Paul Schullery is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than fifty books on history, nature, and outdoor sport, including The Bear Doesn’t Know: Life and Wonder in Bear Country (Bison Books, 2021) and Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness. He is the editor of Theodore Roosevelt’s Wilderness Writings: New Edition (Bison Books, 2025) which was published this month.

Fifty-some years ago, at the beginning of what for want of a better word I’ll call my career (the term flatters the disorganized reality of it), I began work as a Yellowstone Park ranger. I had a degree in American History, so I was classified as a “ranger-historian.” Being thus titled, I was given the key to the park’s administrative archives. Dating from 1872 onwards, the archives was then a little-known mother lode of documentation of the earliest days of federal conservation—a treasure trove of material revealing in nuts-and-bolts detail the American experience of coming to terms with the complexities, mysteries, and imponderable challenges that managing the park—and wild nature throughout the world—will always confront us with.

To my great and lasting good fortune—though at the time I had no idea of the long reach of what was about to happen—one quiet early-winter morning I found myself in the archives rooms conducting an initial personal reconnoiter among the 100 or so shelf-feet of aged filing boxes, account books, soldier station logs, backcountry patrol diaries, wildlife censuses, and all manner of other historic documentary goodies. This was one of my first exposures to the excitement the historical scholar can find just in casually thumbing through any such rich collection of original historic materials (it was only later that I realized that this sort of random sampling is about as good a method as any for turning up really interesting stuff).

That morning, amidst the wildly varying stationery, handwriting, grammar, personalities, and demands of incoming correspondents with early park managers in the 1890’s, a forcefully official letterhead jumped out at me: the United States Civil Service Commission. Though I had only the vaguest idea of what that commission actually did, I was immediately curious why they would bother to contact such a remote and obscure little federal enterprise as Yellowstone National Park. As I pulled the letter from its box, even before I could begin to read it, my attention was drawn to the distinctive signature at the bottom of the page: Theodore Roosevelt.

That Roosevelt letter, one of several from him in those boxes, was in good company among those from other pioneer conservationists, most of whom were, like TR, taking time from busy professional careers to keep tabs on what was going on in the park. This relatively small but influential circle of forward-looking citizens sensed the vast potential—for recreation, for science, for commerce, and for the broader national stewardship of America’s natural resources—of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. And none were more keenly aware of the fragility of this young and still only vaguely defined institution than Theodore Roosevelt.

That morning, I continued browsing and reading and generally rooting around in the files, but it was that startling first moment of recognition of TR’s involvement in the park that I remember best. It was as if when I first saw that signature, the excitement of Yellowstone’s past times and unsettled future unfolded in front of me like a giant map of a new world. In the many years since then, as my work took me to various other parts of that world, it seemed there was no corner of the overlapping scholarly fields of national parks, natural history, wildlife conservation, and outdoor sport where I might not cross TR’s tracks.

As I worked on Theodore Roosevelt’s Wilderness Writings, it was my fondest hope to capture not only the breadth of his travels but also the depth with which he wrote about each place visited. Thank Heavens, the old stereotype of TR as some bloodthirsty hairy-chested adventurer is falling out of favor among historians, but I still felt compelled to make sure I included sufficient examples of his remarkable skills as a naturalist and observer of wildlife who wrote definitive accounts of the lives of the various game animals he hunted and observed. Just as important, I hoped to honor his well-deserved reputation as an unprecedented conservationist whose good works continue to benefit us today.

That said, I didn’t want to shy away from TR’s exciting and at times even death-defying own adventures in various wild settings—those genuine thrills of wilderness experience that he loved to celebrate in the most romantic of terms. Consider one of his many testimonials to life in wild country:

There is delight in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunset and sunrise in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting.

These are not the words of a man who took the small view, or thought in the short term, about his relationship with the wonders of nature—or about his corresponding responsibility to care for the natural world.

Reading and writing about Theodore Roosevelt is an adventure in itself. Here was as complex an American as any we’ve ever seen, who on the one hand held views on gender, race, and foreign policy that rightly shock the modern sensibility, but on the other hand won the Nobel Peace Prize, busted trusts, and made an enormous contribution to the future of the nation’s natural resources.

As has often been said, there was indeed more than one Theodore Roosevelt. He will not be fully understood, much less done justice, without a wide-ranging familiarity with the work he packed into his hectic years among us. From the beginning of my research, I saw this book as an opportunity to illuminate at least a few of those personae, and to do so in the most direct possible way—by letting him speak for himself. Theodore Roosevelt’s Wilderness Writings is my best shot at doing just that.