Roosevelt Elk: Named for a President Who Saved Them

The largest elk subspecies in North America lives on the Olympic Peninsula, and it almost did not make it to the twentieth century. By the eighteen nineties, hunters had reduced the Olympic elk population so severely that the animals were on a trajectory toward local extinction. Elk were being killed for their teeth, specifically the two ivory canines called elk tusks, which were fashionable among members of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks and sold for several dollars each.

In nineteen oh nine, President Theodore Roosevelt created Mount Olympus National Monument by executive proclamation, designating the core of the Olympic Peninsula as a protected reserve specifically to shelter the remaining elk population. The subspecies was named for him: Cervus canadensis roosevelti.

The monument became the nucleus of Olympic National Park when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the park's enabling legislation on June twenty-ninth, nineteen thirty-eight. By then the elk had recovered.

Today there are somewhere between four thousand and five thousand Roosevelt elk on the peninsula. They are not rare; anyone spending time in the Hoh Valley in winter has a reasonable chance of seeing herds of fifty or more moving through the floodplain. The park's infrastructure, the roads, the visitor facilities, the trail system, is organized around a wilderness largely defined by the needs of these animals. The old-growth forest that makes the Hoh famous grows partly in the shape it grows because elk browse the understory in particular patterns, creating openings, redirecting succession, acting as what ecologists call a keystone species.

The teeth that nearly killed them off can still be found in antique shops throughout the Pacific Northwest.