Although they collaborated brilliantly on the articles for Century, Remington didn’t personally care for Roosevelt, who was known to mock sheep farmers (Remington had once herded sheep in Kansas). “No man,” Roosevelt claimed, “can associate with sheep and maintain his self-respect.”*20 This rift over sheep was rather silly, for on the face of it, the two men had much in common: an Ivy League education (Remington had gone to Yale); a belief in the strenuous life and Darwin’s and Huxley’s biology; and, of course, a shared interest in wildlife, ranching, cowboys, and the American West in general. Neither of them enjoyed fake western stories about jackelopes, bigfoots, or ring-tailed roarers. But Roosevelt’s blue blood rankled the scrappy, middle-class Remington, who was often stone broke and begging for freelance assignments.21
Frederic Remington’s Buffalo Hunter Spitting a Bullet into a Gun (ink wash and watercolor on paper, 1892) was a Roosevelt favorite. This illustration was created for an edition of Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail.
Frederic Remington’s Buffalo Hunter Spitting a Bullet into a Gun. (Courtesy of the Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, New York)
Inherited privilege, in fact, annoyed Remington no end. And to Roosevelt, Remington was just a gun for hire, a talented illustrator from whom he had commissioned sixty-four illustrations (plus another nineteen for Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail). Not for a second, however, did either man regret their collaboration. Sheep or no sheep, Remington’s illustrations couldn’t have been finer. But Roosevelt blanched at the idea of Remington as an equal and never once considered him worthy of membership in the Boone and Crockett Club. To Roosevelt, at least before the Spanish-American War, Remington was a plebian, not fit to share a private club’s dais with high-caliber naturalists like Grinnell and Parkman.
III
In the late summer of 1888, having finished Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, Roosevelt once again went on a big game hunt. His destination was the dense coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest and his prey was the woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou). As a Harvard student, Roosevelt had tried to hunt caribou in the North Woods of Maine and failed miserably. Now, with his library walls at Sagamore Hill filled with North American big game trophies, the lack of a caribou head was palpable. According to Grinnell, Roosevelt’s best chance of finding a herd was in the Idaho Territory, high in the Selkirk Mountains along the border of the Washington Territory. So off Roosevelt went on the Northern Pacific Railroad for a stopover in Medora and then on to the Idaho village of Kootenai on the north side of Lake Pend Oreille. Along the way, whenever possible, Roosevelt worked on the first volumes of The Winning of the West. No time was ever wasted when Roosevelt was in a railway car, for he always turned his compartment into a rolling library.
Never before, not even in the Bighorns, had Roosevelt encountered mountains such as the Selkirks. At one point he could see the Columbia River bending and twisting through gorges lined with towering pines. Much of the brush-choked forest had never been explored.* It was delightful to feel like a naturalist explorer again. “The frowning and rugged Selkirks came down sheer to the water’s edge,” Roosevelt recalled. “So straight were the rock walls that it was difficult for us to land with our batteau, save at the places where the rapid mountain torrents entered the lake. As these streams of swift water broke from their narrow gorges they made little deltas of level ground, with beaches of fine white sand; and the streambanks were edged with cottonwood and poplar, their shimmering foliage relieving the sombre coloring of the evergreen forest.”22
The village of Kootenai was the head of the famous Wild Horse Trail, a pack path that led to mineral-rich mines near Fort Steele, British Columbia. Roosevelt—with old John Willis (who wasn’t attentive to hygiene) and a Kootenai Indian named Ammál (who was built like a heavyweight boxer) as guides—traveled up the swift Pack River on the Wild Horse Trail and over the Continental Divide to the Kootenai River. From there they floated down the bone-chilling river in a pirogue, eventually making camp alongside Kootenai Lake. This sheet of crystal-clear water was considered the heart of caribou country. Situated in a long valley between the Selkirk and Purcell mountains, the glassy lake was approximately seventy miles in length.23 Naturally, they set up camp at a level-place. Roosevelt was so anxious for caribou that he bathed his first morning in Idaho before the sun broke.
Idaho was God’s country to Roosevelt, even though the hunting started out slowly. One afternoon, while eating frying-pan bread by a brook, Roosevelt spied an ouzel feeding. Suddenly a water shrew swam into a shallow eddy nearby. Roosevelt had read about this rare little mammal—Sorex palustris—in zoology books over the years, but this was his first real-life encounter with it. The water shrew’s habitat was northern forest streams surrounded by fallen logs and lichen-covered rocks. Roosevelt’s first thoughts were of Spencer Fullerton Baird at the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. C. Hart Merriam at the Department of Agriculture. He knew that they would have “coveted it greatly” for their collections.24 Forgetting about caribou for the moment, Roosevelt captured the feisty little shrew and studied it carefully. The Kootenai guide, Ammál, who had taken to calling Roosevelt “Boston Man,” shook his head in disbelief at the glee his client felt about a rodent.25 “It was a soft, pretty creature,” Roosevelt wrote, “dark above, snow-white below, with a very long tail.” After inspecting it alive, Roosevelt killed the shrew, turning the skin inside and letting it dry. Throughout his days in Idaho, he treated the specimen as a prized possession. Too much handling of the skin, Roosevelt believed, owing to chemicals on one’s hands, would lead to discoloration. When Roosevelt returned to New York he sent the shrew to Baird in Washington, D.C., where it became part of the Smithsonian’s natural history collection.26
But Roosevelt hadn’t traveled all the way to Idaho so that a solitary water shrew could be put on display at the Smithsonian. Eventually he killed a black bear, one with “two curious brown streaks down its back,” and fried its meat for dinner. The caribou, however, remained elusive. Hiking up steep mountain crests and the faces of cliffs, a frustrated Roosevelt couldn’t even find a caribou trail. Willis often ran ahead to reconnoiter, but without luck. At dusk Roosevelt’s party felt removed from even the back of civilization. “Indeed the night sounds of these great stretches of mountain woodlands were very weird and strange,” Roosevelt wrote. “Though I have often and for long periods dwelt and hunted in the wilderness, yet I never before so well understood why the people who live in lonely forest regions are prone to believe in elves, wood spirits, and other beings of an unseen world.”27
Back in New York, Roosevelt raved about the unsurpassed beauty of Idaho—and it was also pretty good for the hunter’s pot. While Grinnell promoted Montana’s Flathead Range as the most gorgeous part of the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt championed the stupendous ranges of Idaho. Perhaps because he had so fully documented wildlife in the Dakota Territory, he was proud to add the topmost peaks of the Idaho Territory to his area of expertise. Before long he was writing about Idaho’s “hoary woodchucks [marmots],” “timid conies [pikas],” and “troops of noisy, parti-colored Clark’s crows.”28
When Roosevelt became president thirteen years after the caribou hunt, saving wild Idaho—which had become a state in 1889—ranked high on his agenda. On January 15, 1907, he created Caribou National Forest, about 200 miles east of Boise. The following year, on July 1, he virtually turned the state into one vast wildlife preserve, setting aside millions of acres in seventeen new national forests with his presidential pen: Pocatello, Cache, Challis, Salmon, Clearwater, Coeur d’Alene, Pend Orielle, Kaniksu, Weiser, Nez Perce, Idaho, Payette, Boise, Sawtooth, Lemhi, Targhee, and Bitterroot.29 Seldom, if ever, had a hunt resulted in such a momentous conservationist gesture on behalf of wild creatures.
IV
That fall, Roosevelt agreed to campaign for the Republican presidential nominee, Benjamin Harrison. Huge crowds came out to hear Theodore as he and Edith traversed Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsi
n, and Minnesota. Perhaps because of the fame he’d achieved through his connections with the West, the farmers and ranchers of the upper Midwest and Great Plains loved him. And he was just as popular all the way south to the Rio Grande and Rio Colorado. To Roosevelt the “hurly-burly of a political campaign,”30 as he once put it, was an enthralling blood sport, the supreme test of personal combat for a genuine warrior.31 While Harrison ran a “front porch” campaign, delivering speeches from his home in Indianapolis and avoiding perspiration, Roosevelt hit the trail with a vengeance, orating at every crossroads town and village junction. The whole experience, he wrote in a letter to Lodge, was “immense fun.”32
As Election Day neared, Roosevelt celebrated his thirtieth birthday. It was a rare time for self-reflection. Despite all his exciting work with the Boone and Crockett Club and as a writer, his political career had stagnated. After all, it was hard to build momentum after losing the mayoralty. He hoped that stumping for Harrison, giving the Republican Party his everything as a surrogate, would earn him a major (or even minor) government post in the administration. Tactically, Roosevelt was on track. On November 6, Harrison defeated the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, by 233 electoral votes to 168. “I am as happy as a king,” Roosevelt wrote to his British diplomat friend Cecil Spring-Rice, “—to use a Republican simile.”33 And sure enough, Roosevelt was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. civil service commissioner starting on May 7, 1889. It was a post he would hold for almost six years.34 His primary task would be to clean up corruption in the federal government.
That Christmas season was a joyous one for Roosevelt. When Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail* was published in December, most reviewers applauded his well-crafted prose and Frederic Remington’s fine engravings and pen-and-ink line drawings. Whether T.R. was writing about cattle branding at Elkhorn, cowboys’ rope tricks, or goat hunting in the canyon of the Coeur d’Alene, Remington delivered spot-on illustrations that electrified the narrative. Although Hunting Trips of a Ranchman had been a better book than Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, Remington’s sketches upgraded the latter into an enduring western classic. Nobody alive could draw mountain men, French-Canadian trappers, or timber wolves with the realistic precision of Remington. (For some reason, however, Remington could never properly depict mountain lions, a deficit that annoyed Roosevelt.)
Like Remington, Roosevelt had romantic sentiments about the American West, finding it an almost inexhaustible source of material for books and articles. “Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past,” Roosevelt wrote approvingly about being a westerner in Ranch Life. “Ranching is an occupation like those of vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century; and the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman.”35
Remington wanted merely to draw the reality in Ranch Life. “I don’t consider that there is any place in the world that offers the subjects that the West offers,” he once observed. “Everything in the West is life, and you want life in art…. The field to me is almost inexhaustible.”36 By contrast, Roosevelt was on an accelerated mission to save its wilderness areas and big game. Underneath his name on the title page of Ranch Life, Roosevelt identified himself as president of the Boone and Crockett Club of New York: the club had become a “bully pulpit” for his ideas about wildlife management and forestry reserves. In the text, he mourned for the “fast vanishing” elk and told readers that when hunting deer they should shoot “only the bucks.”37 The descriptions in Ranch Life of shifting weather and natural wonders were both precise and poetic. Roosevelt’s zoological descriptions rose to the high standard Grinnell had inspired at Forest and Stream. Of antelope, for instance, he wrote: “Antelope see much better than deer, their great bulging eyes, placed at the roots of the horns, being as strong as twin telescopes. Extreme care must be taken not to let them catch a glimpse of the intruder, for it is then hopeless to attempt approaching them. On the other hand, there is never the least difficulty about seeing them.”38
Predictably, Roosevelt ended Ranch Life with a boast about the natural grandeur of the American West. With jingoistic but good-natured pride he tried to one-up both Asia and his brother, Elliott. (The fact that he had turned thirty didn’t mean the sibling rivalry had dissipated.) Elliott, at this juncture, however, was on an alcoholic downslope, desperately struggling with depression and contemplating suicide. “My brother has done a good deal of ibex, mountain sheep, and markhoor shooting in Cashmere and Thibet [Tibet], and I suppose the sport to be had among the tremendous mountain masses of the Himalayas must stand above all other kinds of hill shooting,” Theodore wrote. “Yet, after all, it is hard to believe that it can yield much more pleasure than that felt by the American hunter when he follows the lordly elk and the grizzly among the timbered slopes of the Rockies, or the big-horn and the white-fleeced, jet-horned antelope-goat over their towering and barren peaks.”39
Unfortunately, T.R. didn’t get to bask in the acclaim that Ranch Life received. That winter, to meet his publisher’s deadline, he was working overtime on The Winning of the West. Puffy-eyed, he burned the midnight oil nightly until three or four in the morning. Somewhat naively, he had promised G.P. Putnam’s Sons the first two volumes by the spring of 1889. Always tottering toward a physical breakdown, pushing himself beyond the usual human limits, whenever possible Roosevelt locked himself up at Sagamore Hill and wrote. His entire nervous system was strained. Desperately he tried blocking out both good and bad news. With two children to raise, Edith constantly worried that bills had to be paid. (She made sure all financial obligations were met.) Whenever the issue of financial insolvency was raised, however, Roosevelt’s blue eyes would darken in disapproval. His exuberance would be temporarily extinguished. Life for Theodore had become a pressure cooker of deadlines, commitments, responsibilities, and financial insecurity. Only the finances, however, made him irritable. His great consolation was that at least he hadn’t become a leech, or one of those fellows who always looked for other people to carry the load.
V
Although Roosevelt doesn’t mention it in An Autobiography, there may have been another impetus for creating the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. The previous year, anxious to professionalize mammalogy, Dr. C. Hart Merriam of the Department of Agriculture elevated the Economic Ornithology section at the Department of Agriculture into the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.40 In principle, the new division was intended to help farmers cope with pests. But in practice, Dr. Merriam was interested in the distribution of mammals across the United States. Owing to the creation of the Audubon Society and the American Ornithologists Union, birds were starting to be properly studied. Two exhaustive “bulletins,” in fact, were published in the late 1880s: W. W. Cooke’s “Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley” and Walter B. Barrows’s “The English Sparrow in America.”41 But nobody was publishing similar high-quality bulletins about chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, gophers, ferrets, groundhogs, or dozens of other American mammals.
Merriam—short in stature, with a mustache that made him look like an otter—soon changed that. Merriam’s agriculture division began conducting general surveys of mammals (as well as birds), with a keen eye toward biotic community distributions. Using field reports and scientific results, he constructed life-zone maps. For the first time in American history a biological understanding of cougars’, wolves’, or bears’ ranges became available to the general public. Nobody had ever inventoried American wildlife quite like Merriam. A crucial component of his success was his uncanny ability to reach out to untrained, backyard naturalists and mammal collectors throughout America. In any given state or territory there was bound to be a local hunter who had preserved the skins of such diurnal species as rabbits and squirrels. “It was from such sources that many of his specimens came and he carried on a large correspondence,” the naturalist historia
n Wilfred H. Osgood recalled of Merriam in the Journal of Mammalogy, “promoting interest in mammals by purchasing specimens and, in some cases, by employing collectors or at least by placing standing orders.”42
A truly practical biologist, Merriam also pioneered in using a new trap for small mammals: called the Cyclone, it was made of tin and wire springs, had an area of only about two square inches when collapsed, and was easily portable in quantity. Merriam sent Cyclones to Roosevelt with the idea that when he was in the Rockies he could set up such traps around cabins and creeks, then carefully perform taxidermy on the little mammals and ship the specimens back to Washington, D.C. (Although this is speculative, Merriam may have sent these traps because he was jealous—since Roosevelt had sent the Idaho water shrew to Baird, Merriam’s friendly competitor in collecting.)
Although Merriam’s shop was officially the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, Roosevelt called it the Bureau of Biological Survey (which is what it officially became on March 3, 1905, the day Roosevelt was inaugurated as president in his own right). The Geological Survey mapped the topography of America after the Civil War, and Roosevelt envisioned the Biological Survey doing the same for the classifications of plants, birds, and animals. The Biological Survey, with Merriam at the helm, proved that temperature extremes were partially responsible for how wildlife was distributed. Although only about five or six crackerjack naturalists were ever on his official payroll, Merriam established a grassroots network of specimen collectors from all over America, a particularly notable achievement in an era when there were no telephones, let alone the Internet. He published a pathbreaking study of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona establishing from summit to base six life zones in the flora of the mountains: Lower Sonoran (Sonoran Desert plants); Upper Sonoran (Colorado pinyon and juniper woods); Transition (Ponderosa pine forest); Canadian (Rocky Mountain Douglas fir and white fir forest); Hudsonian (tree line forests of Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine and Engelmann spruce); and Arctic-Alpine (alpine tundra).*
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