The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  In January 1890, encouraged by the positive response from the American Historical Association, Roosevelt once again fantasized about quitting the U.S. government so he could be a full-time western historian. He wondered how best to blend his historical research with his conservationist beliefs. Realizing that the myth of American abundance was a national curse, Roosevelt set about to change attitudes about saving wildlife and preserving habitat. There was in America what his friend William T. Hornaday, chief taxidermist of the National Museum (the Smithsonian), called an “army of destruction” that had to be stopped.61 Roosevelt intended the family trip to Yellowstone, now slated for September, to be a fact-finding mission as well; it would help him better understand the poaching and plundering before he started testifying, as he hoped, before congressional committees on the sanctity of the park.

  Perhaps there was another motivation for visiting Yellowstone in 1890. Roosevelt might have felt embarrassed that both President Harrison and George Bird Grinnell—his superiors in national politics and North American big game conservation, respectively—had already toured the national park whereas he had seen Old Faithful and the Tetons only in picture books. He would now be able to even the score. Polishing up his Civil Service badge, Roosevelt would probe into why Wyoming poachers and Montana lumbermen and railway-tie cutters were being permitted in what the law of 1872 deemed a “public park of pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”62 Why weren’t these intrusive criminals being collared by local law enforcement or the U.S. Army? How could the U.S. government make sure Yellowstone wasn’t “shot out” by horn and hide hunters? His “grand holiday,” doubling as a fact-finding mission on behalf of the Boone and Crockett Club, he believed, was an integral part of this journey to the park that the novelist Thomas Wolfe later called “the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”63

  Even before leaving for the West in late summer, Roosevelt chafed at the loopholes in the original Yellowstone Act, which didn’t properly preserve big game. He wanted protective amendments, and fast. In 1872 there had been only a single transcontinental railroad spanning the Rocky Mountains—the Union and Central Pacific, which rumbled across Wyoming far to the south of Yellowstone. Roosevelt was fine with that. But in 1890, influenced by Grinnell, Roosevelt, after deep consideration of the issue, opposed a proposed new Montana Mineral Railroad line aimed at “segregating” the park. Under the sway of the Forest and Stream crowd, Roosevelt now fancied himself as the conservationist point man in upbraiding Montana Mineral on the Yellowstone issue. “I am glad to hear that Roosevelt is going to stand back on the question of railways in the Park,” Grinnell wrote to a fellow member of Boone and Crockett, “and not to work against us.”64

  The “grand holiday” started out splendidly—a first-class train ride from New York through Chicago and Saint Paul, until the steaming locomotive eventually rolled into the western edge of the Dakotas on September 2. For seven or eight days they mixed it up with the sharp-faced Ferris brothers and T.R.’s hardy Elkhorn ranchhands, such as Bill Merrifield, who lived among the abrupt escarpments like nonconformist characters in a Bret Harte story. Roosevelt’s elation with Medora was evident as he pointed out Custer’s 1876 campsite, the Marquis de Mores’s defunct meatpacking plant, and the innumerable rock formations that gave the Badlands its peculiar charm. One afternoon, coping with washouts and quicksand, they forded the Little Missouri River twenty-three times. Absent-eyed antelope could be seen grazing along a ridge, with muscles suddenly tensed upon the realization of human encroachment. At dusk they watched timid white-tails in bushy gullies and big-eared mules on sage-spangled buttes. “Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint glow of the red sun filled the west,” Roosevelt wrote about these rock landmarks in a publication of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The rolling prairie, sweeping in endless waves to the feet of the great hills, grew purple as the evening darkened, and the buttes looned into vague, mysterious beauty as their sharp outlines softened in the twilight.”65

  Corinne marveled at how Theodore spoke of Dakota cowboys as if they were heroic knights on horseback and their low-lying cabins splendid castles. Despite the fact that she looked like a Dresden china figurine, Corinne proved to be the real trouper of the holiday, not complaining while trudging across mud holes and half-high streams, smeared with pine pitch and achy from saddle sores. Just watching Theodore use an iron brand and rope steer yearlings like the other cowboys, in fact, made her proud. “We lunched at midday with round-up wagon,” she recalled in her memoir My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, “rough life, indeed, but wonderfully invigorating, and as we returned in the evening, galloping over the grassy plateaus of the high buttes, I realized fully that the bridle-path would never again have for me the charm it once had had.”66

  Meanwhile, having heard so many stories from Theodore about Medora, Edith was now pleased to put a face on things. The Badlands stillness seemed unbreakable, eternal, and primeval. Nature, she understood anew, was tonic for her husband; serene solitude of the sagebrush calmed this act down. He simply was more relaxed without gaslights. And she undoubtedly discerned from reading the preface to volume one of The Winning of the West that her husband, in an imaginative leap of romantic fancy, equated his Dakota ranching days with those of the late-eighteenth-century pioneers clearing brush through the Allegheny upcountry and Great Smokies valleys. “The men who have shared in the fast-vanishing frontier life of the present,” he had written, “feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier of the past.”67

  On September 9, the Roosevelt party started making its way to Yellowstone National Park. For the next week, everybody’s eyes were fixed on wildlife around Inspiration Point and on the condensed force of Yellowstone’s Lower Falls as it roared downward 308 feet. Everything about Yellowstone was exhilarating to Roosevelt—although he was disappointed that game wasn’t found around the hundreds of geyser basins where the tourists congregated. One afternoon he and Ferguson fished in the Yellowstone River within close view of Tower Falls, bringing strings of brook trout back to camp for supper. According to Corinne’s diary, throughout their stay in Yellowstone National Park, Theodore kept copious notes about the wildlife they spotted. She marveled at her brother’s ability to distinguish birds at a glance or from merely hearing their thin cries. During just the first four days in Yellowstone they encountered the peregrine falcon, red-tailed hawk, Canada jay, raven, mallard duck, teal duck, nuthatch, dwarf-thrush, robin, water ouzel, sunbird, long-spur, grass finch, bittern, yellow-crowned warbler, Rocky Mountain white-throated sparrow, song sparrow, wren, and pigeon hawk. As a bird-watcher, Roosevelt was most stirred by the golden eagle, which put on an aerial show: these dark-brown raptors glided at fifty miles an hour and then swooped downward for direct strikes on chipmunks and ground squirrels. “Each one of the above I saw with the eyes of Theodore Roosevelt,” Corrine recalled, “and can still hear the tones of his voice as he described to me their habits of life and the differences between them and others of their kind.”68

  Although Theodore occasionally sulked about not being able to “rough it”—the cost of having his family in tow—being in the fresh air brought ample reward. “He loved wild places and wild companions, hard tramps and thrilling adventure,” Corinne wrote, “and to be a part of the type of trip which women who were not accustomed to actual hunting could take, was really an act of unselfishness on his part.” On most days the Yellowstone sky was cloudless; the nights were cold, with frost chilling the eyeballs and causing sinuses to ache. Instead of eating elk venison, as T.R. would have liked, the party’s diet usually consisted of cutthroat trout plus canned ham and tomatoes. At night a theatrical Theodore tried to scare everybody, pretending to be a bear on the prowl outside their tents, swollen with laughter until thoroughly spent. As Corinne put
it, they were all enjoying the “pretense of roughing it.”69

  As Edith and Corinne soon learned, however, for all his scientific knowledge, Theodore was a reckless escort in the wilderness. For starters, the professional guide he had hired, Ira Dodge, got them terribly lost. Acting as if it were still midsummer, one evening the Roosevelt party camped at an altitude of 7,500 feet, shivering all night under flimsy blankets; even the camp’s drinking water, in a pail, froze.70 Disregarding safety, Theodore thrust people ill equipped for outdoors rigors to push themselves to the point of breakdown or exhaustion. Worse yet, Roosevelt had leased a string of horses unaccustomed to being ridden sidesaddle. On a pack trail ride along stretches of the Continental Divide, which separates waters flowing west from those flowing east, Edith was thrown off her horse, which had reared suddenly, spooked by an erupting geyser. The pain in her back was excruciating, but no doctor was brought in. Her recovery was slow. Soon thereafter, Theodore himself was injured when hunting with Ferguson outside the park. He had “rather strained” his groin and was uncomfortable on horseback for a few days. After visiting the Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of Yellowstone, where the hot water rose through limestone instead of lava, the Roosevelt party was back at the Elkhorn Ranch on September 23, bruised but all smiles.71

  The whole Medora-Yellowstone trip was hailed by T.R. as an unsurpassed bonding experience for his family. Only going to a great European spa like Baden-Baden, he believed, had the same rejuvenating effect on citified people as a week in America’s great park. (It didn’t hurt that he had an office of civil service clerks to mind the store back in Washington, D.C., during his six-week grand holiday.) “I have rarely seen Edith enjoy anything more than she did the six [weeks] at my ranch, and the trip through the Yellowstone Park,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “And she looks just as well and young and pretty and happy as she did four years ago when I married her—indeed I sometimes think she looks if possible even sweeter and prettier…. Edith particularly enjoyed the riding at the ranch, where she had an excellent little horse, named Wire Fence, and the strange, wild beautiful scenery, and the loneliness and freedom of the life fascinated and appealed to her as it did to me.” 72

  After the vacation at Yellowstone, Theodore threw himself into his conservation work for the Boone and Crockett Club harder than ever. Arming himself with scientific data, he was determined that his children could someday bring their children to experience Wyoming’s Garden of Wonders. Using the newest wildlife science available, Roosevelt wanted the old-time wildlife abundance back. Yellowstone needed to be expanded as a zoological reservation (George Catlin had once called for this), where big game like elk and buffalo could thunder around unmolested by the intrusions of civilization. After all, Roosevelt argued, the West couldn’t have been won without buffalo and elk to provide the pathfinders with meat. The time had come to create reserves so that the populations of both species could increase again and be safe. If Robert B. Roosevelt and his amiable helper Seth Green could repopulate Hudson River spawning shad through artificial propagation, then surely a similar repopulation project could be undertaken on behalf of buffalo. Essentially, the visionary Roosevelt was calling for what in the 1980s became the American Prairie Foundation, a nonprofit organization that wanted to create a 3.5-million-acre reserve in central Montana for studying, North American game, bird-watching, hunting, and hiking.73

  By 1890 the conservationist movement was no longer embryonic. A new leader had appeared on the West Coast, a man who spoke on behalf of pristine nature with the grace of a literary angel. The California naturalist John Muir’s two articles in Century magazine (both illustrated by Thomas Moran), “The Treasures of the Yosemite” and “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park,” 74 had created a literary sensation. Worried that overgrazing by sheep was denuding the Sierra high country and threatening the groves of old-growth sequoias, Muir wanted to preserve the complete watersheds of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers inside a new national park. Immediately, Roosevelt recognized that California had found its John Burroughs. It was helpful that Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of Century, was himself a strong proponent of national parks in California. Congress created three of them that fall: Sequoia, Yosemite, and General Grant, which is now part of Kings Canyon National Park.

  Bolstered by Muir, Roosevelt now argued that wildlife preserves like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant were among the best ideas of the Gilded Age. Using the Boone and Crockett Club as his pulpit, he argued for tougher antidevelopment and antipoaching laws at Yellowstone. “Through his effort with Grinnell, Roosevelt began to envision the park as a sanctuary and breeding ground for wildlife,” the historian Jeremy Johnston explained in Yellowstone Science. “Roosevelt hoped that if the park’s wildlife were protected, their populations would dramatically increase and spread to the surrounding regions. This would ensure the continuation of hunting, his favorite pastime, outside the park’s boundaries. It would also alleviate his fear that as settlement increased, the West would become a series of private game reserves creating a situation where only the rich could hunt.”75

  As Roosevelt touted Boone and Crockett’s conservation agenda throughout official Washington, there was talk about conflict of interest. But a sharp (and convenient) distinction had been drawn in Roosevelt’s own mind: his club was a watchdog agency guarding against incursions in Yellowstone National Park (federal property). Still, the noisiest of Montana Mineral Railroad’s lawyers and Wyoming’s developers weren’t afraid to publicly smear T.R. as a hypocrite attacking the spoils system from the Civil Service Commission while exploiting his government connections to lobby for conservation. Still, Roosevelt had rightness on his side. There was a palpable urgency to what the Boone and Crockett Club was trying to accomplish in terms of saving big game. A new public consciousness was needed to save the untamed beasts of the west. Roosevelt thought that promoting species survival via educational outreach in zoos and museums was an important way to wake up America’s youngsters to the plight of animals. He also championed the sculptures of Edward Kerneys (considered America’s first animalier) whom made anatomically correct bronzes. He collected them like mad.76 The indifference of big business toward habitat saving annoyed Roosevelt mightily. Instead of thinking of forests as a finite resource and offering to replant as they logged, the railroads preferred the slash-and-burn approach. And the problem of deforestation wasn’t only in the West. The soil runoff from speed-logging in the Adirondacks was being blamed by scientists for ruining navigation (by creating sandbars) on the Hudson River. Following John Muir’s preservationist tactics as delineated in Century with regard to California’s world-class forests, Roosevelt started floating the idea of creating an Adirondack National Park in New York.

  Roosevelt remained determined, and in January 1891 he ran a very important board meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club in Washington. Roosevelt and Grinnell appealed to the room of dark-suited worthies—most notably Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble—about the importance of protecting wildlife and creating forest reserves.77 The latter issue was taking on particular urgency, since deforestation was an ever-increasing problem. Western wildfires were epidemic. Railroads had an insatiable appetite for timber, needing wood for railway carriages, stations, platforms, fences, and, of course, the ties for their expanding network of tracks. (In 1887, Scientific Monthly estimated that the railroads needed 73 million new ties each year.78) Loggers thought of forests as an infinite resource, so no replanting was done. The denuded land was vulnerable to erosion and so, for instance, the soils of Roosevelt’s beloved Adirondacks were already clogging the navigable water of the nearby Hudson River. “Roosevelt…asked me to say something of the way in which game had disappeared in my time,” Grinnell joked to a fellow member of Boone and Crockett, Archibald Rogers, “and I told them a few ‘lies’ about buffalo, elk, and other large game in the old days.”79

  The board meeting led to White House action to protect th
e nation’s forests. A few days later two members of the Boone and Crockett Club—William Hallett Phillips (a lawyer and diehard angler who accidentally drowned in the Potomac River in 1897, moving Rudyard Kipling to dedicate a poem in Scribner’s to his memory) and Arnold Hague (a geologist-conservationist with the U.S. Geological Survey who had written an influential report on Yellowstone)—briefed Secretary Noble on how the new science of forestry could prevent deforestation. The Harrison administration quickly pushed legislation through Congress to protect forests on public lands. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which the president signed that March, put an end to the virtual giveaway of public land to the railroads and enshrined the government’s role in protecting the wild-life in American forests. Most important, its final provision, Section 24, gave the president the right to convert public land into forest reserves. It stated: “That the President of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and reserve, in any state or territory having public land, bearing forests, in any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations, and the President shall, by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such reservations and the limits thereof.”80 The language of Section 24 would prove crucial to Roosevelt’s future conservationist efforts as president.