Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in
the Park. A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting,
and hoped I would teach the President to love the animals as much as I
did,--as if he did not love them much more, because his love is
founded upon knowledge, and because they had been a part of his life.
She did not know that I was then cherishing the secret hope that I
might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but this fun did not
come to me. The President said, "I will not fire a gun in the Park;
then I shall have no explanations to make." Yet once I did hear him
say in the wilderness, "I feel as if I ought to keep the camp in meat.
I always have." I regretted that he could not do so on this occasion.
I have never been disturbed by the President's hunting trips. It is to
such men as he that the big game legitimately belongs,--men who
regard it from the point of view of the naturalist as well as from
that of the sportsman, who are interested in its preservation, and who
share with the world the delight they experience in the chase. Such a
hunter as Roosevelt is as far removed from the game-butcher as day is
from night; and as for his killing of the "varmints,"--bears, cougars,
and bobcats,--the fewer of these there are, the better for the useful
and beautiful game.
The cougars, or mountain lions, in the Park certainly needed killing.
The superintendent reported that he had seen where they had slain
nineteen elk, and we saw where they had killed a deer, and dragged its
body across the trail. Of course, the President would not now on his
hunting trips shoot an elk or a deer except to "keep the camp in
meat," and for this purpose it is as legitimate as to slay a sheep or
a steer for the table at home.
We left Washington on April 1, and strung several of the larger
Western cities on our thread of travel,--Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison,
St. Paul, Minneapolis,--as well as many lesser towns, in each of which
the President made an address, sometimes brief, on a few occasions of
an hour or more.