ABSTRACT
Theodore Roosevelt wrote lyrically about killing game in The Wilderness Hunter: In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole. Theodore Roosevelt’s turn to conservation was also a response to the influence of conservation activists. The persons who most influenced Roosevelt were John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, both of whom were manly men with whom Theodore Roosevelt was comfortable. Theodore Roosevelt successfully urged Congress to give the President authority to designate national forests and parks. Theodore Roosevelt created or enlarged 150 national forests, 11 from 1903 to 1907, 102 in 1908, and 37 in 1909. Roosevelt added 150 million acres to the reserve, an area larger than Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. There was a downside to building dams to irrigate the land. The drive to irrigate and produce crops came into conflict with the protection of monuments, with the tragic loss of invaluable sites of cultural, historic, and scientific value.
