The Trails of Savage Men

An Ecology of Violence in Theodore Roosevelt's East African Hunting Journals

I — "In Their Footsteps"

"Africa is a country of trails," wrote Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. [1] He may have been writing in a canvas tent by candlelight somewhere along a riverbed during his year-long hunting expedition to the continent, shortly after his presidency ended. Or perhaps he was in the Norfolk hotel in the lush heart of colonial Nairobi, where elite emissaries and expeditionists would smoke and scheme as they staged their coming conquests. In my childhood, we would occasionally go to the Norfolk ourselves, if my mother wanted a dignified coffee with a friend who lived across town. I remember there was a plaque on the broad and airy veranda that reminded guests of Roosevelt's illustrious visit. We were American missionaries in Kenya, spent a fair share of time on safari ourselves, and at the time thought of Roosevelt rather like a hero.

A map from 1909, a year before Roosevelt's expedition.

"Across the high veldt," Roosevelt continued, "in every direction, run the tangled trails of the multitudes of game that have lived thereon from time immemorial. [There] are also found the trails of savage men. They lead from village to village, and in places they stretch for hundreds of miles…but they are made simply by men following in one another's footsteps, and they are never quite straight."

I read these words for the first time sitting in my study nook in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student at Harvard. I arrived here after my own brief but glorious career in the bush as a young conservationist. I'd lived into my wildest dreams as a white man in Africa: negotiating with elders, rescuing elephants, venturing down remote valleys and across the plains. After all, I'd inhaled those Rooseveltian adventures in my teenage years, along with Kipling and Haggard and Indiana Jones, for that matter. It seemed every young man's quest and destiny to find himself on the frontier—the world was a stage for our adventures.

But I had begun to feel I was a caricature of myself, and I left. Inequities broad as daylight flickered in my peripheral vision: the gates that I could enter that my Kenyan peers could not. The tables I could sit at. The stories I could tell, and to whom. Who had a voice? It was this question, as asked by Amitav Ghosh, which disturbed and confounded me: "When and how did a small group of humans come to believe that other beings, including the majority of their own species, were incapable of articulation and agency? How were they able to establish the idea…as the dominant wisdom of the time?" [2] Whose trail was I following?

"These rides through the wild, lonely country, with only my silent black followers," wrote Roosevelt in his diaries, "had a peculiar charm." [3] Roosevelt was a Harvard man, too.

I came to Harvard to explore the history of these deeply grooved paths. To listen for new voices, or rather, old voices I'd never heard. But also to open up the old journals of my ancestors—for Roosevelt is, in a way: the wilderness-wandering white Protestant American man. I wondered if I might see something in his own account, his performance of what it means to be a man, a white man, a frontiersman, an American, that might help answer Ghosh's questions, and mine. Where did someone like Theodore Roosevelt have a chance—indeed, have the agency—to break a new trail? And why, most often, did he choose not to?

In this essay, I will read Roosevelt's diaries as much for what is left unsaid as for what is said. It may be closer than some would prefer to be to the mind of an archetypal imperialist—yet the work for each of us is to see what has shaped our own desires, to recognize patterns of power that need interrogation and interruption. If I am honest, I know that the masculinity embodied, performed, and perpetuated by Roosevelt is part of my own lineage, and that trails like his are all too easy to follow. For though they may "bend now a little to one side, now a little to the other…their successors have ever trodden in their footsteps," he wrote in 1910, "even though the need for so doing has long passed away."

II — "They Are First-Class Men"

Before proceeding further, it must be noted that Theodore Roosevelt was a prolific writer. His late Victorian masculine sensibilities demanded a performative erudition as much as rugged machismo. He aspired to be all of it, and "the sheer volume of Roosevelt's recorded words makes contradictions inevitable, allowing Roosevelt to be co-opted for many causes." [4] I assumed, having read his laudatory biographers in the past, that I would need to go digging a bit for his prejudicial racial and religious views amidst all the naturalism and adventure—but to the contrary: they are overtly and inextricably interwoven. Anyone extracting his views on nature and conservation would need to be doing a careful and revisionist surgery upon the text.

From the moment he landed in the cosmopolitan trading port of Mombasa—long a threshold of Arab, European, and African interchange—Roosevelt gushes like a boy stepped into a fairy tale: "In such a community one continually runs across quiet, modest men whose lives have been full of wild adventure…they might have walked out of the pages of Kipling." How modest they must have been to so regale him is open to the imagination. Yet there is no doubt the Swahili coast was a colonial cornucopia, with "not only Englishmen but also Germans and Italians, which is quite as it should be, for at least part of the high inland region of British East Africa can be made one kind of 'white man's country,'" he writes. The phrase is repeated with enthusiasm, as are his collegial descriptions of the pioneers. "There could be no better and manlier people than those," he writes, "who are at this moment engaged in the great and difficult task of adding East Africa to the domain of civilization." [5]

Mombasa, long a principal port of entrepreneurs, explorers, and empires.

Roosevelt did his own part to add "to the domain of civilization," thrusting the United States into the imperial era in Panama, Puerto Rico, the Philippines—but one can hear in his fawning admiration a subtle sense that he is late to the table. The "scramble for Africa" was a literal boys' club and well under way, a political theatre enacted as much in the European literary imagination as on the land. Roosevelt, who "as a youth [had] read the African adventures of explorer and missionary David Livingstone," [6] perhaps felt that he was finally playing in the big leagues. As European explorers fell over one another to plant flags atop the glistening glaciers of Kilimanjaro [7], Roosevelt records that on his safari "the American flag…flew over my tent…and was always carried at the head or near the head of the line of march...."

"...and after it," he continues, "in single file came the long line of burden-bearers." [8] For as Byron Caminero-Satangelo writes, "For the colonists, the 'game of life' is played on the board (so to speak) of an objectified natural world…[and] the metaphor of 'the game' already brings peoples and places 'into line' with a particular hierarchical organization based on the categories of nature and culture. Designating the 'backward races'...as part of the natural world, the game can only establish the differences among European colonizers." [9] Those who bore the burden of the legendary expeditions were described, and usually treated, as mere objects in a landscape to be dominated. The colonists, on the other hand, as agents, were both collaborators and competitors in the game of white supremacy.

There is no doubt that Roosevelt gave this project a full-throated endorsement, writing, "To achieve this white men should work heartily together…remembering that progress and development in this particular kind of new land depend exclusively upon the masterful leadership of the whites." But the nervous misgivings of the newest player in the game creep through, as he observes that "it is therefore both a calamity and a crime to permit the whites to be riven in sunder by hatreds and jealousies." In between his overtures, he repeatedly gestures toward an unspoken fragility in the colonial fraternity. Of the Germans and the British, he writes pointedly, "They are first-class men…both are doing East Africa a work of worth to the whole world; there is ample room for both, and no possible cause but a thoroughly friendly rivalry." Of the British and the Boer settlers, "Their work is bound to be hard enough anyhow; and it would be a lamentable calamity to render it more difficult by keeping alive a bitterness which has lost all point and justification." [10]

"First-class men."

That "friendly rivalry" would of course within the decade explode into the gruesome trenches of the first World War, revealing the inevitable end of the supremacist game. Did Roosevelt in any way sense this instability, or was the gravity well of whiteness overpowering? His hypocrisies are certainly overt. Whilst establishing American colonies around the world, he preached a vision of social welfare with a brazen moral confidence. "As we face the forces with which the great war for righteousness must be waged," he would say, "We must try to keep working with and not against all who are honestly and in good faith striving for the betterment of mankind." [11] Yet in this single statement he reveals the essential contradiction of the Christian colonial mission. Whether for land, wealth, or righteousness, there must always be war.

III — "Master of the Wilderness"

If white supremacy is a power game, it is about being seen—and Roosevelt's journals are hardly the private and interior searchings of his soul. They are a performance, obviously meant to be read, and they were indeed published shortly after his expedition in Scribley's magazine in serial form, just as had Henry Morton Stanley's dispatches that Roosevelt surely consumed as a child. And so I am looking for what is obvious and what is not—his careful praise and posturing puts him at the center of the story without provoking his fellow players. Supremacy, once you start to play, is a black hole—and the colonists' camaraderie was a chummy charade.

I believe his faint ambivalence points to the tension in the "transition of martial masculinities" [12] of the era, in which elite English and American men began moralizing over the "irresponsible" excesses of the late nineteenth century. In a new, delicate, and disturbing kind of status game, the gentlemanly class began to sneer at the "game butchers" and rapacious colonial traders who had built their very wealth and posture as the more enlightened and scholastic civilizers. "In short, the 'honourable soldier,' among others, now studied what he shot and shot what he studied." [13]

Hunting was always, of course, the martial masquerade between the times when whites were killing colonized communities or one another as well. The performance of violence and possession was—and remains—the seam of continuity in the supremacist ideology, regardless of how it was packaged or tempered with further identities. In a screed Roosevelt often seems to echo, the Social Gospel Reverend Josiah Strong blustered that "this race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization—having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth…can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the 'survival of the fittest?'" [14] Strong draws on religious, social Darwinist, capitalist, ableist, and biopolitical narratives all at once, but it is the "peculiarly aggressive traits" that will accomplish his ends.

Roosevelt was strongly influenced by the Social Gospel movement, which well represents the tilted spectrum of white supremacy. "Progressive" social reformers like Washington Gladden, who "praised Roosevelt for courageously attacking the nation's economic injustice," [15] were bedfellows with leaders like Strong—who spoke of Africa, for example, in genocidal terms, saying, "Whether the extinction of inferior races before the advancing Anglo-Saxon seems to the reader sad or otherwise, it certainly appears probable. I know of nothing except climatic conditions to prevent this race from populating Africa as it has peopled North America." [16] What is insidious about the "tilt" is that moderates like Roosevelt and Gladden could vindicate themselves for their relative moral "restraint" even while violence and dispossession underwrote their project.

Peculiarly aggressive.

Hunting big game on the African savanna was in some ways the ultimate expression of this performance. "In the late nineteenth century, elite hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt, recognized that unbridled capitalism would lead to the extinction of many wildlife species," writes Alexander Simon. [17] Thus a "concern with the decimation of game from unregulated 'white development'" [18] led to the new archetype of the hunter-naturalist, and soon enough the conservationist. As Roosevelt notes beneath his game tallies from his East African expedition, in which he and his son shot collectively over five hundred animals, "We were in hunting grounds practically as good as any that have ever existed; but we did not kill a tenth, nor a hundredth part of what we might have killed had we been willing. The mere size of the bag indicates little as to a man's prowess as a hunter, and almost nothing as to the interest or value of his achievement." [19]

Thus he inducted his son into a tradition of moralized violence much as he had been. At the age of sixteen, Roosevelt reportedly went to his church and declared his Christian zeal to the minister, saying, "I feel that one who believes so firmly in the Bible and Christianity as I do, should say so publicly, and…drill with the troops and fight in the battle‐front with the soldiers of the Cross." [20] Why is his religious position already expressed through martial metaphor, and at so young an age? This is how the colonial "boys' club" sealed itself to internal criticism. Make manliness a function of violence, and the manner of your violence righteous. In the words of the imperial hunter Sir Henry Seton-Karr, "The true sportsman is always a lover of nature. He kills, it is true, but only in sweet reasonableness." [21]

All of this, finally, must be enacted upon "the image of Africa as the embodiment of a 'deadly' and powerfully fertile wilderness, designat[ing] the continent as the ultimate test of the colonizer's ability to master nature." [22] The land is explicitly objectified, as are African wildlife and equally its people, for "all forms of wildlife were now 'imperial objects'...precious game resources [which] should not be available to less virile indigenes." [23]

IV — "Life is Hard and Cruel"

This undercurrent of violence simmers and sometimes erupts out of Roosevelt's diaries. He recounts a particular scene—in which he forms a temporary alliance with local warriors—which weaves the masculine, the natural, and the violent into a single libidinal dream:

"The Nandi warriors…were splendid savages, stark naked, lithe as panthers, the muscles rippling under their smooth dark skins; all their lives they had lived on nothing but animal food, milk, blood, and flesh, and they were fit for any fatigue or danger. Their faces were proud, cruel, fearless; as they ran they moved with long springy strides…Then, suddenly a maned lion rose…It was a wild sight; the ring of spearmen, intent, silent, bent on blood, and in the centre the great man-killing beast, his thunderous wrath growing ever more dangerous…He was a magnificent beast, with a black and tawny mane; in his prime teeth and claws perfect, with mighty thews, and savage heart….his life had been an unbroken career of rapine and violence; and now the maned master of the wilderness, the terror that stalked by night, the grim lord of slaughter, was to meet his doom at the hands of the only foes who dared molest him." [24]

It is not difficult to hear in his feverish description of the hunt, and in plain sight behind the rhetoric of Christian civilizational ideals, a projection (upon both the warriors and the lion) of primal male power. In this moment of bloody camaraderie, even racial difference is subordinated to the final, common denominator of supremacy: violence. Reading this, in the words of Amitav Ghosh, "it becomes impossible to doubt that the idea of extermination lay at the core of elite Western culture in the nineteenth century, and even a part of the twentieth." [25] In this scene, and through the fetish of big game hunting generally, we can see through the sophistical political propaganda and recognize that this ideology is most fundamentally a view of nature itself.

Thus what begins as an adventure of exceptionalism ends in an inevitable act of extermination. The fraternity of imperial white supremacy has never lasted long before turning inward upon itself in fratricide, or what Aime Cesaire famously called the "boomerang" of colonialism. There is something ultimately suicidal about it, because an identity based upon violence always needs a target. If the Social Darwinists of the era were correct, and nature itself functioned by this logic, would we not find a brutal world marching insatiably towards its own demise? Or do we simply see what we want to see?

This is the benefit of peering behind the militantly missional mask that claims to be God's great gift to mankind. Folded between accounts of lengthy, lustful hunts and his amateur but enthusiastic natural history, Roosevelt has moments of philosophical reflection that reveal this root ecology of his worldview, and by extension that of much of his culture. "Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation— these are the normal endings of the stately and beautiful creatures of the wilderness," he writes. "The sentimentalists who prattle on about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness…Life is hard and cruel for the lower creatures."

"It is only in nightmares," he continues, "that the average dweller in civilized countries now undergoes the hideous horror which was the regular and frequent portion of his ages-vanished forefathers, and which is still an everyday incident in the lives of most wild creatures." [26] Yet this fearful life of his nightmares, of violence, cruelty, and death, while projected outward onto the African, is constantly reproduced back at home. Roosevelt was a small child as his own country waged a brutal war with itself over the savagery of slavery, a war over its own contradictions. The plains across which he trekked in Africa would soon enough be vicious battlefields of proxy campaigns during the world wars, campaigns in which African porters would once again bear the burden of white supremacy's violence. Could it be that white men go seeking "the hideous horror" abroad in order to not face them at home?

"Endless internecine warfare."

In this context, Roosevelt's description of the Wakamba people can only be read as a deeply ironic and telling projection: "The Wakamba are as yet not sufficiently advanced to warrant their sharing in the smallest degree in the common government; the 'just consent of the governed' in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, famine, and endless internecine warfare." [27] If one imagines Dresden in 1945, or the trenches of the Somme in 1916, or even Vicksburg under siege during Roosevelt's own childhood, we see the "civilized" West, not the Wakamba, acting out its ecology of the cold and the cruel. It seems to me that Roosevelt was an avatar both of his age and of this ideology, in all its contradictions. In 1903, he proclaimed, "We innately desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show we are not afraid of war." [28]

V — "In Splendor and Terror"

Even in a generous reading, it is difficult to find openings toward a softer, less aggrandizing Roosevelt. I notice, however, that he seems quietly relieved when alone, away from the perpetual performance of whiteness. It is in his evocative descriptions of the landscape that I feel the most resonance. He is traveling the same hills and plains that I have, and a mere century between us has not altered their powerful presence. Are the romance and beauty he sees in the natural world just further extensions of his colonial perspective or is he reaching into something more diffuse, beyond the anxious hierarchy? In one especially poignant passage, I hear a peculiar plea:

"In this desolate and lonely land the majesty of the storms impressed on the beholder a sense of awe and solemn exaltation. Tossing their crests, and riven by lightning, they gathered in their wrath from every quarter of the heavens, and darkness was before and under them; then, in the lull of a moment, they might break apart, while the sun turned the rain to silver and the rainbows were set in the sky; but always they gathered again, menacingly and mighty — for the promise of the bow was never kept, and ever the clouds returned after the rain. Once as I road facing [Mount Kenya] the clouds tore asunder, to right and left, and the mountain towered between, while across its base was flung a radiant arch. But almost at once the many-colored glory dimmed; for in splendor and terror the storm strode in front, and shrouded all things from sight in thunder-shattered sheets of rains." [29]

When I read this, I think of the Amazonian shaman Ghosh quotes as saying, "The white people, they find the forest beautiful without knowing why." [30] There is a subtle sadness, a disappointment and distance by which the self-mythologized hero is separated from that which he observes. Is it the fate of the "self-made man"—the moralized narrative of a supremacist ecology—to forever be yearning for a belonging that never comes? Are they caught, rather, in a perpetual chase—trophy hunting, once again, as the perfect illustration—that finally exhausts itself and turns inward?

I have myself ventured up between the clouds to the peaks of Mount Kenya, and can attest that mountaineering is its own metaphor—there is no triumph that can be sustained, and unless your sense of value changes, you seek wilder and wilder danger to prove yourself a man. Yet the world is only too ready to rectify your hubris, if you'll pay attention. In fact, I believe the "wilderness" has a great deal to teach us about how inextricably connected we are, how little we know, and how much we owe one another—in large part because the fantasy of the separate and mute wilderness vanishes under genuine inspection and immersion. Is there a way in which these moments of wonder could soften us towards surrender? More pointedly: is the beauty of the world more powerful than whiteness?

Roosevelt writes that he most enjoyed the moments in which he was alone with Bakhari and Gouvemali, two African "gun-bearers." [31] It is impossible to know what, if any, moments of humanity or vulnerability punctured the facade, because they would never be written down. All his accounts of Africans are paternalist and crude, but he repeatedly notes the "unity" in their music, the dignity of the warriors, the uproarious stories they tell around the fire. Always it is as though he is sitting a ways off, watching from the outside in. His nature-writing, too, suggests a subtle yearning pushing up from beneath the cultural projections, but it is not enough to break through.

And so the gravity of whiteness bends all light back upon itself. Supremacy is a self-perpetuating performance, and a lonely one at that. Towards the African, the furthest Roosevelt can extend humanity is through a tenuous and tepid exhortation "that the man is a poor creature who does not treat them with kindness." [32] Even in the face of the marvelous splendor of the world, the adventurer must be at the center, "the beholder" surveying his land. Still these are critical and revealing statements, for they demonstrate once again that even kindness, even awe, can become captured by a hierarchy that cannot be disrupted, an ontological separation that cannot be broached. This is the deeply worn trail that Ghosh warns us of. Acts of violence justify a metaphysic that justifies violence in turn, and so it spins on. He writes,

"It was the rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled the metaphysical leap whereby the earth and everything in it could also be reduced to inertness…it was their violence, directed at 'natives' and the landscapes they inhabited, that laid the foundations of the mechanistic philosophies that would later be attributed to their contemporaries." [33]

VI — "Tangled Trails"

Of course Theodore Roosevelt was not the sole progenitor of this "mechanistic" worldview, and some might say this was too close of a reading to be fair. But even from a mile off, there is a clarity to the prejudice and a grandiosity to the rhetoric that is both impossible to ignore and important to examine. This is an act of moral archeology—not to obsess over the psychologies of "great men," but to grow more familiar with the ideas that built the world we still live in. Ideas that have an uncanny ability to disguise themselves, even to their thinkers.

Roosevelt's contradictions live on in tremendous material ways: during his presidency, he "established more than fifty wildlife refuges, created five national parks, tripled the amount of timberland set aside by his predecessors, and designated millions of acres as public land." In this sense he is hailed as a visionary "father of conservation," and in a certain shallow reading of history this is true. But not only was this in response—as we have seen—to the grotesque overreach of his own countrymen, it involved the violent dispossession of Indigenous land across the North American continent. The first rangers of Yellowstone National Park were soldiers of the United States cavalry. [34]

U.S. Cavalry in Yosemite, 1906.

This model has since ramified across the world, down to the gates and fences I lived behind in Kenya as a contemporary conservationist. "For example," writes the scholar Esme G. Murdock, "the development of Amboseli National Park in Kenya employs various identical methods to the U.S. government's removal of American Indians from National Parks." [35] Murdock then gives this history a name:

"I have elsewhere called this 'discriminatory biocentrism,' but I think ecofascism or perhaps ecological white supremacy would do just as well…It is my understanding and argument then that the colonial and white supremacist nature of Euro-Western environmental philosophies and environmental management have not fundamentally altered, although the forms they take may appear different…What this means is that the corporate models of global conservation and international 'aid' are largely different hands of the same body working in concert that have largely manufactured the very crises they purport or pretend to solve." [36]

Two hands of the same body, generating a drama in which we can be the hero. It all sounds terribly familiar, like we're treading a tired old trail. As the child of missionaries, I have a sense of what this feels like: being told you're the good guy your whole life can make it very difficult to see where you might be part of the problem. And Roosevelt, of course, was a great supporter of missionaries, urging Americans "to undertake this great spiritual adventure, this work for the betterment of mankind." [37]

Yet I wonder if the "great spiritual adventure" isn't to break from the old trail entirely. The manifest destiny ideology ultimately envisioned a homogeneous world in which all arable earth became the dominion of the white race. They imagined their destination beforehand and went about violently altering the world towards that goal. In such acts of violence, the very things that make the world beautiful—its vastness, its opacity, its "tangled" diversity—are silenced. It is in this sense that the ideology is, as Murdock claims, eco-fascist. Not only does it bind racial, gendered and national identities into one hegemonic force, it also demands a particular—and unsustainable—ecological interpretation of reality. From the beginning of colonization to Roosevelt and through to the present day, this logic remains at work.

There is no doubt that opening these old journals—facing the full and ugly history of our heroes—is a critical step in diagnosing the unease I felt in the world of contemporary conservation, but it is still only looking backwards down the trail. If Roosevelt and others of his era began to recognize the external effects of their own culture's environmental and economic violence, we now need to examine the internal assumptions of violence within our personal and collective narratives and desires that continue creating the crisis we claim to solve.

Heading off-trail means leaving behind these tired tracks of coldness and cruelty and entering an ecology of complex connection and care. It requires giving up the inherited sense of a right to heroism and accepting accountability, which will result, unbeknownst to the supremacist, in an ever deeper sense of belonging. To practice conservation in a just and sustainable way will require a fundamental re-ordering of our ecological imagination. I will not pretend to know what this looks like. But the key, I believe, is to get lost—and to listen.

References

All images either public domain or my own.

[1] Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), 43.

[2] Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 201.

[3] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 29.

[4] Edith Blumhofer, "Morality Writ Large: Theodore Roosevelt's Ecumenical Exceptionalism," The Review of Faith & International Affairs 10, no. 2 (2012), 22.

[5] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 12-14.

[6] Gary Scott Smith, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Bully Pulpit," in Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.

[7] Boris Michel, "Making Mount Kilimanjaro German: Nation Building and Heroic Masculinity in the Colonial Geographies of Hans Meyer," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 43, no. 4 (2018): 679–691.

[8] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 41.

[9] Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 154.

[10] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 24.

[11] Blumhofer, "Morality Writ Large," 25.

[12] J. A. Mangan and C. McKenzie, "Martial Masculinity in Transition: The Imperial Officer-Hunter and the Rise of a Conservation Ethic," The International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 9 (2008): 1243–1273.

[13] Ibid., 1249.

[14] Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885), 214.

[15] Smith, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Bully Pulpit," 138.

[16] Strong, Our Country, 215.

[17] Alexander Simon, "Against Trophy Hunting: A Marxian-Leopoldian Critique," Monthly Review 68, no. 4 (2016), 18.

[18] Mangan and McKenzie, "Martial Masculinity," 1246.

[19] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 183.

[20] Smith, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Bully Pulpit," 131.

[21] Mangan and McKenzie, "Martial Masculinity," 1249.

[22] Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green, 154.

[23] Mangan and McKenzie, "Martial Masculinity," 1260.

[24] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 141.

[25] Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse, 185.

[26] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 85.

[27] Ibid., 23.

[28] Smith, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Bully Pulpit," 138.

[29] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 114.

[30] Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse, 209.

[31] Roosevelt, African Game Trails, 30.

[32] Ibid., 41.

[33] Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse, 255.

[34] Rosaleen Duffy, Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 61.

[35] Esme G. Murdock, "Conserving Dispossession? A Genealogical Account of the Colonial Roots of Western Conservation," Ethics, Policy & Environment 24, no. 3 (2021), 243.

[36] Ibid., 245-246

[37] Blumhofer, "Morality Writ Large," 26.

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