You are listening to the Gritty Podcast where we talk about all things gritty. Life is not

easy. It never was and it never will be. A good life takes grit. Prioritize who you are

and who you want to be because life isn't fair. And a little grit can make all the difference.

Welcome to the Gritty Podcast. I am your host Brian Call. And on today's podcast we're going to talk

a little bit about Theodore Roosevelt and the first federal bird reservation that was created

called Pelican Island. It was Pelican Island set aside as a federal bird reservation. And it's

really kind of the first move toward this idea of federally managed public lands and how that

came to be. This is an interesting story. It has a lot of twists and turns from political maneuverings,

from we're going to kind of talk about I guess culture at the time. There's even a murder involved.

It's a great little piece of history that I think there's a lot to learn from.

So I'm going to get into that. I'm pulling from the book, this book right here for those that

are watching on YouTube. It's Douglas Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior, which is huge,

it's a huge body of work. And I've read it a couple of times actually. And I always, and I keep

having this intention of kind of walking people through it and sharing the information I've

cleaned from it on the podcast. But it's such a daunting task. I've decided, you know what,

I'm just going to kind of take it piece by piece and every now and then do a little episode

on this time period and share some knowledge. And some, you know, maybe gets a conversation going

about the appropriate level of government in our public land system or in government in life in

general. I'm a very conservative fella and I like the idea of small government. The idea of

federally managed public lands, it kind of goes up against my idea that I'm a firm believer in

private property and this idea that the government shouldn't have their hands in a lot of things.

And yet in the case of public lands, I kind of diverge from that. And I hope as we cover

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