Preface Some fifteen years ago the Boone and Crockett Club commissionedJames B. Trefethen to write a history of the club from its inception in1887 under the tutelage of Theodore Roosevelt until the beginning ofthe sixth decade of this century. Mr. Trefethen, an associate memberof the club and a professional wildlife specialist with the WildlifeManagement Institute, immediately plunged into the research for hisproject and he soon realized that the task was larger and more com-plex than envisioned by the club's leadership. The early history of the Boone and Crockett Club was in reality achronicle of the first stirrings of the newly awakened conservationconscience in the United States. The club's activities in the latter partof the nineteenth century and the first decades of this one coincidedwith the launching of both government and private endeavors in theconservation and wildlife-management movement. As his research reached forward into the 1930s, Jim Trefethen be-came increasingly aware of the magnitude and diversity of the recordspreading out before him. What had started as a history of the Booneand Crockett Club soon assumed a much more significant position inthe bibliography of conservation literature. In short, our story be-came a larger history--literally an epic of the crusade for wildlife inNorth America. The book became a standard reference in the fieldand one of the few chronological histories of the conservation move-ment available for research. The United States--indeed, the world--has witnessed an almostunbelievable explosion in interest and concern about all things con-nected with nature since Crusade for Wildlife was published in 1961."Ecology" has become a familiar word to millions. The old-line con-servationist--often ignored or even ridiculed in the not-too-distantpast--has found himself in the middle, often in the front, and some-times left behind in a newly awakened body politic deeply committedto a better natural world about us. It has become obvious to the Boone and Crockett Club that theworld's awareness of today's conservation and wildlife problems isvastly stronger, more immediate, more urgent, and better-informedthan it was in 1961. It has become equally apparent that it is time torestate and enlarge the history of the conservation movement in lightof the rush of development and change in the last fifteen years. For-tunately, Jim Trefethen is still here to lend his wonderfully tunedVll