The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilder ...

“the likely from the improbable” while “salting them liberally.”⁴⁷ This ability to leaven the methodologically observational with the whimsically commonsensical, notes Schullery, was undervalued by the scientific community in the Progressive Era. Roosevelt, by virtue of his popular appeal and especially class-diverse young adulthood, could reach an unusually broad audience with his “Hail fellow well met” relationships with teamsters, mechanics, cowboys, kings, and emperors.⁴⁸ This rhetorical reach coupled with an everyman's sympathies earns TR a reputation as “one of the most capable nature writers of turn-of-the-century America”⁴⁹—an era when nature writing itself enjoyed unprecedented vogue.

Perhaps what's most impressive about Roosevelt's nature writing is its longevity and consistency. Before he turned teenager, Roosevelt had already completed a Natural History of Insects and had prepared a bird list for Lucy W. Maynard's monograph Birds of Washington and Vicinity, wherein he inventoried some ninety-three species. In her memoir, Corinne Roosevelt recalls that, by age fourteen and his participation in the Dresden Literary Arts Club, her brother had found his voice. “His contributions to the immortal literary club,” she writes, “were either very serious and very accurate from a natural-historical standpoint, or else they showed, as comparatively few of his later writings have shown, the delightful quality of humor.”⁵⁰ She cites her brother's fable (included herein), “Mrs. Field Mouse's Dinner Party,” as proof that “Teedie” not only “indulged in the free play of fancy” but also composed his thoughts on the page “with extraordinary system and regularity for a boy of fourteen.”⁵¹ Four years later, and still in his teens, Roosevelt coauthored, with Henry Minot, a pamphlet entitled Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y., a list of ninety-seven species that constituted the official beginning of his life as a published author and his “first contribution to zoology.”⁵² The publication earned raves from zoologist Merriam, who, writing for the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Society in April 1878, enthused that it was “by far the best of the most recent lists, primarily because it bears prima facie evidence of reliability—which seems to be the great desideratum in bird lists nowadays.”⁵³