There was nothing unusual about a nineteenth-century child being enamored of animals and wildlife. Whether it’s Aesop’s Fables or Mother Goose, the most enduring children’s literature often features lovable, talking animals. But the young Roosevelt was different from most other children: from an early age he liked to learn about wildlife scientifically, by firsthand observation. The cuteness of anthropomorphized animals in the popular press annoyed Theodore; Darwinian wildlife biology, on the other hand, captured his imagination and had the effect of smelling salts. Roosevelt loved the way the British naturalist had gone beyond physical similarities of anatomy and physiology to include behavioral similarities in his extended analysis The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). This devotion to Darwin, a real sense of awe, continued long after Roosevelt was an adult. Even when he was president, grappling with showcasing the Great White Fleet and building the Panama Canal, stories abounded about Roosevelt hurrying across the White House lawn exclaiming “Very early for a fox sparrow!” and then suddenly stopping to pick up a feather for closer coloration inspection.9 Believing that evolution was factual, President Roosevelt nevertheless conceded that the concept of natural selection needed to undergo constant scientific experimentation, and the more data the better.10
But before Roosevelt discovered Darwin there were the picture books and outdoors narratives aimed at the boys’ market. Every parent recognizes the moment when a child displays a special aptitude or precocity for learning, when hopes arise that it’s a harbinger of great educational accomplishment to come. Such sudden bursts of enthusiasm from a toddler indicate both personality and preference. When Theodore Roosevelt obsessed over the lavish illustrations in David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa and asked questions about Darwin’s theory of evolution, his parents, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, realized their son was an aspiring naturalist.11
A Scottish physician and African missionary, Livingstone always had a high-minded scientific purpose for his jungle explorations—for instance, to discover the headwaters of a river. Even though the elegantly bound Missionary Travels was almost too heavy for young Theodore to carry, he would stare at the photographs of zebras, lions, and hippopotamuses for hours on end, thirsting for Africa. His early fancy for animals was the most appealing and tenderest part of his adolescence. “When I cast around for a starting-point,” his friend Jacob A. Riis wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen (1904), “there rises up before me the picture of a little lad, in stiff white petticoats, with a curl right on top of his head, toiling laboriously along with a big fat volume under his arm, ‘David Livingstone’s Travels and Researches in South Africa.’”12
Nearly coinciding with the publication of On the Origin of Species, a Neanderthal skullcap was found three years earlier in Neander Valley, Germany. For anybody even remotely interested in the relationship between animals and man the discovery of the first pre-sapiens fossil was stunning news. Suddenly Thomas Huxley, a discerning British biologist with long, wild sideburns, began saying in his lectures that the skull was proof that man was a primate, a direct descendant of apes. Just as exciting was Huxley’s work on fossil fish, which he collected and classified with gusto. Although Huxley had been skeptical of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the publication of On the Origin of Species changed that. As the introverted Darwin retreated to a more private life, spending time with family and friends, Huxley became the leading interpreter of Darwin, explaining the master’s theories and articles to rapt audiences all over the world. Determined to defend evolution to the hilt, Huxley declared himself “Darwin’s bulldog,” ably drawing gorillas on blackboards to explain to the old-school scientists how man evolved from them. Whereas Darwin was a field naturalist, his advocate Huxley practiced anatomy; together they constituted a nearly lethal one-two punch on behalf of modern biology.
Although Theodore couldn’t possibly have understood the intricacies of evolutionary theory as a young boy, the explicit fact that man had evolved from apes appealed mightily to him. As a naturalist Darwin was unafraid to cut into the tissue of a cadaver looking for clues to creation. Merely having the temerity to write that man, for all his nobility, still bore “in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” made Darwin heroic to Roosevelt.13 “Thank Heaven,” Roosevelt wrote about his childhood a year before his death, “I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley.”14
Besides reading heavily illustrated wildlife picture books and hearing about the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Huxley from his family, Theodore gravitated to the Irish adventure writer Captain Mayne Reid. Generally speaking Captain Reid—a school tutor turned frontiersman on the Missouri and Platte rivers—wrote about the “Wilderness Out There” in a highly romantic way, as in a cowboy western.15 His seventy-five adventure novels and oodles of short stories are full of backwoods contrivance. In The Scalp Hunters (1851), for example, Captain Reid, with an air of superior wisdom, went so far as to declare that the Rocky Mountains region was a sacred place where “every object wears the impress of God’s image.”16 But Reid also appreciated evolution, filling his writings with sophomoric Darwinian analysis. He never missed a chance to describe birds, animals, and plants in vivid and apposite detail.17 Although Captain Reid never made much money with his hair-raising tales, he consistently milked his Mexican-American War military service for a string of successful plays. Strange wild locales were among Captain Reid’s specialties; for example, in The Boy Hunters (1853) he made the Texas plains, Louisiana canebrakes, and Mississippi River flyover seem like teeming paradises for any youngster interested in birds. There was, in fact, an able naturalist lurking underneath his often racist (even by mid-nineteenth-century standards) dime-novel prose.
Anybody wanting to understand Roosevelt as an outdoors writer must turn to The Boy Hunters. The plot is fairly straightforward—a former colonel in Napoléon’s army moves to Louisiana with his three sons and a servant, determined to be at one with nature—but by Chapter 2 the narrative takes a strange twist. One afternoon a letter arrives from Napoléon’s hunter-naturalist brother asking the old colonel to procure a white buffalo skin for France. Feeling too arthritic to tramp the Louisiana Territory in search of the rare buffalo, the colonel sends his sons—the “boy hunters”—in pursuit of the rare beast. Accompanied by the faithful servant, the adventurous boys head into the dangerous wilderness, determined to find a white buffalo, thought to be a sacred symbol in many Native American religions.* (Starting in 1917 the white buffalo also became a featured image in the state flag of Wyoming.)
Swooning over such chapter titles as “A Fox Squirrel in a Fix,” “The Prong-Horns,” and “Besieged by Grizzly Bears,” Roosevelt loved every page of The Boy Hunters. Much of the novel’s action took place in the Big Thicket of Texas, where wild pigs and horses roamed freely. After exposure to the American West the boys were no longer content shooting at birds: they coveted big game. Their ambition, Reid wrote, was not “satisfied with anything less exciting than a panther, bear, or buffalo hunt.”18 Like a trio of well-armed Eagle Scouts, the boy hunters grew to be completely self-reliant, able to ride horseback, dive into rivers, lasso cattle, and climb huge trees like black bears. They scaled a steep cliff and shot birds on the wing with bow and arrow. They were taught to “sleep in the open air—in the dark forest—on the unsheltered prairie—along the white snow-wreath—anywhere—with but a blanket or a buffalo-robe for their beds.” Drawing on the legends of the mountain men like Jim Bridger, Reid, preaching the strenuous life for boys, created little Natty Bumppos who could “kindle a fire without either flint, steel, or detonating powder.”19 These boys didn’t need a compass for direction. They could read all the rocks and trees of that “vast wilderness that stretched from their own home to the far shores of the Pacific Ocean.”20
The Boy Hunters included marvelous Hogarth-like woodcut illustrations of ferocious cougars and a bear wrestling an alligator, which spiced up the narrati
ve. Lovingly Captain Reid described in credible naturalistic detail tulip trees and the fanlike leaves of palmettos, weird yuccas, and lofty sugar maples. Most ambitiously, however, he anticipated Darwinian theory in anecdotes about the food chain.21 Academics have (accurately) criticized Captain Reid for harboring racist views of Indians and black slaves, but they’ve traditionally overlooked his essentially Marxist analogies about how the rich preyed on the poor in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a radical Republican, and to him the mega-capitalists were “king vultures” who didn’t have a single positive trait and who abused the common vultures (aura and atratus) without mercy. Later in life, when Roosevelt fought in the Spanish-American War, he borrowed much of Captain Reid’s observations of vultures for color in his own memoir The Rough Riders.22
Unlike James Fenimore Cooper or the Crockett Almanacs, Reid’s half-fictions awkwardly offered up the proper Latin names for wildlife and plants he encountered. “About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (artemisia tridentata),” he wrote in The Boy Hunters, “a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (tetrao uro-phasianus), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.”23 Passages like this occur in dozens of Reid’s books, often with the Latin binomials slowing down the otherwise fast-paced prose. Clearly, Reid wasn’t a local-color writer like Bret Harte or Alfred Henry Lewis recounting desperado hijinks and cowboy yarns from the Wild West. Roosevelt, like many American and English boys, made no bones about their idolatry of Captain Reid and his risky romps throughout the West.
Later in life, when Roosevelt moved to the Dakota Territory for intermittent spells to ranch and research a trilogy of books on the outdoors and hunting, Reid remained his literary model. Reid’s prose exploits of an American “cibolero” (buffalo hunter) in The White Chief: A Legend of North Mexico (1855), for example, motivated Roosevelt to lustily track down a nonwhite bison himself. In following its protagonist on a wild, woolly hunt for trophies in the Rockies, the book celebrated manifest destiny while offering Roosevelt a “manly” lesson in natural history. “To [the cibolero] the open plain or the mountain was alike a home,” Captain Reid wrote. “He needed no roof. The starry canopy was as welcome as the gilded ceiling of a palace.”24
Whenever Roosevelt wrote about the wilderness or birds, even as a boy, traces of Reid’s hyper-romantic style are easily detectable.25 Although other naturalist writers also captivated young Theodore’s imagination—for example, John James Audubon and Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost naturalist of the era *—Captain Reid, whom Edgar Allan Poe witheringly described as “a colossal but most picturesque liar,” remained his role model.26 (Captain Reid seldom purposely lied about nature, but he always embellished his own supposed rough-and-ready heroics.) An impressive five times in his An Autobiography of 1913, Roosevelt wrote about how “dearly loved” Reid was.27 By contrast, other outdoors books for boys didn’t much appeal to Roosevelt. For example, he dismissed Johann D. Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson for its clumsy zoology and was bored by its tropical escapism and dragfoot juvenility. According to young T.R., Wyss had assembled a “wholly impossible collection of animals” to pad his plot about survival after a shipwreck.28
One naturalist Roosevelt did enjoy was the British scholar Reverend J. G. Wood, whose Illustrated Natural History was published to wide acclaim in 1851. Wood made studying wildlife fun for nonscientific minds as well as specialists, without dumbing it down. Ignoring the complications of Darwinism, he simply took the view that natural history was “far better than a play” and “one gets the fresh air besides.”29 In particular, Roosevelt loved Wood’s Homes without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, Classed According to Their Principle of Construction (1866). Roosevelt marveled at passages in this weighty 632-page tome about ant nests and tunnels, deciding on the spot to emulate the author.30 The eight-year-old Roosevelt sat down and wrote a short essay, his first known written work, titled “The Foraging Ant.” There were more than 10,000 ant species in the world and Roosevelt wanted to understand their differences.* Proud of “The Foraging Ant,” which was about the workaholism of ants, Roosevelt read the essay out loud to his parents, who were complimentary about the pseudoscientific earnestness of his naturalist prose.31
More impressive than the essay itself, however, was the mere fact that young T.R. had read Homes without Hands. Although the book was replete with engravings of numerous species ranging from ospreys to wasps, the prose was fairly dense. Ostensibly, Wood was describing the varied hearths wild creatures built to live in—moles’ burrows, prairie dogs’ tunnels, rabbits’ warrens, beavers’ dams, spiders’ nests, and so on. But Homes without Hands was not aimed at the children’s book marketplace; it was serious adult fare, the kind of comprehensive text required in mid-nineteenth-century university biology or zoology introductory courses. Full of Latin identifications, choking with minutiae about the abdomen colors of bees and conchologistical (conchology is the study of mollusks) insights into Saxicava, this book was a far cry from the elegant musings of Thoreau about the shifting light at Walden Pond or a National Geographic article on white-water runs down the Shenandoah River. That Roosevelt gravitated to its heft pointed to his future avocation as one of the most astute wildlife observers our country has ever produced. One object from his Twentieth Street home impressed him more than any other: a Swiss wood-carving that showed a hunter stalking up a mountain after a herd of chamois, including a kid. As Roosevelt recalled in An Autobiography, he fretted regularly for the tiny chamois, fearful that “the hunter might come on it and kill it.”32
Stifled by city life, Roosevelt educated himself as best he could about zoology on the streets of Manhattan. As if cramming for a final exam, he grew determined to learn the song of every fast-fluttering bird in New York and the nesting habits of every small mammal in Central Park. Studying marine species in the nearby Atlantic Ocean was another interest; he actually enjoyed analyzing the radula (mouthparts) of mollusks. One afternoon he spied a dead seal at a fish stand among the piles of maritime products available for sale on the wharf—scallops, tuna, and other food fish; dried sea horses and pipefishes hawked for their “medicinal” qualities; and much more. Roosevelt fixated on the dead seal’s bulk and whiskers.33 The fact that the species had been netted in New York Harbor, where it is a rare visitor, flabbergasted him. Day after day, as if drawn to a talisman, he kept begging to be brought to the pier to study the seal’s anatomy more closely.34 As a budding naturalist, acquainted with The Voyage of the Beagle, the seven- or eight-year-old noted that seals had no external ears and that their back flippers didn’t bend forward to help their bodies when they were on dry land. Zoology books taught him that there were nineteen seal species in the world, most living around Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.
“That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure,” he later recalled in his autobiography. “I had already begun to read some of Mayne Reid’s books and other boys’ books of adventure, and I felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before me. As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal.” 35
Eventually, once the seal’s body was sold for blubber, Roosevelt was given the head as a souvenir. With this in hand, the ten-year-old created his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.” Its purpose was to help train him to become a natural history professional like Darwin. Bookshelf space was made in the upstairs hall at 28 East Twentieth Street for “Tag #1,” and before long he had rows of bird nests, dead insects, and mouse skeletons. He considered himself a “general collector,” with a particular interest in salamanders and squirrels. After
a few months, however, he turned his focus primarily to birds. Before long, he had numerous specimens to call his own. There is, in fact, a precious historical document housed at Harvard University, handwritten and five pages long, that illuminates the sheer earnestness with which young Theodore maintained his natural history collection. Titled “Record of the Roosevelt Museum,” it begins with a proclamation of professional accomplishment. “At the commencement of the year 1867 Mr. T. Roosevelt, Jr. started the Museum with 12 specimins [sic]: at the close of the same year Mr. J. W. Roosevelt [West Roosevelt, his cousin] joined him but each kept his own specimens, these amounting to hardly 100. During 1868 they accumulated 150 specimens, making a total of 250 specimens.”36
Roosevelt scrambled for new specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects wherever he could. Conch shells, larvae, hollowed eggs, and even a common cockroach were worth inclusion into his growing windowsill and bookshelf collection. In an article titled “My Life as a Naturalist,” written in 1918 when he was an ex-president, Roosevelt recalled that he collected specimens the way other boys collected stamps.37 Jars of tadpoles and minnows were particular favorites in his museum. Heading up Third Avenue toward the Harlem River, Roosevelt would wander the fields looking for rabbit holes and woodcock feathers. Leaves found in Gramercy Park were pressed into books and preserved. Young Theodore prided himself on being able to distinguish a hardwood from a conifer. Sometimes he would study the differences between leaves from the same tree, like a perplexed botanist.
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