevelt broke the mindset which he saw as a Confederate states law mindset against the federal government. And in Florida, the first game wardens that Roosevelt administration working with Audubon appointed to Paul Kragel of Pelican Island is one of the people I profiled my book. Two of them are murdered. Two of the first three Roosevelt game wardens of Florida are murdered protecting birds. This is the Feather Wars of Florida. Roosevelt, the militarist put police action into preserving resources. We take it for granted. We're gonna, you go down and see park rangers and uniforms with hats and badges and belts and you think, oh my, it started with the US Army which Roosevelt loved and Roosevelt is increasing that notion because he doesn't trust people will despoil the land and that you had to have police protection. So his really great accomplishments besides creating the Antiquities Act, besides creating US Fish and Wildlife, behind increasing the National Forest 300%, behind these conservation conferences and all of this besides his own writings is the protection aspect of preservation. And he did that brilliantly because just because he declared something off limits didn't mean people were going to treat it as off limits. Roosevelt put the teeth into conservation. Thank you. Professor Brinkley has agreed to take a few questions. It's a little hard to see. So please either stand up or raise your hand and speak boldly. Do I need to use this for taping? You'd rather not stay at the top. Yeah, I wish you would, yeah. Questions? Here's one. I'll repeat it while you get your water. What is TR's role in the Hetch Hetchy controversy? Hetch Hetchy is probably the most written about aspect of TR and of course it's the whole John Muir and Professor Worcester just did the book on John Muir and he's, but Roosevelt after, to cut through a lot of the drama of it, but I think after the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco, Roosevelt's getting to mere persuades Roosevelt about a lot of things. Not that he didn't needed persuading per se, but I think helps him a lot. But I don't think Roosevelt stood up enough for Hetch Hetchy. I think that it didn't of course happen on his watch eventually, but I think there was a moment, he did of course work to expand Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley as president with Yosemite, but the building of the reservoir there, I think Roosevelt's culpable only in this belief of the reservoirs that he loves so much, the Newlands Act, the water in the West and all that. And I think it's a misopportunity, I find Hetch Hetchy personally to have been a misoper, a tragedy that we didn't preserve Hetch Hetchy. Is Roosevelt culpable for that? I think he's gotten beat up on that in the historical profession quite a bit, but I would ease up the criticism on him only because he did so much in so many other ways compared to other presidents. I don't know if it's fair to lay that on him, but of course as you know, better than me because you've written on these issues, but it's, I think it was a missed opportunity to save one of the great places. As later, the damming of Glen Canyon was, I mean that dam should have been taken down Glen Canyon. Other questions? Here's one, go ahead and you repeat the question. He was, the question was, as Roosevelt's problems with overurbanization and with industrialization, some of his skepticism about it, particularly from the health points to it, was it Ruskin and Morris influenced him? He read everybody, Theodore Roosevelt. He was so incredibly well read for a president. I mean, and this is not a partisan statement, but when you hear any modern Democrat or Republican say they're like Theodore Roosevelt, they're not. He was really very, unbelievable reader. I'm not, didn't have the time to explain Darwin. Darwin meant means everything to Roosevelt. Huxley means a great deal to him, but of course he was very wide read. He didn't have a, he had this weird moral streak and so he didn't like anything that he thought was degenerate literature. He didn't have a very high tolerance for novels that were risque, which means he wasn't a great judge of art because he, a lot of the great books of his time, he backed away from because he didn't think they had the right social message, civic message to learn, so there's some limitations to him, but he was a deep intellectual. I think he's on par with people like Jefferson. He was an absolutely brilliant man, Theodore Roosevelt, and the West though was what made him because he would have been a feat without the West, but he, TR guys was the best of any president at manipulating image and media. He was a master. He'd bring reporters along with them and cartoonists with them and compliment writers on their new books and the letter would come out and he meant it all, but he really never, that was one of his strong suits was winning over people to his cause. And with everything with Roosevelt was a bit of a crusade, and there are problems with this in part of, which is a longer conversation, but on the conservations front, we're lucky we had a guy like that at that crucial moment and it didn't just happen in 1901 or happen because he met Burroughs or Amir, he had developed an intelligence on species survival, on land management, on forestry, on the beauty, the need for preserves and parks throughout his life. He loved Thoreau, loved Emerson and took, didn't just casually read them, but really took, learned from them. Time for a couple more. Who's next? Yes, yes. Back there. Talk about water. Yes ma'am, it's a good question and I'm sure it'll be coming up more on the conference, but the big problem of Roosevelt's looking at for deforestation is when you lose your forest, what it does with waters and how you need to keep your forest intact and it was difficult to connect to people the concept of water preservation for sustainable communities and forest and how they were interlinked together. Roosevelt's irrigation projects, some obviously wouldn't have led to the population of the West if you didn't have a lot of what he was trying to do with water. I think the danger on this is which ones should have been done and which shouldn't have been done, which natural sites for irrigation had to happen and which didn't. But 19 of June of 1902, the first, the Reclamation Act, and I, due to my limited time, but Reclamation is big part of Roosevelt's conservation in water and particularly in the Western states and getting Westerners to go for that as a big part of his conservationist agenda. And I have a lot about that in my book and as Professor Worster has written the best book on that topic. Here's one, go ahead. Since there are Roosevelt to our time, he was so multifaceted and many-dimensional. We're just here talking about him in conservation. One could do Roosevelt in military affairs, Roosevelt as progressive reformer. He was so multi-sided. We don't have the men of learning. I find Obama to be closer to kind of FDR and Kennedy in style. Roosevelt was a bookaholic just pouring through these. We've had presidents who read a lot, Bill Clinton read a lot, and you know, Barack Obama became president, he's a real reader, but I don't see a cut of guy like Theodore Roosevelt and he's able to create himself that everybody kind of, in America, he's everybody's favorite president because people can take from him what they want to. And there was a bit of a genius of persona-making out of him. I mean, there's a scene, he was up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and he would make these hunts such elaborate ordeals. It was unbelievable. Then he'd say, everybody leave me alone. I'm gonna disappear for eight days. And he disappeared. Well, he came back to Glenwood and demanded the church move outdoors and they move out the organ outside. And he says, this is God's church, the outdoors and he's wearing like a bandana with the perfect hat, with the boots. And I've seen his letters, he would mail order, custom order every bit of apparel. Even if he looked disheveled, it was coordinated. It's like he knew exactly the look he wanted and he knew exactly what the effect of that appearance would be at that particular audience at that moment. And I mean, the guy was unbelievable and when you mentioned in 1904, he won the biggest plurality and he had the biggest electoral college victory and Democrats and Republicans all bought into him because you bought into this persona. He was a very moral and he had a lot of integrity theater Roosevelt. There are some presidents, I study presidents for a living who don't lie. I don't know if that's high on your list of importance. If it is, you will like theater Roosevelt. Theater Roosevelt never lied and unless, and there are other ones I've noticed over the years, Jimmy Carter never lied and Dwight Eisenhower never lied. There are certain people that have a kind of integrity in politics that does not mean I'm not making a judgment on good presidents or bad presidents. FDR, who after Lincoln was our great president was like a chameleon on plaid. I mean, he lied all the time, you know? And he's like, it was our great president. So I'm not saying that should be the end all of a president, but Roosevelt almost genetically did not know how to not tell the truth and that creates a lot of loyalty when you're that way. Let's do one more and then I have a last question for you. Yes, here, Devils Tower and Roosevelt. Well, it's a, there's a longer, I have a chapter of it in my book coming out, but, you know, he had heard about Devils Tower because he would take, there used to be a stage coach that would go from Madura to Deadwood. And when he'd get down to Deadwood, he became tremendous friends with Seth Bullock, who has become famous in recent years as for lonesome dove is the, he's kind of the centerpiece on the show. And he got to know about Devils Tower and knew about the Indian lore with it, that it looks like bear claws scratched down and all of this. And so it became on the top of his list on national monuments to preserve. And it's got that distinction of being the first, which, and it's a magnificent site, if any of you've seen it. I mean, it seems small if you look at a photograph, but if you go down there, you see it for just great distances. In the back of my book, I'm providing a list of all the places Roosevelt saved in the days that he saved them. And it's a massive appendix because it's stunning how many places he had a big interest in Hawaii and Alaska. In fact, days before he left office, he went and put aside all of this Alaska land for bird reservations. And so yeah, I mean, it's, but Devils Tower, if you haven't been, go. I mean, it's a great site. Let me ask you one last question. You said in your talk that there's sort of a movement now to call the Elkhorn Ranch and his time here, the cradle of American conservation. I want you to reflect on that a little. What did he learn here? I mean, in what sense was the Badlands experience of Theodore Roosevelt formative of his mature conservation ethic? It needs to be preserved as that. I mean, when anybody says something's the cradle, you know, you wonder, it's the cradle of conservation. What about the Rose Walden's pond? What about Jane Audubon's house or whatever? I mean, you can go on and on with that kind of thinking. These are significant sites here, the Elkhorn Ranch, because Roosevelt fell in love with the Little Missouri River, with the Cottonwoods, with the antelope. He wrote about it, he loved it. He later in life said that this is my, if I could trade my whole life, the one place that I would, the one chapter of my life I wish I could relive, and that means the most to me was my time in the Badlands. And he really went and sometimes he'd go with groups, but he would go for days by himself, just camping out along the, and you all know how beautiful the Badlands are, but it's here, he writes a book on Thomas Hart Benton here. He writes some essays for magazines, naturalist essays here, but he starts formulating the idea here of saving the West. And that's why I think it's the cradle of conservation in that regard. It's at the Elkhorn when he's frustrated that the game is disappearing like it's disappearing, and he knows how many Buffalo Hides people had just eight years ago, and he's smart enough to come back and say, they're killing off everything. We've got to do something about it. And he started galvanizing people in George Bird Grinnell in New York and together starting to say, let's save the West from ruin. And in that regard, I think it's, if there's any Roosevelt-ian site for conservation, it's here in the Badlands, not just the park, but particularly Elkhorn site, which is you go there, and now it's just the foundation of the house, but if you're quiet, you hear the solitude and the wind and the birds. And you can relive what Roosevelt heard, because there weren't people off in there. He was there by himself a lot. And you can relive what he felt, this sort of spiritual power. Roosevelt faked going to church a lot. He would do, and he liked church for kids, and he liked to be seen at churches. Usually he was cutting up in church, handing candy out to kids, and whispering during sermons. He was very unhinged inside churches. He really was an outdoor, he found a kind of spiritual depth from the wind, and in particular in breezes, and it's in this prairie lands. He loved, some people, he used to beg, I was telling somebody today, he would have loved Rachel Carson's books because they're so readable on oceans. But he, and he wrote about the Navy and sea, he later would say, I'm out of any landscape. The landscape, by most love, is the plains. It was on horseback, through the plains, seeing antelope or buffalo, and just riding with that feeling you get of that openness, that it was just the environment that spoke to him. We all have favorites, it's like we have favorite national parks. This was his favorite place in the world. Professor Brinkley has graciously agreed to do a book signing in the lobby. There's a reception to follow. We will gather here again first thing tomorrow morning. What a great start. Thank you, Douglas Brinkley.