#194： The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt
Episode Stats
Summary
On this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss Teddy Roosevelt's obsession with keeping detailed notes of every aspect of his life as a natural historian, hunter, and conservationist using his field notes as the primary source.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so if you've been
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following the art of manliness for a while you know we're big fans of theodore roosevelt around
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here the guy crammed a lot into a lifetime there's a new biography out about him that takes a look
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at his life as a natural historian conservationist hunter and it uses tr's actual field notes that he
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took out in the field as the primary source to write this biography it's called theodore roosevelt
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in the field today on the show the author michael canfield and i discuss what we can learn about
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teddy roosevelt's approach to life from his field notes that he meticulously began as a boy he started
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this when he was like eight or nine years old and he continued uh throughout his even throughout his
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presidency we also talk about how his field notes that he took helped sharpen his keen sense of
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observation and how that helped him during his presidency and his political life and then finally
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michael and i discuss what life lessons men can take from the field notes of the bull moose himself
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theodore roosevelt really interesting show uh be sure to check the show notes out after you listen
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because you can actually see actual scanned images of teddy roosevelt's field notes as well as links to
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resources mentioned the show you can find the show notes at aom.is slash canfield and that's spelled
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c-a-n-f-i-e-l-d mike canfield welcome to the show thank you for having me so you got a great biography
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out about theodore roosevelt um but this one's unique it's called theodore roosevelt in the field
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and it's unique in that you focus on his life as a natural scientist hunter conservationist using his
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field books field notebooks that he kept all throughout his life as your primary source
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i'm curious how did you get interested in this part of teddy roosevelt's life that's a good question i
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got interested in his field notes from a previous project that i did on how currently living scientists
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and naturalists keep their notebooks and journals and kind of try to figure out how people would
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actually keep scientific and natural history information in the field as opposed to how we
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think they might or what we would imagine and so out of that process uh and project i did a little bit
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of consideration on historical field notes darwin linnaeus uh even lewis and clark's notes from their
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expedition and stumbled across theodore roosevelt's notes um which are here at harvard um about two
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thirds of the notebooks are in our theodore roosevelt collection and i found them and i was actually just
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talking to somebody about them at one point describing the africa diary the 1909 africa diary with
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these these images that roosevelt wrote these little sort of scrawled images of all the animals he
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shot and it kind of just took off from there so yeah you use these notebooks uh they have some of
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them at the the archives at harvard university um you know and it's crazy how do we have field note
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and field notebooks from when he was a nine-year-old boy because he started this as a very young man we'll
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talk about his career as a natural scientist or a naturalist as a as a child but you know i i had a
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journal when i was in second or third grade so about the same age as theodore roosevelt when he was
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doing his field notebooks but i threw him away so why why why what was it about how did teddy roosevelt
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why did he keep these field notebooks from when he was a eight nine-year-old ten-year-old boy
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i think that part of it was that he was very serious about his natural history study his study
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of the world um there's no question about that he was very studious um and i think there was more
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of a tradition back then of keeping diaries in other words um writing in diaries and then and then
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maintaining them one thing i found very interesting though was that there's evidence that he actually
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copied over his diaries and journal accounts so one of the earlier journals from his what they call
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his grand tour um when he went off with his family to europe the first time he kept a diary and there
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is a diary actually which he kept as a little herbarium he pressed plants in it which still survives we have
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this diary and we have the little pressed plants inside and then there's another journal which is not
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not in the diary format that has like you know the names or the dates and the lines printed on the
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pages but just a blank journal that he wrote in and some of them are actually some dates have a
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entry in the diary and then there's in a separate journal the same diary entry that's been copied over
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but actually the punctuation and the grammar is slightly better so what roosevelt had done is he'd gone
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back to some of his diaries and copied them over into journals like actually copied over the accounts
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so it's not clear that all the original actually the original documents actually survived um but but
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many of these journals and diaries survived and i think he they were just very important to him and he
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was serious about his recording partly because it allowed him to tell stories and narratives of his
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adventures which we can get to later but it certainly showed up in the badlands and and when he was
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doing more professional writing on his adventures well let's talk about his the seriousness that he
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took his i mean he even as a boy he thought of himself as a natural scientist i guess they'd call
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himself a natural historian yeah um i mean so how did this boy he grew up in a brownstone in new york city
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so an urban area how did he develop this intense love for the outdoors and all things nature
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um despite growing up in an urban area yeah well that's a great question and i think it probably
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has a number of um potential answers which i don't think we can know for sure um you know wilson and
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other people might call it biophilia people who you know people just love nature and are naturally
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connected to nature but roosevelt obviously was an extreme case in this instance along with many others
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but he he loved it from a very young age he was drawn to it and he had so i guess what i was what i
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would say is that he had a natural predisposition he just seemed to love to go out and study nature but it
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wasn't just about studying nature he just loved to go out and do things in the world and that's a facet
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that i think is people look to his early natural history study and say oh he was a naturalist from a young
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age and i would agree that's true absolutely he loved nature but he also i would say that's a
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symptom of a larger character um element in roosevelt that he loved to just go out to what
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i call the field he loved to go out and do things in the greater world connect directly with his greater
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world and the early natural history stuff was an example of that his father especially but his family
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made a lot of those early expeditions possible early on he went to the great swamp area of new jersey
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this town called lawanica there's a little brook called lawanica brook where they went and rented a
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house and he rambled around in nature looking at birds and cicadas and all the rest and then later
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obviously they went to oyster bay and up into the adirondack so his family took him out a lot away from
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new york city um to natural areas uh and they spent a lot of time in the summers especially in those
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areas and speaking of how his father encouraged this um i mean what other ways i mean i thought
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when i read this part of roosevelt's life i really admired his father uh he was actually a really great
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example of what it means to be a good dad i mean what were some of the other ways that teddy
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roosevelt's father theodore roosevelt's father uh encouraged this love of nature in his son
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yeah well i mean certainly just making the expeditions happen if you want to call them
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expeditions going up to upstate new york etc i would say also he his father theodore senior went with
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roosevelt on some of these things there's a great passage where roosevelt describes in his diary
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his father reading to him from the last of the mohicans around a campfire in upstate new york
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while he fell asleep so to me that's just a such a great symbol or poignant moment when you see
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roosevelt's father instilling this love of the field in roosevelt what could be better than being
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out on a canoe trip with your dad and he reads you know the last of the mohicans to you and you fall
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asleep it's awesome yeah um another another element i think that um his dad who was not a naturalist
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himself um but just saw this interest early on in roosevelt um when roosevelt you know was theodore
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was carrying these books around the his family's library from david livingstone or you know about
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africa and all these other things he he recognized in his son that this was an interest and he was going
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to foster it roosevelt senior helped found the american museum of natural history so albert s
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bickmore who was an advocate had come to see theodore senior for funding and and support to create the
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amnh in new york and theater theodore roosevelt's dad really helped and helped found it in in their
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living room at the brownstone um and another example is when they um came back from their trip to uh
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roosevelt's trip um to europe he his father actually hooked him up with john bell who was a taxidermist
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who had worked with john james audubon he was the kind of audubon's right hand man this being bell
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who had a taxidermy shop and i interpret i'm not it doesn't say explicitly that his father
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made the connection although roosevelt sort of says that it seems that roosevelt's father really got
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him a position working and learning from john bell of how to prepare uh ornithological specimens so
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there are a bunch of different ways that his dad really nurtured that and i guess the last thing is
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that when he went to college his father said something like i can't quote it just off off the
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top of my head but he said something like if you want to be a scientist you're free to do so i will
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support you in that you're not going to make as much money you're not going to have as as sort of
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elaborate a life as you have here but you can make that decision and i always thought that was a pretty
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nice thing for a father to do too to be realistic but put the decision in his son's court yeah i love that
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and going back to how serious roosevelt took himself as a naturalist even as a boy like you
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talk about in the book he you know kept very detailed notes or records of animals he saw the
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habitats etc but like he even kept he had a museum inside his his house yeah yeah he did and he they
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called it the roosevelt museum of natural history and he founded this with his cousins and a few other
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associated compatriots um and they had a natural history society as well a group so they they had
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this museum right where they contributed their collected specimens and then they also had what
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they called a society where they actually would present papers to one another so they would write
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up a little paper on one of them is about my the migration of whales and roosevelt would read this
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paper and they would talk about it so he wrote this thing out and they would present it to each other and
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talk about the finer points of whales migrating so they were serious they they were modeling kind of
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what happened in the linnaean society and some of the you know professional natural history
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biological societies in the world um but they were acting this out in a serious way not just sort of
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put you know collecting a few shells and birds eggs and stuff um and that really led to him
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studying with bell and preparing specimens and as he you know went through his teenage years and into
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college he then you know had a had a pretty extensive collection of bird skins and knowledge
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of birds um that led to some of his his first publications as well right just to remind people
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like they were he was having these natural history society meetings when he was like eight or nine years
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old uh that yeah i mean that was a little i think the the main natural history society things when
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um they presented papers were a little later probably 13 14 ish um but yeah he started collecting
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and that whole question of childhood natural history museums was was kind of a thing but you know
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people kids would do that um not everybody obviously but but other people who were his peers and um
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that was kind of a a reasonably common thing for kids to do who were really kind of biologically
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inclined um would do some of that so but i think he took it to a little bit more of a professional
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sense than most kids most kids would just have stuff in their room or whatever but he they formalized
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this there's a document um which you can read in the book and um at harvard the you know that is the
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roosevelt museum of natural history history document that is sort of their their charter
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where they wrote it all out um so it wasn't just an informal thing they were serious about it yeah and
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i thought there was a funny scene where i think someone either a maid or his mother threw out
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some animals that he had collected right the mice yeah i mean yeah there were they're periodic
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examples of him butting up against these things you know some at home when he originally had the
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museum in his bedroom and then the maid sort of said this is not okay with us and so they had to
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move it up to a more remote location in the house and then when he was in dresden the um you know he was
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keeping mice and other things and the family he was staying with with just were you know trying to get
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rid of all these crazy animals that roosevelt was keeping in the house um so you know he his um how
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should i say this his tolerance and interest in having a little natural history museum in his room
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didn't always fit with um how other people thought about it and i guess even when he came to to harvard
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um his boarding house uh on winthrop street which i'm actually just looking out the window right now
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and it's at that site the the the um boarding house is no longer there um but where he lived here
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if you look at the photographs he brought a lot of that kind of thing into his boarding house room as
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well when he was in college so yeah he brought his taxidermy kit yeah all that kind of stuff like
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you know he'd bring in turtles or whatever whatever kind of stuff he found um into his room yeah
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so did uh theodore roosevelt actually make contributions to the field of natural history
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as a young man or was this i mean was or was this just a hobby yeah i i think that you could make the
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case that he definitely did um early on you know in his teenage years his collections were pretty
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how should i say it's pretty professionalized for that age he wrote species accounts especially for the
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um specimens that he collected on the trip to egypt and the holy lands for example he has multiple
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accounts of them multiple specimens that he's dissected and documented the contents of the crops
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and um all that so there's really good natural history information there it's that set of information that he
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created there was never published in that form and isn't a real scientific contribution
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but it allowed him to then when he came to harvard um if he ended up assessing the i guess you'd call
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it the ornithological fauna the the birds of the adirondacks and the birds of oyster bay where he'd
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spend a lot of the summers and then they published um a couple of bird lists which are a true contribution
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to natural history because when you make a a list a faunal list of say the adirondacks or oyster bay
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then that gives sort of a snapshot in time of what organisms live there in this case birds
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that can people then can compare to later on or can go down there and know what's there so yes he
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absolutely did and um some of the work he did as a late teen in oyster bay folded into that stuff
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that he then published in the oyster bay um bird list very cool um so you you mentioned earlier that
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pivotal moment where roosevelt's father told him like you can be a natural scientist and i'll support
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you um you know i was kind of that was his career trajectory but what at what point did roosevelt
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decide that he wasn't going to be a full-time natural historian and instead devote himself
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to politics that's a great um moment i think in roosevelt's development when he came to harvard i
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he really was interested in becoming a scientist and he did enjoy his natural history courses here for
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sure um there's clear evidence of that um in his notebooks but also in how he talked about his time
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but i my interpretation is that there are a few pieces that caused him to pivot away from that
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one caused him to pivot away from becoming a full-time sort of naturalist scientist of the day
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um one was the studies that were going on here and the way that uh natural history and science was being
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um was being taught in the museum of comparative zoology which is our sort of the natural history
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museum at harvard um the way it was being taught at the time really grew out of a a german school
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where they were doing a lot of section cutting and pulling organisms apart and looking at very small
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things under the microscope etc and with a lower um how should i say this it was a lower focus on
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field work and field work was really where roosevelt wanted to be he wanted to be out in the field
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you know looking at animals in their natural habitat etc and so i think over time he enjoyed
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his natural history courses but that just wasn't for him sitting in the museum a lot um so that's one
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piece and he also had an interest i think in uh politics and history and other things but that
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came i think out of partly when his father died in um around christmas 1877 his father became sick
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and roosevelt went home and um of course his dad gave him a shotgun for christmas which is a good
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good rooseveltian present um but then roosevelt came back afterwards to harvard and it wasn't long
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that his father really descended into uh had a had a stomach tumor um an intestinal tumor and ended up
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dying uh in february and so roosevelt i think at that point it changed a lot of things but he became
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the head of the family um and i think it it changed the optics of how it looked to be say a natural
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historian who's not going to make a whole lot of money and i think that helped him pivot toward doing
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something that was a career and what he thought of as public service going into um you know politics
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the law etc and he you know after graduation he immediately started law school but didn't finish
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um because he started um in the legislature so that's one thing and i think the the third thing
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is that he met alice lee he fell in love he got a girlfriend and i think that also in some of the
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writings and some of the things in his letters and in his notebooks you can see him completely falling
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head over heels for alice lee and realizing that he wanted to have a settled existence and that going
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off to germany to do graduate work in natural history study or all these other things was not
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going to be the kind of life that he wanted with his darling little sweetheart alice lee and so i think
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all those things kind of pulled kind of came together and caused him to move more toward what at that
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point was called political economy he started writing the naval war of 1812 and um some of those things
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and then pretty quickly after he graduated um did law school and then became an assemblyman
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and uh but at the same time he didn't abandon the field completely he always looked for ways to
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get back out there and continue in some small ways work as a natural historian absolutely yeah i think
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that's um kind of one of the arguments that i'm trying to advance or for consideration is that
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you can see at all these little turning points even though he didn't decide to be a professional
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naturalist or professional natural history writer for his full career he was president at one point
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at all these points along the way he took the opportunity to turn back to the field and do
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things for example it wasn't long after you know he hadn't been assemblyman that long until he met this
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guy at um one of his free trade club meeting um who had a place in the badlands and had bought
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but land in the badlands and roosevelt had always wanted to go out and shoot a buffalo or a bison as
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it's called um and he quickly signed up and went out there on his own it turns out in the end um the
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man grinch didn't decide to go with him um but that's what roosevelt did even before alice lee died
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um roosevelt just turned from the assemblyman stuff at one of their breaks to go out to the field
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to shoot a buffalo and that is a perfect example of the kind of thing that he wanted to do and then
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later on he obviously expanded on that work in the badlands um which we can talk about more but
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i think that was just a feature if you start adding it up over his life it's it's no mistake he just
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that's the way he lived he would do things sort of in the office professionally etc but even while
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president he would escape to the field to hunt to do conservation work to do whatever it was so yeah
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let's talk about his badlands experience so the thing that kicked that off was both his wife and his
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mother died on the same day um and roosevelt decided to get out of dodge needed something needed a change
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so he went out to the dakotas to the badlands bought a ranch tried his hand as a cattle rancher
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and in the process you know had some adventures along the way right how did that experience in
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the badlands shape roosevelt's life i mean what insights did you get from his field notes
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that you saw that a transformation was taking place yeah well there are a whole bunch of elements and i
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think one of the things is that the badlands destination and badlands piece of his life started
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before alice lee and his mother died you know died on the same day um he had gone out to as we said to
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go shoot a buffalo and bought the ranch right so he had already invested and wanted to go out there
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and had written to alice lee about this saying you know this is really important to me basically and he
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had already envisioned the badlands being a destination where he wanted to explore
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it obviously took on a different place once alice died um it was a place where he went out
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for seclusion and to to sort of work through the grief there's no question about that but that
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had been set in motion going to badlands that is well before um alice lee died so sometimes people tell
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the story that that's the place where he went to deal with this grief which is absolutely true but
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he had already set that place up before he knew alice was going to die obviously so
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the the question you have i think is like what did it do for him how did it shape his life well there
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are a lot of different pieces of that one that i really focused on in the book is
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roosevelt i think originally purchased the land in and bought the stake in the ranch in the badlands
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to go out and tell stories he wanted to tell stories about the american west he was fascinated
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with the frontier literature and he wanted to be someone who acted out these hunting narratives etc and
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then write them and that's exactly what he did you know he went out there for periods of time
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ranched and then wrote about it um wrote about it in magazine articles and then you know those got
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clumped into books ranch life and the hunting trail and uh the wilderness hunter etc these really
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really pretty fascinating books sizable um volumes that he wrote and what i found really interesting is
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if you look at his field notes for example you can see the early versions i mean his diaries are
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really in some cases early drafts of the chapters in his books they're the they're the kind of brief
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notes that then led to the stories he told in his books so he was yeah he just he was finding fodder
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for his stories that he wanted to tell yeah i think so i mean again i think he wanted to live that way and
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then he thought it was also a money-making proposition he made money off of his books and
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you know he wanted to be one of the people telling those stories and and living them out and
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he's gotten criticism for that you know certainly early on especially some people like grinnell and
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others would give him a hard time in a way um sort of saying he was acting as if he'd been out there
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longer than he had that he knew more about these animals than he did um but he certainly went out there
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and and collected some really really interesting stories that he told the rest of his life
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certainly the the boat thieves story is one of the best ones um when you know if these guys stole
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his boat and he went after them so yeah and he arrested them um and i think i thought it was
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interesting too you know being the storyteller like you know there's that famous picture that everyone's
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probably seeing of roosevelt with his gun he's got the two guys looking sad like it was like it was
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a posed picture i don't even think the people like no they weren't even like the real criminals were
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there it was just no other people stand-ins yeah stand-ins for sure yeah and it was just him
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trying to tell a story i mean and i think that's another thing people who don't know about roosevelt
00:28:16.540
like the way he made his living mostly was through writing a huge bit of it yeah he made a lot of his
00:28:23.320
actual income through his written work and the it's fascinating to me when you think about when
00:28:30.740
you look across his writings um just his natural history writings are massive the number of books
00:28:38.040
and articles that he wrote is just it's incredible it's actually hard to quantify um it's hard to
00:28:44.720
actually write down i included a sort of a selected set of writings um sort of bibliography in in my
00:28:51.540
work um but actually the definitive uh bibliography of all his writings has never been published because
00:28:59.520
it's too big um i mean you know whatever he wrote like 43 books or or similar depending on how you
00:29:06.980
quantify them you know are the edited books because he edited some with um henry catalog and other people
00:29:13.640
um but all the articles that he wrote have never been fully um put into a list you know there i think
00:29:23.640
there is a there's a set of index cards in the hilton library that has that but it's thousands and
00:29:28.560
thousands of them wow so uh starting as a boy roosevelt was an avid hunter like he had a gun
00:29:35.360
as a young age and he would kill he was even in egypt he was shooting birds um and then that love
00:29:41.800
of hunting grew as he got older and you know one of the criticisms thrown at roosevelt that he you
00:29:47.100
know had an insatiable bloodlust um because some some of these trips maybe you can talk about some of
00:29:51.860
his hunting trips like the amount of trophies he would collect i mean what was like a typical hunting
00:29:56.840
trip like for roosevelt well i don't you know it's funny what is a typical hunting trip i i think um
00:30:06.640
there are a few that were pretty iconic or ones that were the most extreme obviously the african
00:30:15.440
safari when he finished as president he went on this year-long african safari where there was a joint
00:30:22.340
expedition really with the smithsonian and he shot you know many many hundreds of animals and there
00:30:31.420
was also a couple of naturalists that went along that were collecting other things like small mammals
00:30:35.780
and things like that um edgar mearns and uh edmund heller and some people who were professional
00:30:42.840
naturalists went along so it was a big expedition but even on that uh there were a number of
00:30:48.580
instances where one can point to and really ask legitimate questions about the amount of things
00:30:56.880
animals that roosevelt shot and whether they were really a reasonable number given the aims even of a
00:31:04.600
of a collecting expedition for a museum you know for example the white rhino um even at that time was
00:31:12.520
extremely rare and roosevelt knew this he wrote about it being very rare but then he also wrote
00:31:20.480
that he wanted to get some basically i mean the subtext is he wanted to get some before they were
00:31:25.760
gone for these museums in the united states and a few other places so there's a question there whether
00:31:31.000
he really should have done that or done that in the extensive way that he did the white rhino obviously
00:31:36.120
is you know an endangered species even at that time so it's a big question about that i mean that
00:31:42.440
question links even back to when he was going out to shoot the buffalo or the bison if you want to
00:31:48.500
call it by its scientific name um he knew at that point that they were gone and there's even a
00:31:54.380
a quote that's sort of attributed to him that he wanted to get one while they were still buffalo left
00:32:00.460
to shoot not a not a really great justification for shooting up buffalo from a conservationist
00:32:09.120
standpoint but roosevelt's full of contradictions as many historians have pointed out that he's this
00:32:15.140
many-sided american and he also then later established all these lands where the bison then
00:32:23.060
came back right that these were the places that he established for them to be basically repopulate
00:32:31.260
the plains um in certain contexts so he there were there are different pieces of this but certainly you
00:32:37.340
can see in his notes places where he overshot for sure and yeah that's that is the contrary i mean
00:32:45.460
because he laid he was one of the the big people involved in laying the conservation movement here in
00:32:50.360
the united states i mean he loved animals like he genuinely loved animals like and i heard once
00:32:55.780
someone said like he loved them so much like he he wanted he had to kill them which is sort of weird
00:33:00.220
like he just yeah yeah i mean it's a it's a really hard contradiction especially for us now i think
00:33:07.440
earlier on um around roosevelt's time less people saw that as quite so incongruous although mark twain
00:33:15.280
sort of really went after roosevelt about it there were animal rights people then who really felt like he
00:33:21.100
was a really brutal and um kind of a barbarian um and it's a it's a complicated question and i think
00:33:29.800
you know the question of hunting just in general whether it's okay what the moral aspects of hunting
00:33:36.360
even in the first place of any mammal although even now there are groups that um are opposed to
00:33:43.580
butterfly collecting um so it's not even just mammals so that's a big question and i tried not to sort of
00:33:50.360
carve that piece off so to speak of trying to get through all those aspects of the morality the
00:33:56.540
the manliness aspects of hunting if you will there's certainly a a question around the literature around
00:34:03.960
gender identity that that you know looks at historically hunting um but i tried to not delve
00:34:12.900
into that too much but just try to understand a little bit about how roosevelt sort of thought about
00:34:17.880
if there are any echoes of that and certainly later in his life especially around birds there's some
00:34:22.920
passages where he clearly indicated that they no longer really should be shooting songbirds for example
00:34:30.040
um and he looked back and saw that you know he probably collected more than he needed to and that
00:34:37.040
that wasn't really appropriate anymore for example yeah and i think there's a few moments uh you see
00:34:42.140
in his diaries that you mentioned in his book where these two competing drives that he had with him to
00:34:47.560
to hunt and then but to also protect animals there's that moment in africa with the hippo that he ended up
00:34:54.100
yeah shooting a hippo that and he he could tell that he wasn't really happy that he did it right
00:35:00.260
so he tried to hide well yeah that moment um when he was on he was trying to get um hippo uh and he wanted
00:35:07.840
to get a bull and all that stuff he he was in a boat where this launch and one hippos are actually
00:35:16.080
one of the more dangerous things to hunt uh partly if you're in a boat because you can't figure out
00:35:21.640
where they are and they can um they're submerged below you and if they surface they can knock the
00:35:27.500
boat over knock you into the water and and then there you're in the water with a school of hippos
00:35:32.040
so this happened to him that he was in this launch and they were going out to shoot one but then
00:35:38.540
this um he found that these this school of hippos started to surface or at least one under the boat
00:35:45.780
and the the other men in the the story goes the other men in the boat started to shout that he should
00:35:51.220
shoot and so he shot and he shot several of them and didn't he was trying to shoot the one that was
00:35:59.080
coming up below it but he ended up shooting four or five hippos that you know once once the boat sort
00:36:06.420
of settled back down he didn't realize it at first but then slowly hippo carcasses started to come to
00:36:13.720
the surface and he felt very bad about it one because he didn't need all those and two because he knew
00:36:18.880
that he was already under sort of the spotlight for his hunting there and didn't want to be seen as
00:36:25.580
what they called a game butcher and he didn't want that to get out to the press um and and have it be
00:36:31.280
another example of how he was a game butcher and not just selecting things for the for the museum at
00:36:36.800
the smithsonian interesting so yeah a lot of things you can gleam from his field notes and i what i love
00:36:41.060
about his field notes too and you have them in your book is that on his hunting trips you know he would
00:36:45.480
draw pictures these very rudimentary pictures of the animals that he he bagged but then he'd show you
00:36:51.720
know where he shot them at so you again like the meticulousness that he that began as a child like
00:36:56.180
he carried that with them even after and he's i guess he's in his 50s by now yeah yeah yeah i mean
00:37:03.380
he was really um he was a very keen observer and he would really pay attention to whatever he was doing
00:37:10.460
and i think that's another piece of what i really learned about roosevelt by looking at his field notes and
00:37:16.280
by kind of examining what they meant he clearly was someone who had a careful eye spent a lot of
00:37:24.880
time trying to understand what was going on around him and documenting it which doesn't seem to just
00:37:31.760
apply in his work in nature or out in the field i think there's a case to be made which i didn't make in
00:37:39.760
the book explicitly i didn't go through this part but i think if you look at his that those features
00:37:45.840
of of a naturalist being you know observe things collect a bunch of different parts and elements
00:37:52.760
and then try to make sense of them that's something that he did in all sorts of parts of his life
00:37:58.460
um when he was looking to enact conservation legislation he went out and tried to understand
00:38:06.340
john mirror for example but he also tried to understand lumbermen and ranchers and collect
00:38:11.680
all that information from those observations and then decide what to do with it so those things to
00:38:17.320
me aren't totally separate from one another but the fact that he went out to the field with john mirror
00:38:25.300
to understand what yosemite was all about he wanted to go there and sleep outside that's an element of his
00:38:32.320
sort of political and professional pursuits as president that harkens back to this mode that we've been
00:38:40.420
talking about the mode of the naturalist observer
00:38:42.780
so um we talked about his africa trip after he was president what was his other final big expeditions
00:38:51.200
that he took before he died yeah well so he did the africa expedition then he came back and um
00:38:59.320
had the bull moose party got shot and then after that he did the river of doubt expedition um which
00:39:06.840
was you know down this unknown river into the amazon which has been you know really written about a lot
00:39:12.820
and uh it's an incredible story and then after that there were a few more that haven't been written
00:39:19.020
about nearly as much but i find extremely uh interesting there's he went and um on a moose hunt
00:39:24.940
in quebec which was uh has some great stories in it one being chased by this moose which was kind
00:39:32.480
of a wild rutting uh moose and rut and and it kind of went after them and roosevelt ended up shooting
00:39:38.320
it um which is a great story and then i think my favorite one actually is his trip to sanibel and
00:39:46.440
captiva island um with this man named russell coals who was a tobacco dealer by trade but um was someone
00:39:53.120
who was a i mean a hunter of of manta rays and became sort of an expert on how to hunt these
00:39:59.880
giant mantas which can have what we think of as wingspans of like 18 feet they're huge and they
00:40:08.000
would go out and basically harpoon them and ride them you know hold on to this harpoon and and throw
00:40:14.620
these drogues into the water to try to slow them down and eventually they would just expire and when
00:40:19.040
roosevelt heard about this he thought that is really amazing i want to try that and so he ended up going
00:40:24.980
down um and doing this and and hunting some giant mantas uh off off the coast of captiva island so i
00:40:32.300
think that's a great story and just as far as the how it fits into his life so when roosevelt did that
00:40:40.540
it was 1917 and um roosevelt then didn't die until the early days of 1919 but one of the last letters
00:40:50.840
he wrote before he died roosevelt was to russell coals and he was saying to russell that he felt
00:40:58.780
utterly worthless at that point because he was sick but he was planning on coming back down for another
00:41:04.740
manta hunt with archie his son who had been injured in um world war one and he really wanted to get archie
00:41:12.380
out to the field with him um to go hunting with russell coals so his mind even though his body was
00:41:18.040
really expiring his mind was going back to the field with his own son um to do another manta hunt and
00:41:25.900
and that's why i think that one's so important when you look at those letters they're really moving
00:41:29.840
um because you see a dad who was trying to get his in you know his veteran son who'd been injured
00:41:36.580
significantly um in world war one out to the field with him on this experience so he he had some some
00:41:43.420
other a few other trips too he he'd gone to the caribbean to visit william beebe who was um a big
00:41:50.620
naturalist at the time and did uh he continue his field notes with these trips as well not so much
00:41:58.880
um at least they don't survive his later field notes and this is something i think is pretty
00:42:03.960
fascinating to me is that when he was in africa you know you can see in the book and otherwise you can
00:42:10.320
see his 1909 and 1910 diary he filled them up the days he was in africa he wrote profusely in his
00:42:16.860
diary of the things he collected observations the stomach contents of lions etc and then
00:42:24.180
also in africa he kept um a manuscript pad that he would write on a pad of paper that
00:42:34.280
was carbon and had three copies so he would write the chapters of african game trails which was his
00:42:41.200
book on africa um he would write them in the field so his field notes also were manuscript pages
00:42:49.540
and he would send them off and trip it in three different directions actually in africa so that
00:42:55.080
one one would survive and got back to robert bridges in new york so that they could publish
00:43:00.900
these first they published them in scripner's magazine and then and then as a bound book african
00:43:05.760
game trails so in in africa he has both the field notes in his diaries and then these other field
00:43:12.420
notes which were manuscripts on the river of doubt he no diary accounts survive from him
00:43:19.460
kermit his son who went along kept a diary and we have those at the library of congress but
00:43:26.160
roosevelt doesn't seem to have kept any diaries it's um but he just did the same thing he did in africa
00:43:31.360
he wrote these manuscript pages while he was in the field there's a iconic photo of roosevelt sitting at
00:43:37.860
a folding table with a head net and gauntlet gloves to keep biting insects off of him in the jungle kind
00:43:46.100
of um when he was on the river of doubt so it seems like later in his life as he progressed further
00:43:51.800
he did much more just keeping um just keeping manuscript notes etc um so they didn't have
00:44:00.700
uh we don't have notebooks or field notes from his later expeditions it's interesting yeah so michael we
00:44:08.060
we really just uh scratched the surface here of you know what what we you can find in roosevelt's
00:44:14.280
field notes but i'm curious as you you read through them i mean these are things that roosevelt
00:44:18.680
actually touched he actually wrote down and studying his life were there a few lessons life
00:44:25.440
lessons that you gleamed or took away from looking at roosevelt's life through his field notes
00:44:30.940
yeah i think so i mean aside from just being sort of a manuscript nerd and finding it really inspiring
00:44:38.000
to look at them which in fact the harvard ones are all um are scanned almost all of them are scanned
00:44:43.980
and you can look at them they're freely available um it's not quite as good as looking at them directly
00:44:48.840
but it's still pretty moving um i think that my the biggest lesson that i took and the thing i learned
00:44:56.140
about roosevelt as a personal lesson was his dedication to going directly to the source
00:45:02.780
to directly connecting with his world that he went out and with whatever it was yes he was really
00:45:10.440
fascinated with hunting and and doing these kinds of things but the conservation thing was something he
00:45:17.500
went out and met with john muir in yosemite he didn't just think about it he didn't just read about it
00:45:23.480
he wanted to understand lions so he went to africa and he faced went face to face with lions
00:45:29.620
um dramatic yes but when you look at his notes there's a credibility to that and we didn't talk much
00:45:36.760
about the um the trip to cuba in the spanish-american war uh but he left his post as the assistant
00:45:44.160
secretary of the navy much to the chagrin of his friends and family to go be on the front lines in cuba
00:45:51.800
um and you see that in his notebooks uh his documents uh that he was there and he wanted
00:45:58.820
to be there on the front lines in the battlefield people have made a lot of you know reasons why that
00:46:05.700
was the case some that he was sort of mad but he lived his life by connecting with his world and
00:46:12.120
going out there and observing it directly and understanding it firsthand that's what i find
00:46:17.640
most inspiring about roosevelt and the thing i take from him and try to remind myself of is
00:46:22.300
it's great it's important to go to the source and to not live just uh in a secondary fashion but to
00:46:29.860
experience our world and that's what it's going to take i think it's really important that our leaders
00:46:34.640
do that um as much as possible well michael canfield thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:46:40.460
thank you i really appreciate you having me and um i hope that uh things continue to grow well with
00:46:47.260
the with the art of manliness it's a great it's a great site i appreciate that my guest today was
00:46:51.980
michael canfield he's the author of the book theodore roosevelt in the field you can find it on amazon.com
00:46:56.720
and bookstores everywhere and be sure to check out the show notes at aom.is slash canfield to see
00:47:02.280
scanned images of roosevelt's field notes as well as links where you can browse more of them online
00:47:06.960
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:47:26.300
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:47:30.180
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00:47:33.940
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