The Wilderness Warrior
Page 13
To fully comprehend the importance of R.B.R.’s legacy, it’s best to remember that he—like his nephew T.R.—relished slaying dragons, pounding away at adversaries. In political fights Robert B. Roosevelt was always taking on fiendish “rings” with “off with their heads delight.” These included the “Rivermen Ring,” the “District of Columbia Ring,” and the “Tweed Ring” he wanted to be a pallbearer for them all. Corruption of any kind was anathema to R.B.R.’s code of noblesse oblige. In his third conservation book, The Game Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America, R.B.R. merged the sportsman’s ethics with natural history and prosecutorial prose. Basking in his newfound literary celebrity, he spearheaded the preservationist agenda of the New York Sportsmen’s Club. In 1874, at R.B.R.’s urging, the club changed its British-sounding name, becoming the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG). Three years later R.B.R. was elected president (a post he held until his death in 1906).77 Whether the issue was white-tailed deer, mallard ducks, or brook trout the members of NYAPG were hunters who believed wholeheartedly in conservation. The organization was instrumental in the majority of New York legislation aimed at saving wildlife during the 1870s and 1880s.78
What distinguished R.B.R. from other members of NYAPG was that whereas they promoted preservation, he fought for “restoration.” In this regard R.B.R. was furthering the teachings of Henry W. Herbert, challenging the so-called big bugs of his day for killing off America’s waterways. There were many fine books published on fish culture in the nineteenth century—including the U.S. Fish Commission’s annual Reports, which began in 1871—but none had the literary flair of R.B.R.’s efforts.79
IV
Analyzing contemporary “fish culture” and heading a conservationist club weren’t enough for Robert B. Roosevelt. For twenty years, he served as the head of the New York State Fish Commission, an unpaid position. What enraged him most was the fine-mesh nets fishermen draped across the Hudson to catch huge schools of shad, thereby preventing any fish from swimming upstream to their spawning grounds. A firm believer in effecting change through the legislative process, R.B.R. lobbied state lawmakers in Albany, and soon it was decreed that nets could have a mesh no smaller than 4½ inches. Numerous laws followed: fines would be issued to fishermen who operated nets or traps on Sunday; fishing seasons for some species were established; rivers were ordered restocked; and catch limits were enacted to further protect shad during the two-month season (April 15 to June 15).80
Robert B. Roosevelt was a workhorse on the fish commission. Because he was independently wealthy, he had time to send his fellow commissioners a barrage of white papers on pisciculture, and his colleagues usually rubber-stamped his decisions. Nobody doubted that R.B.R. was the voice of the commission. Still, Robert was too much of an autocratic gentleman to persuade working fishermen who needed to troll long hours just to feed their families. A spokesman was needed who could talk with no hint of refinement about the virtues of artificial propagation of fish. R.B.R. recruited Seth Green—the fashion-defying “Fish King,” considered the premier angler in America around 1868—to join the commission and be his mouthpiece in promoting hatcheries.
Raised near Rochester, New York, Green learned to hunt and fish around the Genesee River’s lower falls. As an adolescent, he learned “fishing secrets” from the local Seneca Indians. By the time Green turned forty, in 1857, he was the top fish dealer in New York and was considered the ace commercial fisherman in America; he and his crew caught ten to twenty-five tons of fish a month.81
Meanwhile, Green developed the rudimentary science of artificial insemination. He stripped the female trout of her eggs, catching them in a tin pan like the ones gold miners used. Next, he milked the male trout’s milt to drain into the same pan. A series of other tasks were performed before these pans were placed on the hatching beds. A high level of patience was necessary. Forty or fifty days later, using a magnifying glass, he was able to detect the eyes of a little fry. Around 120 days later eggs hatched.
At first, Green had a success rate of only 25 percent. Not content with that, he experimented, and before long his trial-and-error approach paid off. He discovered that water should never be mixed in with the spawn and milt, because it diluted potency. Using a method he called “dry impregnation,” Green had a 97 percent efficiency rate. He secretly produced fish at his compound for a couple of years, cutting brook trout fillets for market and selling his spawn in Buffalo, Niagara, and Rochester.82
This anonymity, however, didn’t last forever. A series of admiring articles about Seth Green’s upstate hatchery appeared in New York City newspapers. His discovery resulted overnight in a rush to create trout ponds everywhere. Such fish farms were seen as a highly profitable investment, an easier way to get fish onto the nation’s dinner tables than fishing in streams and lakes with rod and reel or nets. Green was suddenly in high demand as a teacher and demonstrator. In 1867 New England fish commissioners hired Green to start propagating the American shad on the Connecticut River, where stocks had been seriously depleted.83 Although he was subjected to torrents of antiscientific ridicule from disbelieving fishermen, Green carefully erected dams, waste gates, and hatching boxes in four New England states. Fishermen on the Connecticut River, now deeply resentful of Green’s wizardry, vandalized his hatchery equipment and cut holes through all his nets. Undaunted, Green began keeping watch over his homemade boxes, leaping out of bushes in the morning hours with a loaded Winchester to frighten would-be saboteurs away.
For a while, Green had a bigger worry than angry fishermen: it turned out that shad couldn’t be hatched through artificial impregnation the same way trout were. From a way station in Holyoke, Massachusetts, he experimented with burying the eggs in gravel placed in the troughs. Every day he made scientific adjustments to his contraptions, but the shad eggs wouldn’t hatch. Despite the continued harassment of local fishermen, Green’s stoic persistence and surgical repairing eventually paid off. When he checked the boxes one afternoon, the shad had hatched. It was an important moment: he had established that shad eggs could hatch in only thirty-three hours, far less time than trout eggs took. And his success rate was even higher: Green claimed that 999 out of 1,000 shad eggs hatched under his new protocol. By the time he closed his Holyoke shop in 1872, Green had released 40 million shad into the Connecticut River. But the river men weren’t wrong. Before Seth Green arrived on the scene, shad had been selling at 100 for forty dollars. By the time he finished replenishing the river, the market price per 100 had plummeted to three dollars.
Although Green received excellent press coverage, due in part to his Trout Culture, published in 1870,84 New England’s fish commissioners gave him only a measly stipend of $200 for all his innovative hard work. (By contrast, in 1871 the California Fish and Game Commission introduced hatchery shad into the Sacramento River and paid Green handsomely for inspiring the hatcheries85).Outraged at his shabby treatment by the New Englanders, Green accused the commissioners of not understanding the magnitude of his accomplishment. His goal was to restock America’s lakes, rivers, and streams, but he needed a sponsor for such a huge undertaking.
It was at this point that Green joined forces with Robert B. Roosevelt, the nation’s richest enthusiast for fish culture. Using his political contacts in Albany, R.B.R. had already petitioned the legislature to launch the state fishing commission. When Green was appointed to the commission’s oversight board, the state of New York provided him with a $1,000 grant to inventory the Hudson River shad population and then start a hatchery operation.
At first, the team of Roosevelt and Green made a tactical blunder in initiating public fish hatcheries in New York. The folksy Green went along the banks of the Hudson, telling groups of river men that the hatchery movement was about to make “fish cheap on the open markets.” It was poor public relations, and the New Yorkers were soon acting like their Connecticut neighbors. The fishermen used oars, axes, and sledge hammers to smash shad-hatch
ing boxes, destroying all Green’s initial work.
An infuriated R.B.R. cursed the “inborn cussedness of human nature” and suggested that wardens were needed on the Hudson River to protect state property. Nevertheless, for a few months R.B.R. also sought a rapprochement with the river men. But when Roosevelt heard that Green had been physically harassed by river men for placing hatchery boxes in the Hudson—cigarette butts were flicked at Green and dead shad were thrown in his face—he headed to river towns such as Beacon and Poughkeepsie, threatening to have the saboteurs clapped into prison. “Furious, Roosevelt went in person and harangued the men,” a daughter of R.B.R. wrote in her diary. “Anyone who knew him would realise that this must have been to him not only a relief but a genuine pleasure. He had a surpassing command of irony, sarcasm, and vitriolic incentive combined with a powerfully paternal method of appealing to one’s better nature, that would bring a sob to the throat of the most callous and horny-handed son of toil. So long as the latter was unaware that it was merely forensic eloquence…the fishermen had no chance.”86
Over the years a strong friendship developed between R.B.R. and Green. Whenever Roosevelt took his yacht to Newfoundland or Maine, Green went along in search of nature’s secrets. Constantly trying to update the general public on scientific improvements, in 1879 they cowrote Fish Hatching and Fish Catching and received solid reviews. Their explorations in 1883 of wild Florida’s “abundance, beauty and fragrance of flowers” resulted in another book, Florida and the Game Water Birds. In it, Green was portrayed as a stubborn foil, continually asking unanswerable questions about local diamond-backed terrapins, stingrays, and sharks.87 Taken as a whole, Florida was described by R.B.R. as a “floral El Dorado.”88 Never before had he seen so many ducks and waterfowl. For an educational appendix to Florida and the Game Water Birds, R.B.R. provided a brief paragraph about each avian species he encountered in Florida. He was building on the traditions of William Bartram and John James Audubon. “There are no dangerous animals in Florida, only a few of Eve’s old enemies,” R.B.R. wrote, “and the sportsman is safer in the woods at night under the moss-covered trees and on his moss-constructed mattress than in his bed in the family mansion on Fifth Avenue.”89
The pliable Green, however, wasn’t always just a sidekick to R.B.R.’s Huck Finn. He did write Robert B. Roosevelt a letter later that year as his rich friend was fueling speculation about running for mayor of New York City. Green saw that his employer’s pigheadedness would make political compromise impossible. “I know you have a big solid head,” he wrote to Roosevelt. “But the ware and tare of if you was mayor of New York would be more than it would be on the yacht. There you don’t have but a few to conquer & some times you find you are wrong and have to take water…. I know you would be always right if you was mayor but there is so many thieves they would keep you awake nights. I know you would get the best of them but it would take a heap of work.”90
Truth be told, R.B.R. was enjoying rural life on Long Island’s Great South Bay (a lagoon) too much to be mayor of any city. In 1873 he had paid $14,000 for a two-acre estate near Sayville. The Suffolk County News described the estate as “a comfortable but unpretentious villa.”91 Living in a dream of bliss, R.B.R. named the house Lotus Lake and enjoyed playing a new role, that of gentleman farmer, yachtsman, hard-clammer, and authority on fish. Sailing around Fire Island, an alarmed R.B.R. declared that New York City’s waste was killing off the eelgrass. Whenever free time was available, he read up on pirates like Blackbeard and Captain Redeye. Playing at being a farmer gave him material for an ongoing spoof about the vicissitudes of growing cucumbers and black wax yellow-pod beans. He joined the Suffolk County Agriculture Society and kept diaries about his farming triumphs and woes.92 Regularly, however, while at Lotus Lake, he corresponded with Spencer F. Baird, head of the U.S. Fish and Fisheries Commission, about the need for hatcheries and an Audubon-quality “fish plates” book of all the American species.93
R.B.R.’s voluminous diaries about fish, crabs, frogs, and turtles, kept through the mid-1870s, are even more telling of his daily commitment to studying nature than his cucumber and beanstalk logs. Here is an example of his science-laden style:
March 14, 1877
I visited State Hatching House. Everything in splendid order. Fish eggs clear and bright. Hatched in Hutton boxes till almost ready to come out, then placed on trays in troughs. All that come out head forest die…. Young Cal. brook trout and young Cal. salmon quite alike, and former handsomer than our B. trout but with blunter head than salmon; they have no carmine specks on their sides. Kennebeck salmon yearlings have yellow sides, much more so than Cal. salmon. Impregnated some eggs of B. trout Mar. 15, while there were 100,000 of fry with the sack absorbed. The spawning season lasting all winter.94
V
Robert B. Roosevelt obsessed over a varied group of wildlife species. And, why not, since he was Dr. Doolittle incarnate? Sometimes he would sit in front of Madison Square with George Francis Train, who published his own quirky newsletter, feeding crumbs to sparrows. Tremendously proud that the Roosevelt coat of arms showed ostrich feathers in plumes, R.B.R. said that they were “always borne with their tops curled over.”95 His personal papers are filled with long, well-written observations on oysters, including their alleged aphrodisiac properties. Minnows were another specialty of his, and he pioneered in studying their spring spawn. He took copious notes on eels, which he collected in tanks to scrutinize. By 1876, in fact, he was considered America’s authority on eels, although he admitted to not fully understanding their role in the food chain. Spencer Fullerton Baird was known to collect snakes in a barrel so R.B.R. decided to one-up him with eels. “Eels—are they kin to snakes?” he once asked in his diary. “We shall leave that question to Darwin and Huxley. You know they are the leaders of modern thought; and it takes a thought leader to find out a thing of that kind. They say eels are a connecting link between the batrachians and the true fishes, and, standing in that position, they are no kin, or, if any, very little, to snakes; though they may be cousin-german to a salamander or mud-puppy. But there is another question: how did the eel get into this position of middle-men? Did he evolute, so to speak, from his cousin catfish? Or did he involute from his cousin mud-puppy? Or did he proceed from that great practical evolutionist, his uncle bull-frog, who used to be a tadpole?”96
Robert B. Roosevelt’s unpublished notes on species are cheeky and he asks the same kind of Darwinian era questions as his precocious nephew Theodore. If Darwin could write entire chapters on orchids and beehives, R.B.R. saw no reason not to do a similar study on oysters and eels. Like most naturalists, R.B.R. valued observation more than reasoning, so his notes on fish—shad, pickerel, bass, bream, and sturgeon, in particular—are fiercely detailed. And few alive knew more about frogs—the animal, he claimed, “easiest victimized”—than Roosevelt. Whereas some naturalists dreamed of climbing Clingmans Dome in the Great Smokies or observing timber wolves at Isle Royale, R.B.R. fantasized about visiting a pond in Illinois where 250,000 frogs were believed to live.
For far too long, environmental history has obscurred R.B.R.’s influence on his nephew’s desire to become a naturalist. You might say the future president was a hybrid—half his father, the other half Uncle Rob. Clearly, Robert B. Roosevelt had taught his nephew that ruinous times would ensue if waterways weren’t properly managed. Later in life, T.R. collected live animals exactly the way R.B.R. did. The conservationist books and articles T.R. wrote about the American West were merely more sophisticated versions of Superior Fishing and Florida and the Game Water Birds. It’s not a stretch to believe that T.R. inherited his idea of owning a beautiful Long Island estate surrounded by teeming wildlife—what became his beloved Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay in 1887—directly from his parents’ Tranquility and his Uncle Rob’s Lotus Lake. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to visit R.B.R. on Long Island, even Oscar Wilde, who arrived one afternoon with a “wreath of daisies” for a hatband.97
To an
ybody interested in the angler’s life, R.B.R. was a true celebrity as an author and activist. His motto—“Remember, no man ever caught a trout in a dirty place”—galvanized anglers to support antipollution laws.98 Everybody, it seemed, wanted to fish with Robert B. Roosevelt. So as Theodore Roosevelt prepared to attend Harvard University in the fall of 1876, his uncle was already an irrepressible crusader for fish and wild-life.99 Certainly every natural history professor T.R. took a course with at Harvard would have known him as R.B.R.’s nephew; R.B.R.’s fame was that widespread in biology circles. Robert’s books, while quirky, were honored at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Robert had earned a place in the history of pioneering conservationists. “Robert B. Roosevelt was among the first to understand that our wild species were being decimated,” Ernest Schwiebert, the renowned author of Trout and Matching the Hatch, wrote. “Our cities and factories were already spewing their waste into our waters. Timber was cut with a mindless rapacity, and land poorly suited to agriculture was being stripped for farmsteads. Roosevelt worked tirelessly for conservation.”100
CHAPTER FOUR
HARVARD AND THE NORTH WOODS OF MAINE
I
At age thirteen, when Theodore was deemed mature enough, his father sent him on a 500-mile excursion by train and stagecoach from Manhattan Island to Moosehead Lake to convalesce in a serene alpine environment after his bouts of asthma. The lake was the largest in Maine, with more than 400 miles of rugged shoreline, most of it untrampled wilderness in 1871. All was going well for Roosevelt on the unescorted journey to the lake until he arrived at the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad depot and station. As he waited for a stagecoach bound for Moosehead Lake, a couple of local youths began taunting him for being a sissy. A nauseated, demoralized feeling rose up behind Roosevelt’s breastbone. Timidly, he put up his dukes and in return got pummeled. “They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me,” he recalled in An Autobiography. “The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”1