Imagine a place where there are rolling hills and animals of all kinds, where there is a perfect balance in nature. Nothing is disturbed, and everything is perfect. A place like this seems like a nice place to have a picnic. This is what America looked like for the most part in the middle of the 1800s. But by the late 1880s, America’s frontier looked far different. There had been little effort by Americans to conserve their own land and animals. America was losing its beauty with every major project it completed (i.e. the Transcontinental Railroad) and every animal it killed. There had been some people that tried to do something about it, but they had little success. But there was one man in the late 1800s that turned the tides for his fellow conservationists. That man was Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States. He is best known as the Conservationist President, and with good reason. He saved more land and animal species than the previous 25 Presidents before him combined! …show more content…
As a young boy, he wanted to be a naturalist, a scientist who enjoys and studies nature. He also went to the badlands in 1883 to go big game hunting. By the time he got there, the vast herds of bison were long gone. He found out that one of the main reasons for the endangerment of the bison was that there were people killing them for hides that could be traded. He noticed that there was terrible habitat destruction in the area, and he became alarmed at the sight of it. He knew about how much damage the Transcontinental Railroad had caused, but this far exceeded what he had imagined. Roosevelt became more aware of common animals that were getting scarce. The bison, for example, used to run rampant in the area he was hunting. He always remembered his childhood dream as an adult, and he used that dream to push him to be the one of the greatest conservationists that America could