Wake Up With A "Did You Know?": Teddy Roosevelt Thought He Killed The Last Bison And It Freaked Him Out

This here is Teddy Roosevelt. I love this guy. My absolute favorite President. Major league bad ass. He was in the Rough Riders, he would get into bar fights, he took on John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. He’s on the Mount Rushmore of Presidents, literally.

Teddy Roosevelt definitely would’ve been #canceled if he were alive today though because he LOVED hunting big and exotic game all over the world. He would’ve been like that fucking dentist who killed Cecil The Lion.

One of the big animals on Teddy’s hit list? The American Bison. The Buffalo. He was obsessed with it. The Buffalo were disappearing off of the plains and he hadn’t killed one yet and it made him sick. He started going on hunting expeditions looking for that elusive bison that he could shoot, skin, chop it’s head off and put on the wall next to his elephant tusks and jaguar rug. In 1883 he went all the way out to Montana, saw a single buffalo, and shot it’s ass dead. Immediately Roosevelt reacted with an….

Now that he finally got his buffalo he was scared that he killed the last buffalo. If you love animals and you love killing those animals, then you need animals to kill and you can’t kill them if you’ve already killed all of them. Roosevelt was scared he fucked up big time and that started him on a path to protect nature in America. When he became President in 1901 Roosevelt he used his power to create National Parks and National Forest and established 230 million acres of public lands across the American West. Industrialists and farmers kept challenging Roosevelt on these protected public lands. They’d be like “yo, if these lands are for the people then let us have them. Let us mine that shit, make a billion dollars, and send the goods back east”. Roosevelt responded by saying “those lands belong to those still in the womb of time”. Profound as fuck. And that is why we have this unbelievable system of National Parks and Forests today. Good ole, TR. Preserving that shit. It’s good to get out in nature a bit. If you’re in Chicago you can get out to Starved Rock State Park in like an hour or so. Highly recommend. Have a good Wednesday.