Free The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley

Roosevelt, even though the constant houseboat traffic and train whistles in these commuter towns not far from the city meant he wasn’t having the kind of wilderness experience his imagination craved.
    Conscious that he hadn’t toured his homeland west of the Atlantic coast, Roosevelt titled his post-Europe diary “Now My Journal in the United States” (May 25 to September 10, 1870). Spending much of that summer in Spuyten Duyvil, Roosevelt quaintly dated his diary with “country” at the top of each entry. Sounding like a modern-day summer camper, he wrote of swimming, hiking, and shooting a bow and arrow. “We began to build a hut,” he wrote on June 6, “and had a nice time and found a bird’s nest with 3 eggs (but we did not take them).” 65
    When that particular diary ends abruptly, in September, there is a gap for the next eleven months. In August 1871, when the next journal begins, the awesome natural sites in the Adirondack Park—Mount Marcy, Blake Peak, and Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds (the source of the Hudson River)—animate his writing. Bursting with excitement about the Adirondacks (and the White Mountains), he tramped around, imagining himself in the footsteps of frontiersmen like Ethan Allen and George Rogers Clark. The Adirondacks at this time were very much in vogue. Two years prior to the Roosevelt family’s visit, the Congregationalist minister W. H. H. Murray had published the best-selling Adventures in the Wilderness; Or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks , in which he claimed that the upstate New York “wilderness” helped cure consumption and other lung ailments. 66 Owing to the unexpected success of Murray’s book, tourists and health seekers alike came pouring into the Adirondacks, fishing in Lake Placid, hiking up Whiteface Mountain, and simply inhaling the air along the Ma-cIntyre Range. 67
    Young Theodore counted himself in the front line of the new enthusiasts for the Adirondacks. Like Thomas Jefferson—who in 1791 deemed the thirty-two-mile-long Lake George “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw” 68 —Roosevelt wanted to explore the shoreline and islands of this natural wonder. In fact, the “Queen of American Lakes” always held a special place in Roosevelt’s heart. “We started on the Minnehaha up Lake George,” he wrote. “We passed innumerable islands on the way up it. At the head or rather tail of this lake, where it is connected with Lake Champlain the mountains were very abrupt and the lake very narrow. The scenery at this point is so wild that you would think that no man had ever set foot there.” 69
    In these diary entries from the Adirondacks Roosevelt uses a vivid exactness in describing the the piney woods and incomparable lakes he played in. Satisfied and comfortable, he watched a blue-gray bird with a shaggy crest dive into the lake and quickly identified it as a kingfisher. Careful distinctions were made between coveys of quail and runs of common loons. Strange as it seems, Roosevelt spent an hour just observing a little blue heron with a daggerlike bill that sat on the lake edge sunning itself; the sight was worth 100 Lord’s Prayers. Sometimes it almost seemed that when Roosevelt saw a bird he became the bird for a short spell.
    In the Adirondack Park and the White Mountains, Roosevelt also discovered the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. His father felt that reading a novel like The Last of the Mohicans (1826) while staying in the area where the French and Indian War took place would enrich the literary experience. Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo (also called Leatherstocking or Hawkeye) was a bold white scout, paddling across Lake Champlain, climbing lofty summits, and wearing a bearskin to gain entrance to a Huron village. Later in life Roosevelt remembered that he read all five of The Leatherstocking Tales in the order in which Cooper had written them. This means that in addition to absorbing The Last of the Mohicans , he read what in