Last week, I heard a thoughtful man say that the Badlands of North Dakota were the "cradle of the modern conservation movement." That sounded so good I just wanted it to be true. I wanted North Dakota to be the cradle of something - other than of the children we raise and export to the rest of the world. His idea was that Theodore Roosevelt's great work as a conservationist had its roots in North Dakota, at the Elkhorn Ranch 35 miles north of Medora.

Then, unfortunately, I got to thinking about the claim, and wondering if it were really true. Can experiences that began in 1883, 300 years after Jamestown, and more than a century after the Declaration of Independence, really constitute the cradle of conservation? That's pretty late in the game. We know that Roosevelt was an important conservationist, but does the idea that he was somehow a part of the birth of the modern conservation movement really make any sense? How important was the North Dakota sojourn (1883-87) to the development of Roosevelt's conservation ethic?

Historians of American conservation tend to write little about Roosevelt. He is usually regarded as a man of action, not of contemplation, and even his remarkable presidential achievement in conservation is usually seen as having been inspired by others, like his gifted U.S. forester Gifford Pinchot. There also is the Roosevelt "problem." As one of America's foremost big game hunters, who killed so many large mammals in Africa (1909-10) that even he was embarrassed, Roosevelt, gripping a Sharps rifle with one foot on the corpse of a white rhinoceros, does not look like a poster child for American conservation.

It's the cradle issue that makes me skeptical.

Wasn't Walden Pond the cradle of American conservation? Thoreau, who died when Roosevelt was just 3 years old, lived at Walden Pond near Concord, Mass., from July 4, 1845, to Sept. 6, 1847. His amazing journal - one of the greatest ever written - and his book "Walden" (1854) are among the most important texts in the history of the conservation movement. For many, they constitute the bible of American conservation. In the great journal, Thoreau wrote, "I have just been through the process of killing the cistudo (a tortoise) for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature." On another occasion he wrote, "I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice. … While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all."

Imagine what Roosevelt would have said about these two sentences from Thoreau!

Two of Roosevelt's contemporaries would seem to have better credentials than his for birthing the modern conservation movement. Both of them influenced Roosevelt's thinking about the natural world.

John Muir (1838-1914) was, among other things, the founder of the Sierra Club. He became the leading American advocate for "preservation" rather than mere "conservation" of what remained of American wilderness. Muir loved untrammeled nature for what it offered to the human spirit, not for the resources that could be extracted from it. In 1903, he spent three days in Yosemite National Park with President Theodore Roosevelt - a primitive encampment with no Secret Service men or handlers. Roosevelt regarded the Yosemite interlude as one of the greatest experiences of his life. One of the first things Muir said to Roosevelt was, "Mr. President, when are you going to get over your infantile need to kill the animals you see in nature?"

When we think of Muir, we don't see a gun and a trophy. We remember the day he climbed a 100-foot Douglas fir in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he rode out a mountain storm. "Never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion," Muir wrote. "The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobo-link on a reed."

The one-armed Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) ran the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers with wooden boats in 1869. His 10-year immersion into the culture and geography of the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin taught him that arid lands could not be developed according to the methods employed in Iowa and Indiana. In his famous "Arid Lands Report" (1878), Powell virtually rewrote the land use policies of the United States for the lands beyond the 100th meridian. He was the first prominent American to predict that water would be the issue of the American West, and that the sooner we began planning for the conservation and just distribution of the West's scarce water supplies, the healthier and more successful our western communities would be.

Other pioneers in the conservation movement include Mary Austin (1868-1934), the author of "Land of Little Rain"; John Burroughs (1837-1921), who spent a fortnight with Roosevelt in Yellowstone National Park; Roosevelt's friends and collaborators Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) and George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938); and Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), whose "Sand County Almanac" is regarded by many as one of the primary texts of American conservation. Nor should we forget Thomas Jefferson in trying to find the "cradle of American conservation."

All of these individuals played a more important role than Roosevelt in developing an American philosophy of nature and resource conservation. Several of them were actually TR's tutors on conservation matters.

But that's not the end of the story. In this arena, Roosevelt was a statesman, not a philosopher. During the course of his seven-year, 171-day presidency, Roosevelt set aside 230 million acres of the public domain of the United States for conservation purposes. He added 100 million acres to the National Forest system. He doubled the size of the National Park system from five to 10 units, one of them - Sully's Hill - in North Dakota. He signed the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902 and designated the first 24 national irrigation projects. One of them, the Lower Yellowstone Project, was set partly in North Dakota. He signed the Antiquities Act in 1906 and designated the first 18 national monuments. He convened the first White House Governor's Conference in 1908 for the explicit purpose of discussing conservation of the nation's resources. And he invented, by executive order alone, the National Wildlife Refuge System (1903). TR designated the first 51 federal bird sanctuaries, two of them - Chase Lake and Stump Lake - in North Dakota.

This magnificent conservation achievement is matched by no other president in American history. A professor friend of mine who is a great expert on environmental history says that TR's presidential action is "an almost unbelievably important accomplishment" in the history of conservation.

Was this stupendous achievement born at the Elkhorn Ranch? I'll address that question next week.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@;aol.com.)