The Wilderness Warrior
Page 31
Certainly overworking was preferable to behaving like his brother Elliott. Following a riding accident, the restless, ill-adjusted, but charming Nell turned to alcohol and opiates to deal with a broken leg and with inner anguish that modern psychiatrists would have probably diagnosed as a form of dehabilitating depression. A chronic misery had fallen over him. He drifted across the Atlantic, fumbled about London and Rome, occasionally sneaked in some serious hunting, but mostly just squandered opportunities to succeed at anything. For a while he sought rehabilitation in Illinois and worked in Virginia. But spiritual destitution followed him every step of the way. Despite being married to a wonderful wife, Anna Hall, Elliott was nevertheless a serial adulterer, like Uncle Rob. By including Elliott as a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, Theodore hoped to get his brother refocused on the outdoors life—hunting being the one activity that stabilized Elliott’s tormented spirit.28 However, once Elliott became embroiled in a paternity suit, Theodore lost all patience with his brother.29 Bringing shame upon the family name, he believed, was never acceptable. “He is evidently a maniac,” an agitated Theodore wrote Bamie about Elliott, “morally no less than mentally.”30
In early 1889, besides worrying about Elliott, Roosevelt wondered whether the Boone and Crockett Club had a staunch ally in Benjamin Harrison. Because Harrison was a Republican—as were most early conservationists—Roosevelt was hopeful. Would the new president fight for forest reserves, fish hatcheries, and big game preservation? The stoop-shouldered Harrison, in fact, was an “aesthetic conservationist” who loved the outdoors almost as much as Roosevelt did.31 Growing up on a farm along the banks of the Ohio River (near Cincinnati), Harrison hunted duck, fished for smallmouth bass, and hiked around the North Bend woods looking for arrowheads. He had a sharp eye for birds. Harrison appreciated the redemptive quality of wild places and their contribution to building character. Twice before being elected president, he visited Yellowstone National Park. While serving as a U.S. senator from Indiana, Harrison had been instrumental in halting commercial development in Yellowstone, pushing for prohibitive legislation that allowed only ten park acres to be leased for hotel use. Harrison had also introduced a bill in early 1882 that would have set aside land along the Colorado River of Arizona for government preservation. (The legislation failed, but T.R. eventually saved the Grand Canyon under an executive order known as the Antiquities Act of 1906.)
Despite these legislative setbacks, Harrison’s conservationist convictions grew. His new secretary of the interior, John W. Noble, was a college friend of his at Yale who’d risen through the Third Iowa Cavalry to become a brigadier general during the Civil War. Following Lee’s surrender, Noble moved to Saint Louis, practiced law, and was eventually made a U.S. district attorney.32 Perhaps because he had seen so much killing in the Civil War, Noble didn’t cotton to the slaughtering of bison by market hunters, which had become widespread owing to the demand for the hides. And he worried about a timber famine in the Missouri Ozarks and elsewhere, seeing it as an impending national danger. In 1910 George Bird Grinnell, reflecting on the early history of the conservation movement in his partially unpublished “Brief History of the Boone and Crockett Club,” praised Noble in no uncertain terms, writing that he was “a man of the loftiest and broadest views and heartily in sympathy with the efforts to protect the forests.”33
As an intellectual, Roosevelt spent much of the 1890s competing with Edward Coues for preeminence as the top frontier historian. Each man, in particular, was vying to be considered most knowledgeable about the American West. While Roosevelt was writing The Winning of the West, Coues was editing an impressive string of journals and frontier reports about western exploration. The years Coues spent as an army surgeon in forlorn outposts along the Mexican border had allowed him to gather valuable insights for his books. Coues’s firsthand knowledge of the West clearly informed his reliable annotations of the classic accounts of exploration he edited in the 1890s: History of the Expedition of Lewis and Clark (1893), Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1895), Journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson (1897), Journal of Major Jacob Fowler (1898), Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri by Charles Larpenteur (1898), and Diary of Francisco Garces (1900).
Coues’s major books were edited, but even so, only Roosevelt himself (and perhaps a few others) could publish at that book-a-year pace. Roosevelt felt Coues, along with Burroughs, was doing the most important work of any U.S. writer or intellectual in the 1890s by editing these six treasured classics of western expansion for future generations to appreciate. When Coues died in 1899 at age fifty-seven, Roosevelt considered it a terrible loss to ornithology, zoology, and frontier history. Coues, he believed, had awakened the popular consciousness to the epic of American exploration.34 (And then there were Coues’s ornithological works.) For the remainder of his life Roosevelt used Coues’s Key to North American Birds (which went through six editions) as his central reference work regarding classification.
At the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt continued his war against the entrenched spoils system, a war he’d been waging since he joined the New York state assembly in 1883. Now he had a national platform from which to preach against the epidemic of corruption. Almost as much as “Bad Lands Cowboy,” the label “Civil Service Reformer” soon became attached to Roosevelt in the minds of the American people. Over the next six years, serving both presidents Harrison and Cleveland (the latter won the 1892 presidential election, returning to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term), Roosevelt prosecuted dishonest government officials from coast to coast. Fraud at the U.S. Post Office was his particular focus. He also tried to help the nongovernmental Indian Rights Association (IRA) improve living conditions on territorial reservations in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.35 “The spoils system was more fruitful of degradation in our political life than any other that could have possibly been invented,” he would write late in his tenure. “The spoil monger, the man who peddled patronage, inevitably breeds the vote-buyer, the vote-seller, and the man guilty of malfeasance in office.”36
No nook or cranny was off-limits when it came to Roosevelt’s determination to eradicate illegal profiteering from the federal government. Fellow Republicans were aghast that Roosevelt doggedly investigated his own party’s members, but he believed both parties were unacceptably full of money skimmers. His targets included not only customs officials in New York City but even William Henry Harrison Miller (President Harrison’s former law partner in Indianapolis). From that moment, the taciturn president disliked the flamboyant Roosevelt, barely listening when his commissioner pontificated about crooked Wyoming developers determined to carve up poor Yellowstone National Park, or about a new investigation of the U.S. Post Office, or about graft in the Indian Agency. The old general—the grandson of America’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison—would tap his finger, bite his lip, and stare straight ahead with a marble face. Roosevelt wasn’t oblivious of the icy treatment, writing to his daughter Alice that the five-foot-six-inch Harrison was a “little runt of a President.”37 Often, Roosevelt called the president “Little Ben” behind his back.
Although Roosevelt used Sagamore Hill as his home base that summer of 1889, he often traveled to historic U.S. sites of western expansionism. Greatly encouraged by G.P. Putnam’s positive reaction to the first two volumes of The Winning of the West, Roosevelt pressed on, doing research in archives in Canada (Ontario), Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. To Roosevelt entering each archive was like entering a mine—he never knew what gem or nugget it might contain.38 “If nothing else, The Winning of the West stands as another monument to Roosevelt’s preternatural energy and powers of concentration,” the historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., observed. “No other active statesman in the English-speaking world, not even Winston Churchill, produced such a solidly scholarly work of history while he was, as the Romans said, in medias res.”39
III
Whether Roosevelt was hunting bears or attacking spoilsmen,
his level of activity wasn’t without critics. Ironically, he now got along splendidly with toothless trappers and cattle ropers, but was no longer as comfortable with the refined intelligentsia of the East Coast. Critics like John Hay and Henry Adams, to name the most prominent, belittled his talk of the “strenuous life” as counterfeit and self-aggrandizing (though they both liked his wife, Edith, tremendously). Whenever Roosevelt spoke about humans needing to have “healthy animalism” instilled into their lives, patricians rolled their eyes. Hadn’t he learned anything in Porcellian? Whenever he claimed that great knowledge could be gleaned from backwoods types like Hell Roaring Bill Jones or Yellowstone Kelly, they rebuked him for being a literary nationalist at best and folk-obsessed and jingoistic at worse. Hadn’t he traveled extensively through Europe and understood the great art of Leonardo and Michelangelo? Equating the beauty of Pike’s Peak with The Last Supper, they believed, was Wild Wolf macho nonsense.
With his trademark teeth and eyeglasses moving in unison as he spoke, Roosevelt countered that his critics were part of a stifled class, deaf to the clarion call of nation-building, unable to see that the United States’ frontier values made the nation vastly superior to Europe’s effete culture. His opponents could die in their Washington parlors, but he preferred to go out like a wild animal shot at dusk in an untrampled forest. The whole Hay-Adams circle viewed Roosevelt, in the words of Kathleen Dalton, as “an entertaining but dangerous man to have in a drawing room: he had spilled coffee all over the dress of one governor’s wife and bumptiously ripped another woman’s hem with a clumsy step.”40
The poet James Russell Lowell notably bucked this patrician crowd assessment, praising T.R. in the 1890s for being “so energetic, so full of zeal, and, still more, so full of fight.”41 (It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had quoted from Lowell’s poem “A Fable for Critics” to open the first volume of The Winning of the West.) As a conversationalist, Lowell would say, Roosevelt was in a league of his own. Clearly Roosevelt was a force of nature, a rare phenomenon, a well-rounded intellectual unafraid to enter the fray of national politics, conservation, military affairs, and academic scholarship. With the exception of Henry Cabot Lodge, however, Roosevelt was no longer fully comfortable with the Brahmins of mannered society. He consciously cultivated the manners of a background different from his own, eating with his fingers, reading books at the dinner table, waving off blessings, and carrying a loaded pistol for its shock value. Essentially five generations of etiquette had been abandoned in favor of the half-primitive insolence.
Although Roosevelt was impressed with the Hay-Adams crowd, wanted their airy approval, and admired them as perspicacious people who had personally known Lincoln, his respect went more to scientists. In the presence of biologists, naturalists, and surveyors like Grinnell, Baird, Coues, or Merriam, for example, Roosevelt was much more modest, soft-spoken, and open to criticism. He listened as much as he spoke. It was as if he had determined that politicians were corrupt and intellectuals fey, whereas U.S. government scientists (that is, those who knew how to write well) and members of the army or navy were the true pillars of American integrity. As for the pioneers themselves, Roosevelt proudly characterized them as “grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion.”42
In July 1889 the first two volumes of The Winning of the West were published to another round of critical acclaim. Best read as a bildungsroman about how “Young America,” as the country was called by Great Britain, had succeeded in its westward expansion, The Winning of the West was Roosevelt at his nationalistic apogee. “His Americanism,” Burroughs wrote, “charged the very marrow of his bone.”43 Frederick Jackson Turner, still a relatively obscure historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, praised the volumes in The Dial, saying that Roosevelt had dealt “impartially and sensibly with the relations of the pioneers and Indians whom they disposed.” 44 The Atlantic Monthly commended Roosevelt for his “natural, simple, picturesque” style.45 According to the New York Times, the volumes were admirable in their “thoroughness” and written by a “man who knew the subject.”46 Great Britain’s finest review publications—including the Saturday Review and the Spectator—all gave thumbs up.47 What none of these glowing reviews pointed out was that Roosevelt had pioneered in writing a new kind of popular scientific history, melding Parkmanism with Darwinian thinking and a full jigger of Mayne Reid to boot. Some passages directly echoed The Oregon Trail and On the Origin of Species, and even The Scalp-Hunter.48 The consensus was clear: the historian Roosevelt had a knack for not putting the reader to sleep.
For his own part, Roosevelt was proud that The Winning of the West was more in the tradition of Francis Parkman than Henry Adams’s History of the United States in America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose first volume also appeared that year. Besides writing about westward expansion as Parkman had done, Roosevelt had infused his narrative history with scientific explanations. “Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature,” Roosevelt wrote; “and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable.”49
Yet, as Roosevelt was apt to do, he felt the sting of criticism more than the high-minded accolades. Accusations abounded that the The Winning of the West had been a rush job. Typos and minor mistakes could be found. The Atlantic Monthly, for example, pointed out that Roosevelt had misidentified John Randolph of Roanoke, and the New York Sun charged him with unethically paraphrasing a book by the scholar James R. Gilmore.50 An exclamation of anger broke from Roosevelt’s pen, for he knew his public reputation was under assault. Roosevelt dealt with each charge differently: he befriended the Atlantic Monthly’s editor but put the kibosh on the envious Gilmore in a very public rebuttal to the charge of quasi-plagiarism. By confronting his tormentors, Roosevelt escaped the turbulent waters of bad publicity unscathed. By emulating Parkman, Roosevelt prided himself in having written the “history of the American forest.”51
Basking in the sunshine of literary fame, Roosevelt wrote to Francis Parkman himself—who the previous year had written an important conservation-oriented article, “The Forests of the White Mountains,” for Garden and Forest 52—and told Parkman about his future plans as an author. Although not an environmentalist in the modern sense of the term, Parkman was a premier naturalist and horticulturist of his day, running a nursery in Massachusetts to supplement his career as a historian. Clearly Roosevelt wanted to show Parkman that, he too, used wilderness and fauna as his background for historical events.53 “I am pleased that you like the book,” he wrote on July 13, 1889. “I have always had a special admiration for you as the only one—and I may very sincerely say, the greatest—of our two or three first class historians who devoted himself to American history; and made a classic work…. I have always intended to devote myself to essential American work; and literature must be my mistress perforce, for though I really enjoy politics I appreciate the exceedingly short nature of my tenure.”54
IV
In the fall of 1889, Edith moved the three Roosevelt children—Alice, Ted, and Kermit—from Sagamore Hill to a rented house at 1820 Jefferson Street in Washington. (The house, just off Connecticut Avenue, was one-tenth the size of Sagamore Hill.) Theodore, who called his children “bunnies,” hoped his family would grow even more.55 (He would soon get his wish: Edith gave birth to Ethel in 1891 and to Archibald in 1894.) Considering the constraints on his time, Roosevelt was a good, loving father to all five children. Enjoying the hurly-burly of the household, he instructed his brood at a young age how to identify songbirds and insects. In the
nation’s capital, Theodore was usually more mannered, acting like his own father, determined to teach his children the Ten Commandments, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare. At Sagamore Hill, however, he encouraged mayhem, coaxing them to swim in the bay and play in the Long Island woods. Dull moments were frowned upon.56 “Every evening I have a wild romp with them,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother-in-law, Gertrude Elizabeth Carow, “usually assuming the role of ‘a very big bear’ while they are either little bears or a ‘racoon and a badger, papa.’”57
Over Thanksgiving 1889 Roosevelt began planning a “grand holiday” during which he would bring Edith, Bamie, Robert Munro Ferguson, Corinne (and her husband, Douglas Robinson), and Henry Cabot Lodge’s sixteen-year-old son George (nicknamed Bay) to the Badlands and Yellowstone. They would travel by pack train to pristine parts of the upper Rocky Mountains. Because Theodore talked incessantly about the Elkhorn Ranch, it made sense for his wife to see the Medora magic firsthand and then head to Yellowstone. Over the next nine months, as he prepared for this expedition, he devoured every aged calf-bound book ever written about exploration in Yellowstone. Theodore was thrilled to learn that all the Rocky Mountain big game he loved, except the mountain goat and caribou, were to be found in Yellowstone National Park. According to Arnold Hague, a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, deer—both mule and white-tailed—populated the Gallatin Range valleys in high numbers, dashing up hillsides and grazing in meadows. An impatient Roosevelt could barely wait to see the enchanted herds for himself.58
And he was likewise eager to show off his scientific knowledge to his family—to explain why some owls nested in prairie dog holes and to describe the mating rituals of elk. Playing geologist, he could explain to Edith the significance of the 2-million-year-old lava on Huckleberry Ridge tuff and how Specimen Ridge had one of the world’s largest petrified forests. More and more, he saw himself as an interpreter of both American triumphalism and Darwinian species variation as they related to western U.S. history. In fact, after delivering an address on westward expansion at the American Historical Association’s year-end meeting, Roosevelt was acclaimed by his colleagues as the leading proponent of the “new school” of western historians.59 “I know of no one in the East, besides yourself, who has any conception of Western history,” William Frederick Poole, the association’s president, wrote to Roosevelt. “You have entered a fresh and most interesting field of research, and I predict you great success.”60