Although when it came to studying bears, elks, deer, and antelope Roosevelt too was something of a bricklayer, he had appointed himself as the architect of the burgeoning scientific conservation movement. It was Roosevelt, for example, who dramatically testified before the Public Lands Committee of the House of Representatives against railroad expansion and the YIC’s development schemes. During a question-and-answer session Roosevelt acted like a conservationist hit man, ready to take out any un-American corporations or individuals undermining the new wild-life protection ethos and forestry. Unlike Baird, for example, Roosevelt never demanded data. For both better and worse, Roosevelt believed in the cumulative power of firsthand observations over empirical laboratory results. All the biological conservation theory and forestry science in the world, he insisted, wouldn’t add up to much if the American people didn’t believe the findings.
Although Roosevelt worried that Merriam, at the U.S. Biological Survey, was overdoing classification, he insisted that big game, songbirds, and even reptiles should be saved like rare, precious gems. To protect animals as endangered species, moreover, Roosevelt believed you had to make people care about their survival. Roosevelt, susceptible to the ideas of naturalist-inclined poets like Whitman and Burroughs, was the kind of polymath not usually admired by serious scientists. To make nature dull like the “little half-baked scientists,” Roosevelt believed, was fraught with peril. Darwinism needed to be communicated directly to people in simple ways that they could understand and that wouldn’t dethrone God as the creator. Like Darwin himself, Roosevelt was a “nature theologist,” holding that nature was proof positive of the genius of God, who had masterminded everything from sparrows’ eyes to Pike’s Peak.100
Thus, by 1891, serving as civil service commissioner and as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt was already the heart and soul of the burgeoning conservation movement. One reason for this was that he was the only Darwinian-trained biologist who wore a shapeless broad-rimmed rancher’s hat, carried guns, and knew how to attract a large audience both inside and outside official Washington. When Roosevelt offered homilies about grizzly bears and elk herds, the general public listened. As a Washington-based politician, he had clout: for example, he dined regularly with Secretary of the Interior Noble at the Metropolitan Club. He could also glad-hand with backwoods types in the West on his hunting trips. It’s one thing to set aside timber tracts with Section 24 as President Harrison did; it’s quite another to change an American mind-set about wildlife and timber management—a mind-set committed to plowed land and sawmills—as Roosevelt was attempting to do, seemingly overnight.
In the early 1890s people needed familiar points of reference to make the leap from Creationism (God put mammals, fish, minerals, and trees on earth to be used) to Darwinism-Marshism (varied species need lots of protective habitat and enforceable laws to survive). Roosevelt was there as America’s conservationist trail guide. Because most subscribers to Forest and Stream imagined “Dakota Teedie” as a wilderness hunter in buckskins, he had the credibility to explain to them why game laws and forest reserves were necessary. No other easterner was perceived by so many Americans as embodying the western spirit. Only by living in the log cabin at Elkhorn and writing about it in Hunting Trips and Ranch Life did Roosevelt earn the right to explain why California’s old-growth timber needed saving and why for every tree felled in Wyoming another should be planted.
By mixing Darwinian-Marshian analysis with cowboy campfire yarns, and by applying his inbred prosecutorial disposition, inherited from Uncle Rob, Roosevelt was able to help sell the U.S. Congress, the departments of Agriculture and Interior, and eventually western Americans on the notion that saving natural wonders, wildlife species, timberlands, and diverse habitats was a patriotic endeavor. From his boyhood (when he drew Egyptian storks to demonstrate evolution) until his death in 1919 at age sixty (after an arduous river trek to the Amazon of Brazil), Roosevelt served as the American spokesperson for mainstreaming evolutionary theories. This was something neither Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, nor John Hay had an inclination to do—nor, for that matter, did John Burroughs, Elliott Coues, or John Muir. “He who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology,” Roosevelt would write later in life, “and especially of that science of evolution that is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin.”101
VI
Especially after the Forest Reserve Act and the three new national parks in California, it was natural for Roosevelt to support President Harrison for reelection in 1892. Despite their personal differences, the two men were philosophically similar. Roosevelt cheered his fellow Republican’s achievements, such as the bold appointment of Frederick Douglass as ambassador to Haiti. When Harrison resolutely confronted Britain and Canada about their overharvesting of fur seals in the Bering Sea, Roosevelt was honored to be part of his administration. When Harrison’s wife, Caroline, died of tuberculosis a few weeks before the 1892 presidential election, Roosevelt sympathized with his boss’s deep grief and distracted mind. So when Grover Cleveland routed Harrison in the election, Roosevelt, too, had a sense of loss.
As president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt hoped that President Cleveland would build on the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. Although the overweight Cleveland—who was a cartoonist’s delight because of his girth and his walrus mustache—couldn’t be accused of being a typical outdoorsman, he was known to care deeply about the fate of big game. Therefore, Roosevelt planned to engage Cleveland, a fellow New Yorker, in saving Great Plains buffalo from extinction. Recognizing that preserving the territorial integrity of Yellowstone was the initial step if the national park movement was to succeed, Roosevelt refused to reduce the political heat just because Harrison had been rejected by the electorate. He believed that the unflinching Grover Cleveland, who had gone after Tammany Hall’s notorious Roscoe Conkling, 102 could be won over by the Boone and Crockett Club through a combination of diplomacy and arm-twisting. After all, most of Roosevelt’s fellow club members were extremely rich and were, like Cleveland, from New York state.
On December 5, 1892, as Harrison’s term was winding down, Roosevelt wrote a letter to the editor, attacking the villains—mining interests and real estate grabbers—of Cooke City, Montana, located northeast of Yellowstone National Park. To Roosevelt, this mining-camp town seemed to be frying in greed. Through unethical quid pro quos and bribes, local developers in Cooke City had, Roosevelt feared, chipped away at the territorial integrity of President Grant’s idea for a park (dating from 1872); President Harrison’s wise amendments regarding forestry and timberlands (1891) were simply being ignored. Grinnell had published a series of articles in Forest and Stream criticizing the contraband mentality of Cooke City and even disseminated a pamphlet all over Montana aimed at stopping the pilferers by threatening to have the U.S. Army arrest them. The Boone and Crockett Club’s hard-line approach was “If you poach in Yellowstone, you will go to jail for two years.”
Roosevelt’s letter, written on U.S. Civil Service commissioner stationery (and thus implying that the federal government was on his side), didn’t mince words. “It is of the utmost importance that the Park shall be kept in its present form as a great forestry preserve and a National pleasure ground, the like of which is not to be found on any other continent than ours; and all public-spirited Americans should join with Forest and Stream in the effort to prevent the greed of a little group of speculators, careless of everything save their own selfish interests, from doing the damage they threaten to the whole people of the United States, by wrecking the Yellowstone National Park,” he wrote. “So far from having this Park cut down it should be extended, and legislation adopted which would enable the military authorities who now have charge of it to administer it solely in the interests of the whole public, and to punish in the most rigorous way people who trespass upon it. The Yellowstone Park is a park for the people and the representatives of the people should see that it is molested i
n no way.”103
In The Winning of the West, Roosevelt had promoted manifest destiny and the westward march of U.S. capitalism with the zeal of Horace Greeley, so his new position baffled the developers in Montana. Roosevelt, in fact, had once speculated that Duluth would soon rival Chicago as the citadel of the West and that the Red River valley of the Dakotas would harvest grain for the world. As if he were a bond salesman for Jay Cooke, he had written that Montana would supply the most beef and that the Cascade Mountains of Washington Territory had enough potential timber to construct endless homes for America’s growing population.104 Now, suddenly, Roosevelt was smashing the utilitarian paradigm on behalf of preserving lodgepole pines, petrified logs, and elk herds. To the Cooke City folks, Roosevelt’s new demands were nothing more than atheistic excuses for a federal land grab.
Such were the deeply anti-Roosevelt protestations of Montanans (and the organized syndicate YIC) in the early 1890s. How were they to know that Roosevelt had developed his preservationist insights by reading sportsman literature and studying Darwinian biology at Harvard? Who knew he had memorized every detail of Audubon’s Birds of America as if it were a sacred text? How could railroad titans have understood that he took pride in his association with John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell, who had lured him into the preservationist camp? How were western cattlemen to fathom Roosevelt’s preference for open-range grazing because his humane, Berghian side didn’t like seeing wild game get tangled up in barbed wire? Could anybody really imagine that his Uncle Rob used to have monkeys leaping around in a New York brownstone and a German shepherd sitting at the dinner table? To T.R.’s thinking, his letter in Forest and Stream was just straight talk. Like Muir, he thought the idea of national parks should be adopted, honored, and celebrated by mainstream Americans. Some areas of the American landscape and some types of wild-life, he believed, were simply too magnificent for mankind to destroy for the quick financial profits of scoundrels like the Cooke City crowd.
So when Roosevelt went elk hunting in western Wyoming in September 1891, for the first time since the Forest Reserve Act of the past spring, he was considered by many locals as a bizarre, land-grabbing preservationist zealot. (And that was even before his blistering open letter in Forest and Stream.) Accompanied by his friend Robert B. Ferguson, the frustrated forty-niner Tazewell Woody, and the campfire cook Elwood Hofer, Roosevelt wanted to see the elk herds of the Tetons, which the Shoshone spoke about with such reverence with his own eyes.105
Two Ocean Pass was a scenic wonder that left Roosevelt breathless. It was located on the Continental Divide (in what became Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1908). All around him were evergreen forests and eternal rock peaks with “grand domes and lofty spires.” Craggy ramparts pierced the sky in this vast mountainous region. Here was a sacred spot for sure. Some streams flowed westward into the Snake River and then the Columbia River, eventually emptying into the Pacific Ocean. Others descended eastward toward the Yellowstone River, which drained into the Missouri River before merging with the Mississippi River at the confluence north of Saint Louis; from there the Mississippi went straight to the Gulf of Mexico.106
To an American outdoors romantic like Roosevelt, the forlorn, wild valley of Two Ocean Pass epitomized the miraculous West. He was walled in by the raw, rugged Teton mountain chains, their flanks blasted and slashed by precipice and chasm. Carefully Roosevelt studied the fork of a stream where one branch headed toward the Oregon coast while the other flowed in the direction of Louisiana’s bayous. Clad in a buckskin tunic with leggings, Roosevelt was living out his fantasy of a voyage of discovery. Everything around him—mountain valleys; fields of goldenrod, purple aster, bluebells, and white immortelles—was unmarred by mankind. There were no surveyors’ stakes, mining shacks, or cattle trails to break the spell. Two Ocean Pass and the Tetons—the Grand Tetons—were becoming known as national treasures as surely as Yellowstone and Yosemite. A poet like Whitman could have written a hymn just by breathing in the crisp Wyoming air. “In the park-country, on the edges of the evergreen forest, were groves of delicate quaking-aspen, the trees often growing to quite a height; their tremulous leaves were already changing to bright green and yellow, occasionally with a reddish blush,” Roosevelt wrote in the essay “An Elk-Hunt at Two-Ocean Pass,” which appeared in The Wilderness Hunter. “In the Rocky Mountains the aspens are almost the only deciduous trees, their foliage offering a pleasant relief to the eye after the monotony of the unending pine and spruce woods, which afford so striking a contrast to the hardwood forest east of the Mississippi.” 107
CHAPTER TEN
THE WILDERNESS HUNTER IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
I
Ever since Roosevelt arrived in the Dakota Territory in 1883 to ranch cattle, the very idea of Texas enthralled him. Many of the Badlands cowboys he encountered spoke of the Hill Country as a hunter’s paradise teeming with big-bodied deer. So in the spring of 1892, as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, thirty-three-year-old Roosevelt hatched a plan. Officially, he was going to Texas to investigate the dismissal of a few U.S. postal employees solely for partisan political reasons. But he also arranged for a six-day collared peccary hunt in the South Texas Coastal Plain, which would enliven The Wilderness Hunter, the outdoors memoir he was writing. Furthermore Roosevelt was hoping to anchor future installments of The Winning of the West on Lone Star history. “The next volumes I take up I hope will be the Texan struggle and the Mexican War,” Roosevelt would write his friend Madison Grant. “I quite agree with your estimate of these conflicts, and am surprised that they have not received more attention.”1
Killing a peccary (or “javelina,” the term preferred in Texas) during the Gilded Age wasn’t easy. In addition to being elusive, peccaries were fierce fighters who traveled in packs, known to slash horses’ legs with their daggerlike tusks and stampede over dogs in dense thickets of chaparral and scrub oak. “They were subject to freaks of stupidity, and were pugnacious to a degree,” Roosevelt wrote. “Not only would they fight if molested, but they would often attack entirely without provocation.”2
Roosevelt had imagined Uvalde, Texas—where his friend John Moore ranched—to be a temperate prairie like North Dakota. But the area’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico meant there was a wide range of varied habitat to study. Three different types of rail—King, Clapper, and Virginia—were found in the brushlands. Around giant cypress trees or pecan groves Roosevelt discovered uncommon species such as greater pewee and Rufous-capped warbler. Bustling insectivorous redbirds and flycatchers, moving together in concert, abounded. Around wild fruit fields were frugivorous birds, including many whose genera Roosevelt was uncertain about.3
After discovering no peccaries along the Frio River, the Roosevelt paty headed south along the Nueces River toward the oak-motte prairies of the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. The spring air was mild at Choke Canyon, and Roosevelt was delighted to see so much unexpected greenery. Little brown swifts dashed in front of his horse at regular intervals as they moved seaward avoiding the stinging ants. The horseflies were the biggest he had ever seen. The insects were such a serious problem for Texas settlers that screens covered house windows and smoking coils were lit to ward off the swarms. Those in shacks smoked fern rollups to ward them off. Roosevet copiously noted the lilac-colored flowers and wide bands of purplish wildflowers that carpeted the unobstructed Texas prairie. “Great blue herons,” he wrote, “were stalking beside these pools, and from one we flushed a white ibis.”4
Once Roosevelt had absorbed the Nueces River area in exacting detail, the expedition went onward with trophy-hungry determination. At sunrise the hunt party was greeted by the Texas nightingale (the mockingbird) and at sunset by the howls of coyotes. But no javelinas. Just when the hunting looked bleakest of all, however, Roosevelt suddenly stumbled upon his mark. A sow and a long-tusked boar turned their huge heads toward the Roosevelt party, grinding their teeth so loudly it produced a sound like Mexican castanets. Their needle-sharp eyes had th
at dark, calmly menacing look of a great white shark as it circles prey. Roosevelt shot them both at point-blank range.5
That evening the hunt party feasted on peccary and Roosevelt shipped his trophy heads back to New York. More than anything else, it seemed, Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed the tough-talk style of his Texas compa-dres. Like a mynah bird, Roosevelt had picked up a lot of sayings and brags which he now constantly repeated back in Washington. He admired, for example, the story of a Texan who carefully studied a tenderfoot’s 32-caliber pistol and said: “Stranger, if you ever shot me with that, and I know’d it, I would kick you all over Texas.” As a corollary, Roosevelt decided that when it came to peccary hunting, guns weren’t the armament of choice. “They ought to be killed with a spear,” Roosevelt wrote his British friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice. “The country is so thick, with huge cactus and thorny mesquite trees, that the riding is hard; but they are small and it would be safe to go at them on foot—at any rate for two men.”6
Texas put a ruddy color back in Roosevelt’s cheeks; and his brow, though creased, now showed few traces of stress. The fresh air had once again purged his bureaucratic fatigue, and the open country had given him time to relax and think. The spare campfire meals had thinned him down quite a bit. Once back in Washington, he remained so enchanted with Texas cowboy lore, in fact, that he made plans to visit Deadwood in August to see with his own eyes where Wild Bill Hickok died. (He went and deemed it “a golden town.”7)
That journey to the Black Hills of South Dakota, however, had a civil service objective: to investigate graft and inhumane conditions on various Sioux reservations following the massacre at Wounded Knee. Roosevelt rode to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where more than 7,000 Sioux lived, largely in squalor, to investigate what had happened twenty months earlier when the Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull was murdered by U.S. troops while under house arrest.8 That killing had triggered the massacre of December 29, 1890, when 500 cavalrymen surrounded an encampment of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. Four rapid artillery-fire Hotchkiss guns were brought in and—after a sharp disagreement with a deaf tribesman who refused to surrender his rifle—more than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children lay murdered in the bloodied snow. “They gathered up the frozen dead in wagons at Wounded Knee,” The American Heritage Book of Indians later lamented, “and buried them all together in a communal pit.”9
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