The West and the 19th Century's commercial slaughter of its wildlife became the birthing ground of Theodore Roosevelt's conservation ethic. He came to North Dakota in 1883, to hunt on America's vanishing frontier. He feared he might be too late, writing that he was: "… anxious to kill some large game - though I have not much hope of being able to do so." A short time later we wrote his expectant wife Alice: "Hurrah! The luck has turned at last. I will bring you home the head of a great buffalo bull, and the antlers of two superb stags."

Tragedy however awaited Roosevelt; Alice died giving birth to their child and his mother died - the same day and in the same house. A devastated Roosevelt left his daughter in his sister's care, and returned to North Dakota to build his body and to restore his shattered spirit. Back in North Dakota he poured his energy into the business of cattle ranching and feeding his passion for the hunt. He wrote his sister:"I heartily enjoy this life, with its perfect freedom, for I am very fond of hunting and there are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling, limitless prairies, rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called badlands."

Biographer Nathan Miller observed that Roosevelt's conservation ethic had been, "… an idea that had begun with a lonely hunt in the Bad Lands."

Within three years TR formed a citizen's organization for the restoration of big game to North America. In 1891, that organization championed an act through Congress enabling Presidents to create national forest reserves. Those reserves surround us here. When Roosevelt left the White House in 1909 he left us endowed with 230 million acres of protected landscapes to be incubators for the national recovery of wild things. Those landscapes became the birthing ground for the North American Wildlife Conservation Model. Those protected wild places formed the estate upon which the hunt could pass from the Pleistocene to the 21st Century. For the lovers of numbers, TR set aside about 84,000 acres a day for every day he was our President - it was an estate of promise for the people, a promise this organization carried through the end of a century.

The Theme: Promises Fulfilled / Promises to Keep

Our 26th President's conservation ethic and his philosophy of the hunt were even more important than this landscape of promise. It was a philosophy clearly articulated and it inspired a nation to conservation. It began creating the values our culture would place on animals, hunters, and the fair chase pursuit of wildlife. These values were and are the motivation that created this International Association and its member organizations. These cultural values, along with our court defined public trust responsibilities, were the pillars that supported the restoration of wildlife to an entire continent. Now, a century later we look out across the sweep of North America and we see promises fulfilled.

References Cited:

- Nathan Miller.  Theodore Roosevelt - A Life, William Morrow & Company, New York, 1992.