The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

Upon receiving Roosevelt’s collection Baird—a prolific correspondent, who wrote about 35,000 letters a year—immediately sent an acknowledgment, saying he “was by no means prepared for so admirable or extensive a contribution, and beg to thank you very much for it. There are many specimens in the series which will be a great service to us in extending and completing the collections of the several compartments. I need hardly to say that whatever [else] you can furnish in the way of specimens of natural history will always be gladly received.”82

  An affectionate name for the Smithsonian has long been “America’s attic,” a fitting designation for our vast depository of national heirlooms. Roosevelt’s birds had ornithological value in 1882, and today they are invaluable as a window into our twenty-sixth president’s youth. The thorough accession records at the Smithsonian are nothing short of awesome, and the detailed accounting of all aspects of Roosevelt’s bird specimens is something that would make even Price-Waterhouse proud. Clearly Roosevelt’s birds were valued by Baird, for they immediately became an integral part of his natural history collection. In twenty-five pages the Smithsonian provided proper binomials and data on characteristics and colorization for each and every one of the 622 bird skins T.R. had donated. Fifty-three of them came from abroad (specifically, 31 from Egypt, six from Syria, five from Austria, one from Germany, one from France, two from England). As for his U.S. birds, they overwhelmingly came from Oyster Bay, the Adirondacks, and Garrison, New York.83

  What mattered most to Roosevelt, it seemed, wasn’t whether his birds ended up under glass at the Smithsonian Institution—to his mind the greatest museum in the world—but the fact that Baird had actually accepted his taxidermy as being excellent. From then on, whenever Roosevelt went hunting the Smithsonian Institution was the primary beneficiary of his prowess. Three of Roosevelt’s favorite Egyptian birds—a crocodile bird, a white-tailed lapwing, and a spur-wing lapwing—were gifted to the American Museum of Natural History. A white snowy owl he had shot near Oyster Bay in 1876 also was deeded to the New York museum. The largest bird in the arctic region, the snowy owl often migrated southward in the winter; a few were once discovered in the Caribbean. Covered with velvety, fine-textured, white, downy feathers, this owl epitomized gracefulness, swooping down and using its sharp talons to seize prey in a single elegant motion. Even before Roosevelt was famous, just a twenty-three-year-old assemblyman, this expertly mounted snowy-white became something of a tourist attraction at the American Museum. Over time, as his legend grew, this snowy owl likewise grew in significance. Today its recognized as the high-water mark of Roosevelt’s ornithological career.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHASING BUFFALO IN THE BADLANDS AND GRIZZLIES IN THE BIGHORNS

  I

  Although Theodore Roosevelt had donated his vast natural history collection to the Smithsonian Institution, he nevertheless desperately longed for the head of a free-ranging buffalo to hang on his library wall in New York. Roosevelt preferred to call them by the proper zoological classification “bison.” In Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1895) he titled one chapter “The Lordly Buffalo” and was full of reverence for the horned species. With zoological precision he was also careful to note that there were two subspecies of the mammal in North America: Bison bison bison (Plains buffalo) and the lesser Bison bison athabascae (wood buffalo) found primarily along the Pacific Coast.*1

  In late 1882, Roosevelt purchased a small brownstone off Fifth Avenue, at 55 West Forty-Fifth Street, hoping to get away from his mother’s tight grip and start a family of his own. The new home was, according to a close friend, a “pleasant” hearth where Theodore and Alice entertained guests with “the kind of generous warmth that characterized them both.”2 Roosevelt decided that his heads of indigenous game—buffalo, moose, elk, antelope, grizzly bear, etc.—would be showcased throughout the residence. “Back again in my own lovely little home,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1883 following a stint in Albany, “with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives—my own sunny darling. I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in my cozy little sitting room, before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, the playing backgammon with my own dainty mistress.”3

  By summer Roosevelt had set his sights on a country house as well. Craving open-air diversions, he acquired 155 acres of pristine land, half-wooded, near the family estate on Long Island’s north shore, and he started building an eclectic, roomy three-story mansion, with a view from upstairs of Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor. Originally called Leeholm, this mansion would become known as Sagamore Hill (after the Indian Chief Sagamore Mohannis, who had deeded away rights to the property 200 years earlier).4 The estate became Long Island’s great wunder krammer (room of wonders) for natural history. Its oak-paneled library would eventually house a first-rate naturalist book collection, and the walls would groan with trophies from the West—including skins and heads of all the North American big game Roosevelt shot—running the gamut from bear to wapiti. (Sagamore Hill would also become the summer White House from 1902 to 1908.5)

  That spring Roosevelt was reading Eugene V. Smalley’s History of the Northern Pacific Railroad, just released by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, the same firm that had published The Naval War of 1812 the previous year. Roosevelt had grown so enthralled with Putnam that he became a partner of the house, investing $20,000.6 The timing of Smalley’s book was propitious—near the end of the summer the second transcontinental railroad would open, with great hullabaloo. New Yorkers like Roosevelt could now easily travel to the northwest territories that Lewis and Clark had first bravely explored in 1803–1805.7 Dime novels had popularized past western heroes like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger as updates of the Leatherstocking sagas. Roosevelt wasn’t impressed by such hack writers as Ned Buntline or Prentiss Ingraham, but he touted western cowboys as the American equivalent of the British knights popularized by Sir Walter Scott. A mere train ride to the western edge of the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt hoped, would bring an array of Homeric pioneer characters into his fairly aristocratic eastern-centered orbit.

  Everything about the Northern Pacific Railroad—a pet project of presidents Lincoln and Grant—enthralled an unabashed expansionist like Roosevelt. Linking Lake Superior to Puget Sound, the Northern Pacific was somehow more romantic than the first transcontinental line, the Union Pacific, which chugged from Omaha to Sacramento through the salt flats of Utah, where Mormon settlements were springing up. With the Northern Pacific, places like the Bighorns, Yellowstone National Park, the Cascade Mountains, and the Olympic rainforests were now more easily reachable from the Atlantic East. As a direct consequence of the connecting spike a greater number of emigrants and fortune seekers now departed for the Minnesota and Dakota territories in droves to grow wheat in the excellent prairie soil. Not only did History of the Northern Pacific Railroad include attractive black-and-white photographs of Pyramid Butte and a panoramic shot of the sediment-laden Little Missouri River (the largest tributary of the Missouri in the region); it also included a shot of a “Ranchman’s Log ‘Schack’” that exuded unvarnished frontier charm in a classic western landscape.8

  Having already traveled on the Northern Pacific from Saint Paul to Moorhead, Roosevelt was now eager to take it farther west to a bizarre area that Smalley devoted an entire chapter to: the “Bad Lands.” Located in what is now western North Dakota,* the Badlands is a surreal jumble of scoria hills, towering buttes, buffalo wallows, grassy draws, and narrow valleys following the 560-mile Little Missouri River. Taken together the geography resembled a blasted-out Grand Canyon on a small scale. Created as the ancestral Rocky Mountains were being formed 60 million years ago, the Badlands were full of dinosaur bones and fossils, easily found on digs in sandstone beds and soft siltstone.9 (In 2007 scientists discovered in the Hill Creek Formation a rare “dinosaur mummy” of a 67-million-year-old fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur named Dakota; much of its tissue and bone was preserved in an envelope of skin.10) As in the Painted Desert of Arizona,
petrified wood was scattered about the Badlands for hundreds of miles, with silica coating the dead tree trunks and old stumps.11

  That spring of 1883 Theodore (with Alice) spent a lot of time at Tranquility in Oyster Bay, reading Smalley and other books pertaining to western exploration and Dakota wildlife while commissioning the architecture firm of Lamb & Rich to build Leeholm. During the workweek Theodore commuted into Manhattan on the Long Island Rail Road to take care of family business and give political speeches. At a Free Trade Club dinner in May at Clark’s Tavern, for example, he delivered an address on “The Tariff in Politics.” That evening Roosevelt struck up a conversation with Henry H. Gorringe, a blunt-spoken commodore who’d recently resigned from the U.S. Navy. One can only assume that The Naval War of 1812 was discussed, for Gorringe (like Roosevelt) was an outspoken advocate for a much larger and more modern U.S. fleet. Gorringe was so blunt, in fact, that Secretary of Navy William Eaton Chandler had found him insubordinate and forced him to resign that February.

  Deeply civic-spirited, Gorringe had supported Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt’s reformist initiatives in New York to clean up tenement buildings and improve sanitation, including the clearing of snow.12 Roosevelt and Gorringe had more in common than their interest in Oliver Hazard Perry and reformist politics: they shared a romanticized view of hunting and ranching along the Northern Pacific Railroad line. Gorringe planned to open a hunting lodge and cattle ranch in the Badlands, taking over a cantonment abandoned by the U.S. government along the languid Little Missouri River. The cantonment was originally built to protect railroad workers from Indian attacks, but Gorringe now envisioned it as a sportsmen’s resort. Roosevelt told Gorringe that he was dying to bag a free-ranger “while there were still buffalo left to shoot.”13

  The response from Gorringe was a salesman-like “no problem.” Recently, newspapers such as the Bismarck Tribune and Dickinson (North Dakota) Press had boasted that a couple of hunters there had bagged ninety deer and fifteen elk in a few weeks. Gorringe was already part owner of the Pyramid Park Hotel, which he was also hoping to make into a sportsmen’s resort, in Little Missouri, a village along the Northern Pacific Railroad route. Since the days of Lewis and Clark the Little Missouri area had been considered excellent hunting country (for bears, elk, antelope, beavers, black-tails, and white-tails) by the Crow, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Cheyenne, and Gros Ventre Indians.14 Now, Gorringe said, it was time for the white man to take advantage of such happy grounds.

  Unbeknownst to Roosevelt was that finding buffalo to shoot anywhere—even in the Badlands—was nearly impossible. For example, an outfit in Miles City, Montana, that very September had corralled wagons, bedrolls, horses, tents, pots and pans, playing cards—all the necessary provisions for a high-end Dakota-Montana buffalo hunt. It had signed up numerous eastern clients, promising the head of a 2,000-pound buffalo (plus an immense hump of the delicious muscle that supported the huge skull) for a high fee. Clearly Roosevelt wasn’t the only New York hunter craving the ultimate wall trophy, and buffalo steak by campfire under a starry sky. The Miles City outfit, however, couldn’t deliver on its sales pitch; disappointed clients, in fact, feeling ripped off, demanded a full refund.

  That summer buffalo herds were disappearing from the entire northern range. One of Minneapolis’s legendary fur buyers, for example, sent able scouts trudging over the northern plains in buckskins and mackinaws looking for buffalo hides. Finding them proved to be almost impossible. Back in 1881 one Montana dealer had acquired more than 250,000 buffalo hides for his little operation; now, just two years later, he was lucky to get ten. The buffalo hunter himself was becoming extinct. “Almost every wild buffalo had been done away with,” the historian Tom McHugh lamented in The Time of the Buffalo. “All that remained was the conspicuous leftover of carrion rotting on the prairie.”15

  Weeks after the Free Trade Club dinner where he met Gorringe, Roosevelt fell ill again with both asthma and cholera. Even escaping to an upscale Catskills resort in Richfield Springs didn’t help his breathing much. Although he said enthusiastically that the “scenery was superb,” being a convalescent made him feel puny. “For the first time in my life, I came within an ace of fainting when I got out of the bath this morning,” he wrote to his sister. “I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude, and am bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do, and being placed in that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering place for underbred and overdressed girls, fat old female scandal mongers, and a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives.” 16

  Following a familiar pattern, Roosevelt started to crave wide-open spaces as a cure-all. A Catskills hotel simply couldn’t do the trick. Another month in New York and his entire nervous system would have short-circuited. Gorringe’s Badlands beckoned him more than ever. Also gnawing at him was the fact that Elliott had returned from hunting in the dense jungles of India and had brought tiger heads; it wasn’t right for an older brother like himself to be trumped like that. Adding insult to injury, Elliott had already been stampeded by frightened buffalo in the Staked Plains of Texas, nearly losing his life for a trophy head. (Later, Theodore would commission Frederic Remington to sketch his brother’s brave technique—splitting the herd—as an illustration for his 1888 book Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail.17)

  With a tone of desperation, Roosevelt wrote Gorringe on August 23 to request that plans for their buffalo hunt be completed and the date set.18 Perhaps the fact that Alice was pregnant put him under additional stress. He was already equipped with two double-barreled shotguns—a No. 10 choke-bore made by Thomas of Chicago and a No. 16 hammerless especially made for him by Kennedy of Saint Paul. He also told Gorringe that he owned a .45-caliber Sharps, considered one of the finest buffalo guns.19

  Inexplicably, however, Gorringe backed out of going, leaving Roosevelt companionless for the hunt. Still sick with asthma (but with Alice safely ensconced with her family in Massachusetts), Roosevelt left by himself for Chicago, then switched trains for Saint Paul. Writing his mother a quick letter, he boasted about “feeling like a fighting cock again.”20 Proudly heading west on the Northern Pacific, Roosevelt steamed past the Lake Park region of Minnesota and the wheat fields of the Red River valley across the billowy plains around Jamestown to nearly treeless Bismarck and on to the desolate Badlands of his dreams.

  II

  At around two o’clock in the morning on September 8, 1883, Roosevelt arrived in the hamlet of Little Missouri (called “Little Misery” by locals) on the western edge of the Dakota Territory. There was no waiting platform or porter to greet him; he was the sole passenger, disembarking in the still darkness. Along the Little Missouri River you could hear a rustle of cottonwoods like waves along a dock. Everything about the scene had an eerie, ethereal cast. Not far from where Roosevelt was standing, George Armstrong Custer had camped with his detachment in 1876 on his way to the fatal battle of Little Bighorn. And just a couple of days prior to Roosevelt’s arrival, the former president Ulysses S. Grant had passed through Little Missouri, riding the railroad west to Gold Creek, Montana, where he would celebrate the hammering of the gold spike connecting the Northern Pacific to the Pacific Coast. About 200 miles to the southwest, the pacified Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull was now living on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation Agency, isolated in a patch of forlorn prairie along the present-day border between North and South Dakota; the U.S. government held him there as a prisoner of war.21 Either consciously or unconsciously, Roosevelt was about to insert himself into the closing act of the western frontier’s historical pageant.

  As Gorringe had instructed, Roosevelt made his way in the pitch blackness along the main street to the Pyramid Park Hotel. The gruff manager let him in and ushered him to a cot in a large communal room. Roosevelt collapsed and fell asleep, happy to have made it to the real West at last. In the morning light, as he rose alongside touchy frontiersmen and saddle-sore wranglers, it all looked very primitive. The washbasi
n where he tried to shave was clogged with dirty water and stubble, and the hotel towel was soiled with alkali dust. Instead of complaining, Roosevelt seemed to relish the lack of amenities. After breakfast, when he sauntered out of the hotel, his jaw dropped at the exquisite scenery. Instead of the flat, rolling prairies he had encountered in Fargo and Bismarck, here were the ill-shaped bluffs of the fabled Badlands. He set off on a hike of six or seven miles, just to get a quick feel of the imposing landscape and the unvarnished little Dakota town. The horizon seemed infinite. He was for once speechless. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” Roosevelt later recalled, “ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.”22

  Although the distinctive landscape made the Badlands difficult to travel through—that was why French trappers had originally applied the designation “bad”—there were two reasons it was prime cattle country: an abundance of nourishing stem-cured grasses, and the buttes themselves, which offered heifers decent shelter during winter storms. Owing in part to Brisbin’s book (its subtitle was How to Get Rich on the Plains), cowboys and others who believed that beef was the new cash cow stampeded to the area. “Montana has undoubtedly the best grazing-grounds in America,” Brisbin wrote, “and the parts of Dakota stand next.”23

  Theodore Roosevelt himself had been caught up in this cowboy uproar. Even before he read Brisbin or set foot in the Badlands, he gambled on the cattle business. Along with a Harvard classmate, Richard Trimble, he had ponied up $10,000 to be part owner of a ranch north of Cheyenne, Wyoming, called the Teschmaker and Debillion Cattle Company.24 Many Wyoming ranchers of the early 1880s preferred the label “drover” to “ranching cowboy” (a term that originated in Ireland around AD 1000), but Roosevelt preferred the latter. Somewhat naively he predicted that the spools of barbed wire would never overtake Wyoming as it had overtaken Texas. His romantic vision of himself was quite specific: a hunting cowboy on the open range. Quite correctly Roosevelt understood that cowboy culture was based on three principles: mobility, custom, and survival of the fittest. As a side project he hoped to document cowboy life for magazines such as Scribner’s and Collier’s. “It was a frontier institution,” the historian David Dary noted of the first generation of cowboys, “and it died when the frontier died.”25