From his lakefront lodge, Roosevelt, piqued by the hazing incident, embarrassed by his feebleness, stared zombie-like at the blue water, which swallowed strands of dark green spruces along its shoreline.2 Instead of resenting his tormentors, he envied their hardiness, brawn, and condensed force. Following the humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt made a pact with himself: he was going to become a man of true physical strength. Boxing, weight lifting, calisthenics, hiking—he would do whatever it took. Someday, he promised, those same bullies would treat him with respect. “The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me,” he recalled. “I made up my mind…that I would not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by training.”3
In a sense, Roosevelt was determined to evolve from prey to predator. He started pumping weights and doing push-ups regularly, and he also improved his skills as an equestrian and marksman. Meanwhile, his bird collecting in the woodlands of New York continued unabated. Whenever time permitted, Roosevelt had a birder friend accompany him on these tramps. His usual companion was Frederick Osborn, an irresolute ornithologist who, like himself, was in awe of God’s wild creatures; no nest, egg, or bird sighting failed to enthrall Osborn. Memories of their bird-watching times together remained with Roosevelt for the remainder of his life, one more vivid than another.
One winter afternoon in the 1870s near Bear Mountain—a breathtaking rise on the west bank of the Hudson River—Roosevelt and Osborn went on a hunt. Full of anticipation, Roosevelt had journeyed upriver from Manhattan to see Osborn, who lived in nearby Garrison, a ferry and railroad depot directly across the river from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Much of the forest around Bear Mountain was still pristine, but quarrymen had of late been mining toprock (basalt) to provide building material for eastern metropolises. Clomping down a snowy path, they suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. It was a moment of unprecedented excitement. In front of them was a flock of gorgeous red crossbills. Both Theodore and Frederick had long coveted this species to add to their collections. They were determined to be the very best of the new breed of post-Darwinic ornithologists.
In unison Roosevelt and Osborn rapidly fired their shotguns in a succession of blasts, three or four times each. When the dust settled, finch carcasses lay on the stump-filled field. Red crossbills—with different bills from their brethren in the West—could now be added to the bounty bags of pine siskins, common redpolls, and pine grosbeaks. Working without hunting dogs, Roosevelt and Osborn anxiously sprinted to retrieve their prized birds from the ground. But Roosevelt tripped on a concealed rock or tree root, stumbled forward, and barely recovered his balance. He was smacked in the face by a low-hanging branch or twig and his spectacles went flying. Half-blind, squinting, and shaking off disorientation, he quickly recollected himself and scanned the ground. “But dim though my vision was, I could still make out the red birds lying on the snow; and to me they were treasures of such importance,” he wrote years later, “that I abandoned all thought of my glasses and began a nearsighted hunt for my quarry.” 4
Once Roosevelt secured the red crossbills he went searching for his glasses, but in vain. From that moment onward he made a pact with himself always to carry a reserve pair of spectacles—with rims made out of steel—in his breast pocket. (When Roosevelt ran for president as the candidate of the Bull Moose Party in 1912, he was shot in the chest by an anarchist in Milwaukee. The extra bird-watching spectacles absorbed the impact of the bullet and probably saved his life.5)
Just four months after the day of the red crossbills, Osborn—whose father, William, was president of the Illinois Central—died in a river accident. Roosevelt was emotionally crushed by his friend’s death. His mind held a montage of all the wilderness tramps they had gone on together. Osborn, he loyally believed, was a rising prince, as kindhearted as the day was long, the companion of belle jeunesse. His death jarred Roosevelt’s outlook on life. With a contracted brow and grimace on his face it became the day the fun stopped. “He was drowned, in his gallant youth,” Roosevelt mourned decades later. “But he comes as vividly before my eyes now as if he were still alive.”6
Losing his favorite birding side-kick was emotionally tough on Roosevelt, but his naturalist journals continued without a hitch. Whenever he found a flock of sandpipers or a delicate nest of golden-crowned kinglets—to cite just two examples from that spring—he’d dutifully record the observations in notebooks labeled with pseudoscientific titles like “Remarks on the Zoology of Oyster Bay” or “Field Book of Zoology.” Using Elliott Coues’s excellent Key to North American Birds—first published in 1872—as his principal classification tool, Roosevelt was determined to carry the ornithological torch for both Osborn and himself. Depression, he decided, simply wasn’t allowed. March, after the snow melted, left the ground parched. April, as poets often wrote, was a fickle month. But in May—the month when Osborn died, in his prime—there was a sense of rehabilitation in the air. As any naturalist knew, death must always precede rebirth. When the May dandelions arrived, everything turned green, the migratory birds returned to New York, and the fields were filled with thistle and thine. “I just begin to realize it,” he wrote to his mother, who was traveling in Georgia, “the birds even are commencing to come back. While in the Park [Central Park] the other day I saw great numbers of robins, uttering their cheery notes from almost every grove. That winter had only just departed was evident from the number of little snowbirds (clad in black with white waist coats) which were about.”* 7
If any American writer caught Roosevelt’s attention in the 1870s it was Coues. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while John Tyler was president, Coues had lived a storybook life as a western man of science. During the Civil War he served at Fort Whipple, Arizona, as an assistant surgeon. Later he was appointed to Fort Randall, South Dakota, as a naturalist for the U.S. Northern Boundary Commission. Although he was considered one of the few top-rated surgeons west of the Mississippi River, Coues preferred writing wildlife books to performing tonsillectomies and amputations. His Key to North American Birds made him the heir apparent to Audubon. Although he served the Geological Survey of the Territories from 1876 to 1880 as a secretary and naturalist (under the supervision of F. V. Hayden), Coues eventually quit and returned to Arizona to document the amazing variety of migratory birds that wintered at such prime grounds as the Chiricahua Mountains and Patagonia Lake.8
Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have dizzied themselves trying to monitor their subject’s travels between Manhattan Island, Moosehead Lake, the Hudson River valley, the New Jersey Palisades, the Adirondacks, and Oyster Bay from 1874 to 1876, before he went to Harvard. Restless in the extreme, Roosevelt switched locales as regularly as a salesman or trail guide. In the two years before he entered Harvard, he tried to get away from West Fifty-Seventh Street on nature excursions as often as possible, usually alone. Instead of Osborn, Coues’s Key was his new companion, and he religiously followed the books’ systematic standards of trinomial nomenclature (taxonomic classification of subspecies).
Often, however, when he was studying foreign languages or arithmetic under the guidance of his tutor, Arthur Cutler, Roosevelt’s mind drifted to the Adirondack timberlands and the Long Island meadows, daydreaming about troops of new birds for his collection. Every time he could escape from Cutler’s apron strings, he made a beeline for Oyster Bay, part of the Eastern Flyway for migratory birds, eager to hear reedy wails and lovely carols. Whenever Cutler—who now prided himself on being headmaster of the Cutler School of New York—tried regimenting Theodore and getting him to focus on French or Greek, his prize student’s attention instead drifted to meditations on plebian robins and exotic waterbirds.9 “The study of Natural History was his chief recreation then as it continued to be,” Cutler recalled later. “He had an unusually large collection of birds and sm
all animals; shot and mounted by himself and ranging in habitat from Egypt to the woods of Pennsylvania. In his excursions outside the city, his rifle [actually a shotgun] was always with him, and the outfit of a taxidermist was in use on every camping trip.”10
That autumn, Roosevelt’s natural history journals document eight visits to the North Shore of Long Island in two months. Even though Roosevelt kept bird counts doggedly, even fiercely, he sometimes panicked over his lack of ornithological expertise. When the Oyster Bay fields turned dark and the nighthawks were no longer doing arabesques, Roosevelt would study the frail skeletons of doves and pigeons in his collection. Unlike those of other vertebrates, many of these bird’s bones were hollow tubes. The larger the bird, Roosevelt noticed, the more hollow the bones were. Thanks to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Roosevelt understood this to be a result of evolution—the lighter the bird, the easier it was to fly. Staying up late, long past the shifting dusk, though his parents usually retired early, Roosevelt pondered each avian’s aerodynamic design, fascinated that only ostriches and penguins had abandoned flight. Throughout these ritualistic midnight inspections, Roosevelt bore down as a scientist, unemotional and sleepless.
Roosevelt sometimes worked eight or nine hours a day on ornithological pursuits when he was in Oyster Bay, and his descriptions of birds increased in vividness and freshness. Each bird Roosevelt saw in a field or grove attracted his serious attention. Even the coarse materials songbirds used to build nests or the exact number of wing beats it took to defy gravity came under his careful scrutiny, in a way Robert B. Roosevelt would have approved. “It becomes very fat in August and is at all times insectivorous,” Theodore wrote of the white-throated sparrow. “It has a singularly sweet and plaintive song, uttered with clear, whistling notes; it sings all day long especially if the weather be cloudly, and I have frequently heard it at night, but its favorite time is in the morning when it begins long before daybreak; indeed, excepting the thrushes, it sings earlier than any other bird. The song consists generally of two long notes, the second the highest and with a rising inflection, followed by five or six short ones (as duuduu), but there are many variations. A very common one is to have but two short notes (as uu); sometimes the second note is broken into two (as uuu). It sings all through the summer.”11
On July 8, 1874, Roosevelt shot, skinned, and mounted a male passenger pigeon in Oyster Bay. What interested him the most was the pigeon’s esophagus crop, the sac where food was stored to later regurgitate and feed hatchlings. This bird also had a crop to produce a special milk for its hungry babies. Because these pigeons were still plentiful, Roosevelt wasn’t overenthusiastic about them in his journal. During the Jefferson era, there had been millions of these tan-and-burned-orange birds in America, huge flocks migrating regularly from north to south. The ornithologist Alexander Wilson, in fact, once recorded more than 2 million in a single flock flying over Kentucky. Since passenger pigeons were edible and marketable, their slaughter was at full throttle in the middle of the nineteenth century when Roosevelt shot his specimen at Oyster Bay. One New York man, in fact, boasted of killing 10,000 pigeons in a single day. The growth of cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago hastened their destruction by ruining their natural habitat.
Meanwhile, while birding, Roosevelt had started “seeing” Edith Carow of New York. Edith’s father, Charles Carow, was perhaps Robert B. Roosevelt’s closest fly-fishing friend. “Charles cast the fly simply to perfection,” R.B.R. wrote, “and with whom I have fished many and many a day on the waters of old Long Island and elsewhere as well.”12 At Oyster Bay Theodore and Edith argued over the merits of popular fiction, played board games, and rowed around the Long Island Sound. Everything about Edith—her sharp quick eyes, playful countenance, and air of general smartness—appealed to Theodore.13 Too young to really understand love, Theodore nevertheless knew this much: Edith, who was destined to become his second wife, was the girl he wanted to impress. So they dated. Nothing too serious, just occasional hand-holding or good-night hugs. They were very young, and whatever romance existed between them didn’t last long. Once Theodore arrived at Harvard, he quickly found another girlfriend, who came from Chestnut Hill in Boston.14
Truth be told, Roosevelt—as of 1874—didn’t have the self-confidence or the desire to date with marriage in mind. He was busy just trying to understand his father’s expectations. The awkward Roosevelt, who was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 124 pounds, strove to improve himself in every way. He grew bushy side-whiskers, developed compact forearms, and wore pressed clothes fit for a sportsman hunting. He always looked as if somebody had slapped the creases out of the fabric for the sake of upholding the family name. Although his parents often straitjacketed Theodore in formal attire, he preferred dressing down like a muskrat trapper or stable keeper; this fashion attitude would change at Harvard.
Visiting Edith at her summer home at Sea Bright, New Jersey, for a week in July 1874, Roosevelt noted that the sand dunes of the barrier beach were brimming with “ornithological enjoyment and reptilian rapture.”15 Playing a Darwinian biologist, he pickled in jars all the toads, frogs, and salamanders he caught for more careful study of their evolutionary stages. Romance with Edith was put on a back burner in favor of writing about New Jersey’s avians in his Notes on Natural History. “Whether inland or on the coast the most conspicuous bird was the fishawk,” he wrote. “It was most plentiful by ponds, and over one of these several pairs of singular birds could almost always be observed, circling through the air on almost motionless wings, usually far out of gunshot range. On a suitable fish being seen, the hawks swoops down with arrow like swiftness, causing a whistling, booming sound as it descended, and stooping with such force as sometimes to totally immerse itself in water.”16
With the hungry speed of youth, Roosevelt was dead certain about his career direction. As his father conceded when they returned from the trip to Europe and the Middle East, he was predisposed to be a scientific naturalist or wildlife biologist. But Theodore Sr. warned his son that a life of science meant long hours in a sterile laboratory; field collecting was only a small part of the profession. Either way, the importance of being accepted at Harvard weighed greatly on young Theodore. When word of his acceptance came in the spring of 1876, he was elated, but he also knew that the time had come to professionalize his infatuation with animals. “When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type,” Roosevelt recalled in An Autobiography, “a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.” The key phrase here is “out-of-doors” he didn’t want to be an indoor scientist, the kind of scientist Captain Reid had shunned.17
Throughout the summer of 1876, as America was in the midst of celebrating its centennial, a Grand Exposition was held in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. It celebrated the industrial march of progress from Alexander Graham Bell demonstrating the telephone to a massive 650-ton steam engine built by Rhode Island’s George Corliss (standing seventy feet high, it was the largest engine ever constructed). At one point, Ulysses S. Grant and Frederick Douglass sat side by side onstage; a photograph of them together spoke volumes about the Union victory in the Civil War. The Grand Exposition, in fact, was the first world’s fair held in the United States, and more than 10 million people attended. Young Theodore was one of them. The Department of the Interior created a pioneering display showcasing America’s original native inhabitants in colorful ethnological detail. When Roosevelt visited the fair, what he marveled at most was the display of U.S. wildlife (assembled with help from the Smithsonian Institution), including a fifteen-foot walrus and an Alaskan polar bear. Huge aquarium tanks displayed the plethora of American fish, such as salmon and perch, an aspect of the exposition that Robert B. Roosevelt had been instrumental in creating.18
Roosevelt at Harvard University in 1877. Desperate to become masculine he worked-out everyday with free weights.
T.R. at Harvard. (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Also, 1876 was a presidential election year, with his father backing Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Uncle Rob behind Samuel J. Tilden of New York. T.R. didn’t get very involved even if, like all good young Republicans, he believed the campaign hoopla: “Hurrah for Hayes and Honest Ways!” Politics was thin gruel to Roosevelt. He complained that both Hayes and Tilden sneered at the teachings of naturalists such as Coues and Darwin. Roosevelt instead pored over zoology books, including the new Manual of the Vertebrates of the Northern United States, whose author, David Starr Jordan, was only seven years older than himself.19 Suddenly, Roosevelt, influenced by Dr. Jordan and Uncle Rob, became interested in game fishes, particularly bass and trout; he was determined to enter Harvard as the best-rounded naturalist of his up-and-coming generation. As promised since the family trip down the Nile, Roosevelt was going to be a Harvard-trained foot soldier in the Darwinian revolution.
II
Before classes started in late September, Roosevelt tried to get his asthma under control. Unfortunately, his breathing had been thick for much of the year. It was as if a fungus had taken hold in his lungs. Because Harvard offered him only first-floor dormitory rooms, Roosevelt sought lodgings elsewhere. (Basements or ground-level rooms developed dampness and mildew, he claimed, which in turn triggered his coughing fits.) Roosevelt—already segregated from mainstream before the first day of class—rented a second floor suite in a house at 16 Winthrop Street (since torn down) just blocks from the campus. There were shady elm trees to admire from his four picture windows and, better yet, he could see the Charles River from the rooftop. Worried that he’d turn his living quarters into a taxidermy studio, Roosevelt’s overprotective sister Bamie prepared the rooms, fixing up his study and alcove.20 “Ever since I came here I have been wondering what I should have done if you had not fitted up my room for me,” he wrote to Bamie in earnest gratitude. “When I get my pictures and books, I do not think there will be a room in College more handsome.”21
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