page_title: Nature fakers controversy
section_title: Pre-1907
hierarchical_section_title: Nature fakers controversy / Roosevelt's involvement / Pre-1907
context_page_description: The nature fakers controversy was an early 20th-century American literary debate highlighting the conflict between science and sentiment in popular nature writing. The debate involved important American literary, environmental and political figures. Dubbed the "War of the Naturalists" by The New York Times, it revealed seemingly irreconcilable contemporary views of the natural world: while some nature writers of the day argued as to the veracity of their examples of anthropomorphic wild animals, others questioned an animal's ability to adapt, learn, teach, and reason.
  The controversy arose from a new literary movement, which followed a growth of interest in the natural world beginning in the late 19th century, and in which the natural world was depicted in a compassionate rather than realistic light. Works such as Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known and William J. Long's School of the Woods popularized this new genre and emphasized sympathetic and individualistic animal characters. In March 1903, naturalist and writer John Burroughs published an article entitled "Real and Sham Natural History" in The Atlantic Monthly.
context_section_description: President Theodore Roosevelt was a well-publicized nature-enthusiast, known for his grand hunting expeditions. While he admired the natural world and the animals who inhabited it, he believed that animals served a singular purpose: to satisfy human needs, especially in the name of progress. Roosevelt had been following the debate in newspaper articles and magazines with great interest, and as a result he became a friend and confidant of John Burroughs; shortly after Burroughs' first article condemning popular nature writers as sham naturalists, Roosevelt sent him a letter of support as well as an invitation to travel west in each other's company. In April 1903, Roosevelt and Burroughs explored Yellowstone National Park and its surrounding areas together.
  In late 1905, Roosevelt received a copy of Long's book Northern Trails from the publisher. Based upon the author's travels in Canada, most of the stories involved a noble, white wolf named Wayeeses. As in other works, Long asserted that "every incident in this wolf's life, from his grasshopper hunting to the cunning caribou chase, and from the den in the rocks to the meeting of wolf and children on the storm-swept barrens, is minutely true in fact, and is based squarely upon my own observations and that of my Indians." While Roosevelt reportedly enjoyed a majority of the book—he even read it aloud to his children—he found fault with Long's dramatic description of how a wolf killed caribou by piercing the animal's heart with its teeth. "A terrific rush," Long wrote in Northern Trails, "a quick snap under the stag's chest just behind the fore legs, where the heart lay". Drawing upon his own extensive hunting experience, Roosevelt wrote confidentially to the book's publisher about Long's description being "sheer nonsense", concluding that it "is so very unusual" and anatomically impossible that it could not be true. In his letter, of which he also sent a copy to Burroughs, Roosevelt pointed out the physical difficulty a wolf would have if attempting to kill its prey in such a manner, while also commenting upon the unlikeliness of other wolf stories written by Long.
  Burroughs agreed with the President's assertions, and urged him to comment publicly on the subject, although the other man demurred. When Roosevelt published Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter in October 1905, however, he not only dedicated it to the elder naturalist, but he also made his first public foray in what would become known as the nature fakers controversy: "I wish to express my hearty appreciation of your warfare against the sham nature-writers—those whom you have called 'the yellow journalists of the woods' ... You in your own person have illustrated what can be done by the lover of nature who has trained himself to keen observation, who describes accurately what is thus observed, and who, finally, possesses the additional gift of writing with charm and interest."
caption: Theodore Roosevelt's official White House portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1903
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