 I just want to first of all say that this is the third of our symposia and I think already until this moment at least it has been far the best of them. I have been so delighted by the three talks before now with Professor Brinkley's second talk at noon today. Everyone has contributed something really important to this discussion and I think that we are on our way to helping to clarify the question of what is Theodore Roosevelt's place in the history of conservation and how do we evaluate Roosevelt as a conservationist. I just want to quickly go back to a couple of things that I've heard last night. Douglas Brinkley spoke of Roosevelt as possibly bipolar or manic depressive. We certainly know that he had bouts of depression including here in western North Dakota and he said that K. Jameson of Johns Hopkins has written a book in which she speaks of exuberance as one coping mechanism with depression and he said if ever there was a man who embodied exuberance it was Theodore Roosevelt. I thought that was really a great insight. I know her work on Mary Wether Lewis and I was thinking of one of Roosevelt's most interesting single sentences about his time in North Dakota. He said black care seldom sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough. Black care seldom sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough. That could be the motto of Theodore Roosevelt's life. Now whether he was fighting off black care or just a man of animal high spirits isn't either here nor there. It is clear that he lived a hectic life and he died at the age of 60 in some part because he had been so punishing to his body all of his life. This is a man who read a book a day in addition to being one of the most forceful executives in American history in addition to being a hands-on paterfamilias of one of the most rambunctious families in American history. You'll see from what's about to unfold in my talk how much he could pack into a short period of time. Doug Brinkley also said last night that he thought Roosevelt was happiest traipsing around in the wilderness and he said it in an even more powerful way just now at lunch. He said and I think this is very important for us to keep central to our discourse. He said the American spirit for Theodore Roosevelt is tied to wilderness, open space, wildlife, and some sort of reconnection with the early dawn of humankind, squatting around a fire, killing something and eating it more or less fresh from the kill, fording a river when it's cold. I think that's really central to Roosevelt's life and that's one reason why he resonates so deeply with the wilderness community and another way of saying that is that I think Roosevelt got it. If you love wilderness, Roosevelt got it and just leave the hunting out of the equation for the moment. You'll see in this trip that he took in 1903 what he really wanted to do more than anything else in the world was not kill something. He wanted to camp out under primitive conditions. If you know Joseph Saxe's book, Mountains Without Handrails, which I just heartily recommend as one of the great books, Joseph Saxe says we are ennobled as industrial humankind. We are ennobled to the extent that we voluntarily and deliberately lower our technological superiority over the rest of creation. In other words, if you go to a trout stream and drop a stick of dynamite into it and 500 trout come to the surface, that's not fishing. But if you use a flycast, the elegant poetry of a flycast, as seen in St. Norman McClain's A River Runs Through It, that's sport, that you have lowered your technological superiority and that has ennobled the connection between humans and nature. Or if you shoot an elephant with a cruise missile, that's not sport. But if you stalk an elk in the badlands with bow and arrow and the only way you're going to get that elk is to in some sense understand elkness, how elk move, how they browse when they're at the water, how long they'll stay in one place, that's sport. And Roosevelt loved that above all else. There's a famous letter that he wrote about Oyster Bay, and he said, I took my sons and their cousins and some hangers on, all boys, all boys, you know, from eight till 18 years old out camping. He said once a year they asked me to take them out camping on the northern shore of Long Island. We find a secluded beach and we swim and we wrestle and we climb hills and we play point to point and then he said at the end of the day they all tumble into sleep but before that they asked me to tell them ghost stories. And I sit around the campfire and I tell stories of Cuba and I tell stories of my big game hunting and I tell stories of my time out in Dakota and I tell stories of every sort of the civil war and of Daniel Boone. He said in the next morning they all tumble out of their sleeping roles and I make them breakfast and they are good enough to think that my breakfast is delicious. It's just a beautiful picture of a man who loved children. Roosevelt's wife either says he was her seventh child. He was a boy all of his life in essence and he had a boy's enthusiasm for life, a boy's exuberance and he was happiest in some respects. He was happy in many different situations but he was drawn to squatting around a campfire. That mattered to him ultimately more than shooting something. We've been talking about the role of violence in Roosevelt's life and there was. I think Roosevelt had a lethal attachment to violence. Interestingly it was said earlier today that Roosevelt killed his man in Cuba rather than the United States and that's true. But Roosevelt did have a bloodlust and there was something about visceral violence that really appealed to something deep in his character. But I think the way Roosevelt saw it was that violence was inherent to the human condition, that it was particularly inherent to the American experience. Frederick Jackson Turner had a frontier thesis. Roosevelt had a frontier thesis that was published at much the same time and they're very similar in some respects and they're quite distinct in another because for Frederick Jackson Turner the quintessential American man was a pioneer, was a farmer who came up over the ridge, cleared trees, plowed the field, killed off the varmints and began to create the conditions of the American experience and after the trees were cleared and the first crops came in then there would be a church or a masonic lodge or a school or a community theater and Turner talks about this regeneration from frontier ridge to frontier ridge as the essence of the American character and then worried about or at least asked what the American character would look like after the frontier moment closed. Well Roosevelt was enamored of that. He and Turner were friends and corresponded mutually and happily reviewed each other's books but Roosevelt's frontier thesis has violence at the center of it rather than the pioneer farmer. Roosevelt's frontiersman is George Rogers Clark who has a violent errand on behalf of civilization in the wilderness and so violence is a more central part of Roosevelt's concept of the American West than it is say of Frederick Jackson Turner and I think for Roosevelt himself violence we've been sort of dancing to the edge of psychoanalysis of Roosevelt and all of us trying to avoid it but if you look at the pattern of violence in Roosevelt's life and you'll see it from what I'm about to say when Roosevelt was at his most confident he was at his least violent when he was at his least confident he was at his most violent for example the two most violent periods of his life except for Cuba are the safari in 1910 in Africa and his trip to South America in 1914 it turned out that the South American trip did not wind up as a hunting trip but his deep desire was to kill South American quadrupeds to bring back to the Smithsonian and other natural history museums and that that expedition into the Amazon tributaries had a lot of violence in it it didn't turn out to be hunting exactly but those two periods are interesting because they follow periods in which Roosevelt has peaked you know he leaves the presidency voluntarily in March of 1909 he's the youngest former president of the United States he's at the height of his powers he wanted desperately to have a third term he had chosen not to take one and suddenly at the age of 50 he is at loose ends there's no definition for him of what it is that he's now supposed to do as a post-presidential statesman this led H. L. Menken who watched Roosevelt's post-presidential career with extraordinary skepticism Menken finally said if Roosevelt is our example of a post-president the best thing we could do for them in the country is take them out and shoot them that a post-president is a dangerous man in a democratic culture so here's Roosevelt who has had power and has used it more more with more potency than any president with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln and suddenly he's out and at loose ends and he went to Africa and it was really mayhem he killed way more than he should have he went to kill he said he went later to supply specimens for the Smithsonian and natural history museums but there was a scramble to that side of it he really went to kill so as his power ebbs and and as his sense of identity slips away there's a period of hectic violence in Africa similarly he went to South America in 1913 and stayed through part of 1914 that's after the the debacle of the bull moose campaign and suddenly now not only powerless but having been profoundly repudiated by the republican party he's now anathema he's now a pariah in republican central circles he goes to South America and recklessly seeks out danger danger to himself danger to his son and danger to others so if you look at this pattern of violence in Roosevelt I mean my sense of it is that Roosevelt believed that humans are a violent creature and that violence is on the whole a good thing but that it needs to be chastened and channelized through hunting through ritualized forms of violence like boxing and football as you know he helped to save college football Roosevelt believes in violence but he wants to civilize it to a certain extent but never too much and that's the dance that Roosevelt is always playing what what level of violence is a sustainable level of violence in a culture and I think one reason that Roosevelt became a conservationist this sounds I mean a little perverse but he wanted to preserve the possibility of violent encounters for American citizens for the rest of time it's not just hunting he believed that we had been formed by wilderness and that wilderness was a violent project in some part and that if we were going to maintain the American character we had to preserve arenas where violence was somehow acceptable and that would be periodic war blood sports you know he's famous for his violent athletic activities he was while boxing in the White House with a young officer from the armed forces much younger than Roosevelt Roosevelt's corpulent I think Don Worcester said stocky Roosevelt is out of shape he's the president of the United States he has these young army officers who are at the top of their form in their 20s come and box with them and he always says don't hold back go ahead hit me as hard as you can and some of them did and one of them put out his eye the Torah's retina and he never saw out of that eye again there was no repair mechanism in Roosevelt's era so this this officer puts out Roosevelt's eye and then Roosevelt in writing about it says I didn't bother to tell him what happened I didn't want him to feel guilty and on another occasion Roosevelt took up jujitsu and he said there's nothing more exhilarating than being thrown over the head of a 300 pound Japanese man which I suppose is true and then it but my very favorite of all the Roosevelt stories involves Gifford Pinchot and let me just digress to say that if you want to understand Roosevelt in conservation you have to look at Roosevelt the governor of New York and I hope Doug that in your book the governorship plays a role but the great book on the governorship of New York for Roosevelt has not yet been written and I don't think you can really understand Roosevelt the conservationist unless you understand sort of his probationary attempts at conservation and the Adirondacks and the Catskills and the Palisades and other issues during his his four years as governor but while he's governor he he's been reading about Gifford Pinchot Gifford Pinchot is the first scientific forester he's trained abroad he comes back and so he's sort of the leading environmental expert on timber culture and Roosevelt invites him to come up to Albany to meet him and to advise him Roosevelt's governor of the state of New York Pinchot is this very learned fellow Pinchot comes to lunch they have a nice luncheon and then Roosevelt says to him hey you want to wrestle and they get down on the ground and wrestle I mean the governor of New York and the leading timber culture expert of the country are going two out of three rounds on the floor of the governor's mansion just think of George Bush and Condoleezza Rice you know hey you want to wrestle you know this is an odd fellow you know this is a very strange man Theodore Roosevelt so when he's when he's at his most confident I think he can get rid of the thing he has to prove proving something is central to Roosevelt's character his father says my son you must make your body he spends the rest of his life trying to live up to that challenge his father didn't fight in the civil war for very good reasons his father bought proxies during the war which was relatively common Roosevelt was ashamed of this and when he finally did go to Cuba he said to his sister Corinne now I've indicated the family now Roosevelt's fight now Roosevelt's have stepped up he Roosevelt has a lot to prove and something that Doug Brinkley said at lunch about you know the dandy Roosevelt going off to Liverpool with these liver puddley and tuffs and they're looking at him in his in his knicker boxers and his his little scientific kits and you know he was a bookish man and in some respects he was an effeminate boy and in some respects he was a fastidious person and Roosevelt therefore had to prove that he wasn't effeminate to use his term and he proved it by ritualized violence so there's always something to prove in Roosevelt and when he goes on these sprees of killing I think that that's for some reason if you if you could look at this in a psychoanalytical framework you would see that his confidence level for whatever reason has come down but when his confidence level goes up he sort of jettisons that so let me just show you a little of this this trip this trip that he took is is one of the great trips of his whole life it's 19 three he's been president since September 14th 19 one and he's found his stride at first he was very anxious because he was you know the fill in for McKinley but he's had some triumphs he successfully intervened in the anthracite coal crisis the year before this he has filed suit against the northern securities trust and even though that was controversial he survived it politically it looks like he's going to be reelected in 19 four states are already lining up behind him this is a confident time in Roosevelt's life and so he takes this trip by train from April 1st 19 three to June 5th eight weeks and look what he did in this time 25 states 14,000 miles 150 towns 262 speeches including five major major political addresses he had a air force one at the time was a seven car palatial train that was when travel meant something to presidents he has a club car a dining car a reporter's car a sleeping car and then he has this 70 foot presidential pullman with two sleeping chambers two bathrooms a kitchen and most important sorry a platform on the back from which to talk in towns like Dickinson towns that he can't spend any time in they slow the train down he gives a few words the five major addresses that he gave he wouldn't have said this because at that time you really weren't permitted by presidential protocol to campaign for your reelection but these were speeches that he knew would be widely reported that would help him get reelected and look where he gave them he gave them all before the hundredth meridian he gave them all in the heartland the midwest rather than the west chicago the Monroe Doctrine Milwaukee trusts st paul tariff sue falls labor policy and here in our own fargo this might have bewildered some of his audience an hour and a half address on american policy in the philippines and then he leaves fargo and when he leaves fargo he says now we're getting into the west that I love so much now i've done with my political work now we can have fun there are only 261 more speeches to go the speeches imagine having to give 262 speeches imagine being barack obama or sarah palin or john mccain he said to henry cavitt lodge all as as Doug said at lunch his friends henry adams and john hay and henry cavitt lodge and all these these establishment folks looked down on rosa for slumming it with common people and even liking common people and he was always defensive about this but he said to lodge platitudes and iteration are necessary in order to hammer the truths and principles i advocate into people's heads in other words if i sound shallow and repeat myself a lot it's not as bad as it looks here's his journey and i'm so bad at this i i had to call my daughter to help me do this powerpoint she's 14 she said dad let me walk you through it but um so i tried to show the phases of this he starts in washington dc and he gives the speech in chicago and then milwaukee he goes to madison he goes up to st paul minneapolis down to sue falls up to avardine so the first phase gets him to yellowstone national park he stops notice in fargo jamestown valley city bizmark dickinson and interestingly enough madora i'll come back to that so the first phase is to get him to yellowstone national park then he spends two full weeks in yellowstone national park it's a long time for a president of the united states it's a long time for anyone then he goes from yellowstone to st lewis because it's the centennial not the bison tenure but the centennial of the lewis and carcac expedition and rosevelt wants to it's been asked to address it he gives a speech there in st lewis and interestingly enough for you who are north dakotans the maltees cross cabin which is now on the property of theodore rosevelt national park was shipped to st lewis to be part of that world's fair there were several log cabins there and rosevelt came on the train on this occasion gets off goes to the big exposition hall and there is this cabin but he didn't recognize it too many things had changed the roof had been removed and things had been taken apart and rebuilt and he couldn't any and people wanted him to say oh there's the cabin where my character was set he said i'm not so sure but he said if sewell says it is i guess it's my cabin so then the cabin just to finish that story the cabin is then taken apart again and taken to portland for the lewis and carc centennial there and so that cabin is a much traveled cabin it wound up on the capital grounds in bismarck spent a little time in fargo now it's been preserved as well as it can be and restored to the extent that we can really do it on the on the property of theodore rosevelt national park interpretive center so after that that's why he digressed and went back to st lewis then he goes through kansas down into uh through wyoming or colorado i'm sorry that should be colorado he goes to santa fe and albuquerque and then for the first time ever to the grand canyon having gone to the grand canyon he goes to barstow and san bernadino and los angeles then up the coast he stops us at santa clara santa roza i'll come back to that and then he gets to yosemite where he camps that's on the front of all of your materials that's the place time when he camped with john muir for three days and he goes up the pacific coast finds his way back across the country and gets back to washington dc on june 5th i don't have time to go through this all but i'm giving you the itinerary here was april 7th 19 three that he was in jamestown bismarck mandan dickinson and madora when he got to madora rosevelt said i can't stay i have pressing i must go on i have pressing business well his pressing business was a two-week vacation in yellowstone national park it's a great there's a picture i'll show you in a minute you've probably seen the picture that was taken of rosevelt in the town hall in madora on that occasion he stopped for a little about an hour and he shook a lot of hands and heard a lot of stories they had a dance they wanted him to stay for he wouldn't stay they also had brought this is the kind of the poignant moment they had brought out his old horse manatou when he lived out here he had a favorite horse called manatou which is algonquin for the great spirit and that horse was still alive in 19 three and so they trotted it out and they wanted the president to take a ride on manatou but the secret service suggested no it was dark they didn't want the president getting hurt and so the locals joe ferris and sylvain and jerry paddock and others were were a little crestfallen that the once reckless rosevelt wouldn't ride on manatou april 9 through 24th in yellowstone national park with the naturalist john burrows here's what's interesting about this i i'm looking and studying this episode i just find this fascinating so far as we know on this eight-week journey rosevelt the big game hunter you've been hearing so much about did not shoot one thing in eight weeks in the american west that's remarkable and during the only thing we know he killed was a mouse he was in yellowstone national park he was a friend of sea heart mariam mariam and as you've heard in rosevelt sort of had a friendly dispute going about speciization you know what's a species what's a subspecies do you lump or do you differentiate rosevelt's on a horse remember he's an almost blind man he sees a mouse that he reckons is new to science he jumps off that horse and wrestles the mouse to death then while he's there he takes out a taxidermy kit and he eviscerates the mouse and sends its peltries and bones back to sea heart mariam and says i believe i have discovered a new mouse so far as we know that's the only thing rosevelt killed on this eight-week journey there's your big game hunter what he because his confidence is so high and what did he do in yellowstone national park in yellowstone national park for fifteen days theater rosevelt camped out and he counted elk and he observed antelope and he observed bison he so wanted to see a grizzly bear but they were still in hibernation for that entire period they just went to remote places in the park and camped that's a long time to camp in the spring it's still winter in yellowstone park he's listening to birds he's observing the gauntness of the herds that are nearly starved from winter he goes off alone a couple of times just to watch the elk and count them this is somebody who loves nature in a pure way this is not an instrumentalist this is a this is a wilderness guy who likes to squat by a fire and eat beans and drink coffee and talk i think it's just absolutely remarkable that the president of the united states jettisoned his reporters up at gardener took no reporters with him and he goes into the park with major pitcher who's the who's the cop who is the superintendent of the park and john burrows and a couple of handlers a couple of cooks and for 15 days all they really do is sit out in one of the world's great places and enjoy it i know i i hiked the little missouri river two years ago from marmouth to the north unit over 17 days and you have to like to camp to be out that long without a bat you have to like this a lot if you want to if you're going to do this if this isn't suits you you're going to get dirty and grumpy really quickly go on to billings goes back as i've shown to st louis that's the world's fair then he goes across kansas through colorado santa fe may 6 the grand canyon i'll come back to that anyway ramond is the portal to um yellow yosemite from may 15 through 18th of much shorter time and a less private time he's with john mure in yellowstone national park in a certain sense the time with burrows was pure vacation in in some sense the time with mure was a photo op for theater rosewell he liked the idea of being there with john mure and and having the country know about it in the photograph that's on all of your materials commemorates that he winds up in butte montana crosses the country again you can find that antenna anywhere i just want to pause quickly to look at a couple of moments madora i've said what i think i need to say about yellowstone and then the grand canyon yosemite and the redwoods here's the picture from madora he couldn't stay but he had one of the photographers that were on that seven car train take this famous photograph and there he is in the back and here are the folks of madora and there are people like doug ellison who can identify a lot of them and they had stayed and waited for this moment and you know that what he had said in 1900 when he came through and this i think also is a comment on much of the discourse that's been going on for the past day now in 1900 he looked out at the same group of people and said it is here that the romance of my life began keyword the romance of my life there are several roosevelt's there's a romantic and he's a deeply romantic man but there's also a pragmatist and a utilitarian and an industrialist and a nationalist and an imperialist and a jingoist and a man of bloodlust but for roosevelt the episode in the badlands was about romance after the expedition this trip was over he wrote a letter to john hay his very dear friend john hay has been mentioned a couple of times he was the secretary of state in the mckinley and roosevelt administrations until he died in 1905 john hay was one of the most learned men in america at the time he was one of the greatest diplomats in american history and it was his job you know roosevelt's a grandstander and he's always running off at the mouth and poor hay had to clean up after president roosevelt in these very delicate diplomatic situations with respect to britain and the keizer and columbian panama and it was a it was a it was not a fun job for john hay to try to protect roosevelt from himself in diplomatic circles john hay had known roosevelt's father the and greatly admired him he didn't greatly admire theodore roosevelt until late in the game he regarded roosevelt as a kind of a cowboy and a buccaneer and a grandstander and a maverick and somebody who was had something to prove but they became closer and closer friends and after this this journey roosevelt on august 9th 19 three so just you know a few weeks after he got back to washington wrote a 12 page letter to john hay and he said at that dinner party the other night you asked me to describe to write down some of the stories i was telling you at the dinner party about my recent trip to the west so i've tried to do it it's it's very imperfect but here it is it's a 12 page letter hay had written a famous book called pike county ballads about it's sort of in the same tradition as brett hart and and mark twain's roughing it it's about those quaint but really interesting people who live out in the heartland and how they even though they they don't groom themselves as we do and don't attend to opera as we do and they can't parse a latin sentence they have hearts of gold and they're more authentic in some way than the rest of us hay had become famous for writing this book called pike county ballads and roosevelt wrote a 12 page letter in the manner of hay's pike county ballads and what's interesting is he summarizes this whole elaborate itinerary i've been showing you but what does he focus on for at least nine pages out of the 12 roosevelt tells madora stories seph bullock hell roaring bill jones the time he punched out a drunk in a bar he says and maybe we can believe this and maybe not that when he used to pass through on the trains then he was on cattle trains and he would be after they would rush the they'd stop at someplace to get water and and roosevelt and others would take these sticks and and and shove them into the sides of the cattle to keep them from lying down because of the cattle lay down in the box cars they might be trampled to death and so their job was to keep the cattle up this whole time and roosevelt said then the train would start moving and we'd get on the caboose and we'd run on top of the train on the backs of it all the way up to our car did this happen maybe i mean it sounds a little oh and wister ask did roosevelt really run on tops of a of a moving freight train to get maybe he did he says it many many times but most of this famous letter one of the best letters roosevelt ever wrote was not about yellowstone it was not about yosemite it was not about conservation practice it wasn't about hunting it was about his time in madora somehow the madora badlands experience was the central story in the roosevelt repertoire there were other important stories cuba a big game hunting safaris but somehow this story and when i was working on this little book we did on roosevelt i found that statement that was mentioned by i think it was uh professor brinkley that when roosevelt was president he had senator fall from new mexico into the white house and they were chatting about the west a new mexican senator in a sort of a north dakota president in a certain way and roosevelt said to him if you could only have one memory of all of the memories of your life and every other memory and experience had to disappear you get one and only one what would you choose in the written account of we that we have of a typically roosevelt does not record elbert fall's answer because he doesn't care he says i would choose the time i was an authentic cowboy and rancher in dakota territory i mean i think he must mean this that of all of the experiences of his life if he only got one it was this one and that's why we north dakotans need to take that so very seriously i mean this was not one of the many many adventures of theater roosevelt this was the adventure this was the shaping moment of roosevelt's life this is when he became the roosevelt of mount rushmore and the roosevelt of the presidency and the roosevelt of the roosevelt corollary corollary to the Monroe doctrine why it's that wilderness it's the frontier thesis it's daniel boon it's roosevelt getting to be daniel boon and getting to be davie crocket and there's violence in it you know the most famous of all the stories is the time he punched out the drunk in weibo and he tells us in that and he told many different versions of this but in every version as the as the gunslinger with a loaded pistol in each hand goes down what happens the pistols go off it's important to roosevelt that he might have been killed this wasn't just a bout of pugilism somewhere there was an armed gunman that roosevelt knocked out in a bar and as the gunman went down the pistols were discharged key moment for roosevelt regeneration through violence on the frontier in the wilderness in the turner roosevelt frontier regenerative moment in america daniel boon davie crocket this letter could have easily been about yellowstone it isn't it could easily have been about the redwoods it's not it's about madora i think that's very very interesting and yet he spends about an hour in madora and rushes on he spends his time in yellowstone i just want to digress for one second on this i have a sentimental attachment to sharon springs kansas last night if you listened douglas wrinkley said that when he was out here he got a badger he went to sharon springs kansas on the second and third of may 19 three and he stops there it's on the union pacific line it's just a godforsaken little place out in far western kansas about the size of a regent or reader he stops there he spent a night he spent two nights a day and a half but two nights and he went to church and everyone for 40 or 50 miles around came in on their buggies and horses to see this great man and he tells a beautiful and moving account of it in this letter and as he was leaving the this little girl came up there were there were five or six little girls in white dresses and he said there they were you know they had no shoes on they were all tanned from living out there and this girl said mr president would you like a badger and roosevelt said well yes i i think i should like a badger so so she goes back to her farm her ranch three miles away and comes back with a baby badger and gives it to him and he says where'd you get this badger she said well my brother joceia caught it this morning and he said i shall call it joceia and he took it back all the way to washington dc and then he gave it to his children and he said it was a very good if somewhat biting sort of pet so he's dog was talking about how much he loved common people he says of the people of charon springs kansas they were in their sunday best and their brown sunburned little arms and faces had been scrubbed till they almost shown it was a very kindly homely country congregation all the people of a type i knew well and all of them looking well to do in prosperous in a way that hardly was warranted as it seemed to me by the eaten off wire fencing clothes short grass ranges of dry plains around about among the rest there was a little girl who asked me if i would like a baby badger it's shown here by the way that's the badger this is roosevelt in charon springs kansas i found this photograph in the wallace county museum in charon springs kansas little pathetic museum with the world's largest nail collection and barbed wire collection and you know those wonderful museums that have where they've taken arrowheads and formed them into dioramas of the the story of the american west and it's just a marvelous perfect sort of place and i was looking through the files and here's this picture of jocea among the rest there was a little girl who asked me if i'd like a baby badger which he said her brother jocea had just caught i said i would in an hour or two later the badger turned up from the little girl's father's ranch some three miles out of town the little girl had several other little girls with her all in clean starched sunday clothes and ribbon-tied pigtails so the seven girls are standing around he's taken the badger and then he realized they're that they want something and he says what do you want and their father sternly warns them off turns out they want to see his presidential car so he lets them in he says their little eyes were just the size of silver dollars because they had never seen anything that splendid in all of their life and he lets them stay until sundown wandering around his train the badger i'm quoting again was christen jocea and became from that time an inmate of the train until my return home when he received a somewhat stormy welcome from the children and is now one of the household the numerous gifts i received on this trip by the way included not only a badger but two bears a lizard a horn toad and a horse well the reason why the i love this story just because of the fact of it but this is also sharon springs kansas is where my daughter catherine lives she lives on a in this town in the middle of nowhere out on the kansas colorado border and this town has almost nothing in history to to call attention to itself except that it's applied the most famous badger in american history when he gets to the grand canyon we're just about out of time and i won't have time to say everything i want but here's what here's the second thing so the first thing i've been trying to say is that that the quintessential rosevelt the confident rosevelt is not a killer it's a camper when he gets to the grand canyon he's never been there before he's never been to california before he's seen the grand canyon for the first time back then there weren't photographs i mean there might have been a few but it's not like in our world where if you see the eiffel tower you've seen it if you see the suez canal you've already seen it many times in video and audio and so on back then there was a much deeper chasm between the american people and sites that weren't in their vicinity he says i don't know exactly what words to use in describing it is beautiful and terrible and unearthly remember this is not one of his prepared speeches he's now speaking spontaneously and as he looked at the grand canyon he said i think the best thing ever said of the wilderness of america and i think this is the motto of the national park system of america he said famously they were planning to build a hotel and other amenities leave it as it is you cannot improve on it the ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it keep it for your children your children's children and for all who come after you i mean nobody has ever said it better than that this is this is the this is the credo of the wilderness leave it as it is you cannot improve on it the ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it spontaneously said by theodore roosevelt in may of 19 three at the grand canyon he goes up to the redwoods and they if you were here last night the well wishers had put placards and signs and advertisements on these majestic redwoods roosevelt threw a little fit he said i am not going to give my prepared speech until you remove those placards which i regard as obnoxious to the idea of the redwood so he says i propose to go off on a little walk and if i when i come back if you've removed those placards i may give my speech so he leaves for an hour and they you know they climb up and pull down all the placards that said welcome teddy and we love you mr president he gets and he says those cards pinned up on that tree give an air of the ridiculous to this majestic grove do keep these trees keep all the wonderful scenery of this wonderful state unmarred by the vandalism or the folly of man or this one of his most famous single pronouncements i feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the euphrates he said these are our cathedrals this is our westminster abbey these we don't have Notre Dame and st peters of rome but we have the grand canyon and we have the titans and we have the redwoods and we have the sequoias and we have yosemite these are our cathedrals and we have to treat them every bit as respectfully and with as much sacrament as the europeans treat their most famous places and ruins this is a wilderness guy yes he may have flooded hatch hatching and yes he was a utilitarian but something deep in rosevelt was a preservationist you know normally we create this false dichotomy between the conservationist pin show and rosevelt and the preservationist the purists mure and others it's way more complex than that and some really important part of rosevelt was a preservationist and so i'll just close with with just a couple of thoughts about this one is that here's i think how rosevelt saw it let's take the most sublime and majestic places in the country that don't seem to have much economic value that was important to him and we will sequester them off and preserve them forever yellowstone yosemite the grand canyon etc he had a long list and he didn't get all that he wanted but he wisely his motto was use the tools you have those things he couldn't make national parks he often made national monuments he couldn't make them national monuments he often made them bird sanctuaries but he used federal tools including a whole new range of of executive tools many of them invented by himself to sequester parts of the american west as in some sense off limits to routine economic development so he was a preservationist for especially spectacular places that weren't already overrun and didn't have some essential economic value that would make that difficult to do then he was a conservationist for the rest we will have national forests you can cut timber on them you can hunt in them there's mining in them but they will we will chase an industrial violence by regulation so he had a range of different levels of protection we still have this you know we have high levels of protection in national parks and monuments somewhat lower and forests lower still in blm land he wanted to create a series of chasening mechanisms brought by the federal government to to make sure that we preserve the absolute best of the west and we conserved the rest of it in a responsible way and that government was an essential tool in that responsibility so I think that this is a consistent view in Roosevelt and the reason I just struck me when I was listening to Robert Morgan today that you know we really could call the national park system boon land Daniel boon land he wanted Daniel boon enclaves all over this country for people to go into and the last thing I'll say is that in this way in a sense matters I think more than everything else about the national parks what Roosevelt didn't want was national parks in which you have sort of a coney islandism where there is there are lots of amenities and lots of roller coasters and lots of excursion systems and lots of this and that these pleasure parks were being formed all over the world in Roosevelt's time that's what was happening to Yellowstone it did happen in some sense to glacier national park that we were going to have an industrial model of luxury vacations for the privileged in our national park systems you see this today if you go to some of the lodges in Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon very wealthy people come they stay in these really extraordinary lodges they feel very rustic in doing so they stroll out for a little while onto the asphalt paths and then scurry back for a fine dinner and they then they go away and say yes I'm regenerated by my time in Yellowstone this is one model of this and Roosevelt hated that model he wanted a Yellowstone that was as lightly industrialized as possible so that when you go into it it's really squatting by a fire and you're going to get dirty and you're going to get smoky and you're going to have rain and it's not going to be sheltered and there isn't a great meal it's a meal of beans that's his vision and he helped to save the national park system to the extent that it was saved from it from that bourgeois luxury model of amenities that matters in some sense more than anything else he did because it was it was up for grabs that was a road we had reached across roads and we could easily have gone into that other model and Roosevelt said no Daniel Boone does not stay in a resort we're staying on the ground we're sleeping on the ground and you know what you might get wet too I think that's the for me that's the essence of why Roosevelt's so great and on this famous trip at the heart of one of the most hectic presidencies in American history he made sure he got 15 days camping out in Yellowstone National Park no resort so thank you very much now