Naturally, at the time of Roosevelt’s inspection, tension between the Sioux residents and white guards at Pine Ridge remained high. Complaints that the Sioux were now being given poisoned food had traveled back to Washington, D.C., and landed on Roosevelt’s desk; 10 he was looking into allegations that U.S. officials were diluting and stealing foodstuffs directed toward the Great Plains reservations. (As president, Roosevelt, after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, famously took on the Chicago meatpacking industry for selling rancid beef and pork. Now, fourteen years before the Meat Inspection Act was passed, he sided with the discontented tribes who claimed they were being sold poison pork at commissary stores on the reservations.)
As it turned out, Commissioner Roosevelt sided with the Indians on most of the issues. No American, he maintained, should be deliberately served rotting meat and given poor medical attention. Roosevelt’s host, Captain Hugh C. Brown, boldly issued a meat recall at Pine Ridge, defying his military orders. The stealing of U.S. supplies directed for the reservations, Roosevelt thundered, had to stop at once. Breaking with General William T. Sherman’s philosophy that all Native Americans had to “be killed” or else “maintained as a species of paupers,” Roosevelt wanted the tribespeople fully integrated into the fabric of American life.11 To Roosevelt, the properly maintained reservations were merely a way station to fuller integration, which could be accorded in due time.
At the time of Roosevelt’s reservation tour, the number of Indians in the United States was only 250,000, drastically decreased from estimates of the population in 1492, which were in the millions. The surviving Native Americans had overcome disease, conquest, genocide, and assimilation, but Roosevelt worried that the spoils system could do them in. “The Indian problem is difficult enough, heaven only knows,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1891 to a friend who advocated Indian rights, “and it is cruel to complicate it by having the Indian service administered on patronage principles.”12
From Pine Ridge Roosevelt headed south to meet the humanitarian Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Organized in 1882, the IRA believed in the immediate and direct acculturation of Native Americans into the mainstream of U.S. society. The energetic Welsh knew how to lobby effectively on behalf of Indian welfare (or, at least the IRA’s vision of it).13 The IRA believed serious changes needed to be made in state and federal government to create a pathway to full citizenship for all Native Americans.14
Roosevelt deemed Welsh the most effective advocate fighting on behalf of Indians in America. Together, they toured the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. They also visited George Bird Grinnell’s old stomping grounds in Nebraska (where he had once befriended the Blackfoot and North Cheyenne while working on Buffalo Bill’s ranch near North Platte). In his capacity as civil service commissioner, Roosevelt inspected the Missouri River Indian agencies in South Dakota and Nebraska—Yankton, Santee, Omaha, and Winnebago—pausing at all the old Lewis and Clark campsites for curiosity’s sake. Although he stumped for President Harrison’s reelection along the way, he also denounced the abuses Native Americans were suffering in Nebraska’s reservations at the hands of a delinquent U.S. government. During this inspection trip Roosevelt didn’t keep a South Dakota–Nebraska diary, but he did write an official report as civil service commissioner, one that was considered too inflammatory to be published in family newspapers. It was pure Roosevelt, playing the role of muckraker in the style of Lincoln Steffens or Jacob Riis. Point by point he analyzed why Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribespeople weren’t getting a fair shake. The federal government didn’t disseminate Roosevelt’s final report, but Welsh printed 3,000 copies and distributed them to leading legislators and philanthropists. “By the time of Roosevelt’s departure from the Civil Service Commission in 1895,” the historian William T. Hagan has noted, “he had earned the admiration of many friends of the Indian.”15
Although Roosevelt was enough of a social Darwinist to write that the Pawnee and Cherokee were far superior to the Sioux, he was more fair-minded in his assessment of the U.S. government’s failings in its Indian policies than most other leading politicians of the era. Exactly why Roosevelt behaved so decently to Indians is paradoxical but simple. Never one to romanticize Sitting Bull or Geronimo (deeming both dangerous rabble-rousers), he had invested so mightily in the U.S. Army’s western triumphs that he wanted to make sure the defeated Indians were not treated badly or as inferiors. This basic moral premise put him in the IRA camp. Just as presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant forgave the Confederates after the Civil War, welcoming them back into the Union fold, Roosevelt believed that now that the West was won, the vanquished Indians should be brought into the constitutional democracy with the same God-given rights as everybody else. Roosevelt’s Americanism—that is, the need for the country to act as one—far outweighed his mistaken interest in armchair eugenics.
Yet there was another factor in play. Tickled to be called the Great White Chief by some Native Americans, Roosevelt truly respected the central role bison continued to play in the culture and religion of the Sioux (and other tribes). Unlike Euro-Americans, the pragmatic Sioux tribes used every part of the buffalo: hides were made into clothing and tepees; horns were eating utensils and cups; and muscles provided glue and bowstrings. After killing a buffalo, the Sioux would first eat the fresh meat and then preserve the rest as sun-dried jerky strips. A positive auxiliary effect of repopulating the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions with buffalo, Roosevelt believed, was to properly honor the folkways of the Plains Indians. George Bird Grinnell was in full agreement on this point. Like the Plains Indians, the Boone and Crockett Club hoped, as an Indian once told Grinnell, that someday the prairie lands would once again be “One Robe.”16
In a kingmaking mood following his successful appearances at the Deadwood Opera House and the Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas reservations, Roosevelt continued to give last-minute speeches back East championing President Harrison’s reelection whenever the Republican National Committee asked. His voice, however, wasn’t persuasive enough. On November 8, 1892, the Democrat Grover Cleveland easily defeated Harrison by 277 electoral votes to 145.17 As Cleveland took office on March 4, 1893, Roosevelt offered his resignation from the civil service. The incoming president refused, deciding that having a high-profile Republican reformer like Roosevelt in his administration was a good thing.
His job secure, Roosevelt forged ahead with more outside activity. He wanted the Boone and Crockett Club to have a log cabin exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, opening in May 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (as well as Chicago’s moment to present itself as a world-class city). There were more than 200 European-designed buildings going up on the fairgrounds alongside Lake Michigan, so Roosevelt had focused on displaying the vernacular frontier home, the log cabin, as a point of national pride. The humble birthplaces of Lincoln and Grant were far more impressive, he believed, than Buckingham Palace or the Vatican. (Both replica presidential cabins were exhibited in Chicago under the slogan that the ingenuous American “cuts his coat according to his cloth.”18) Roosevelt assumed the role of exhibit designer, and his archetypal western log cabin was packed with Davy Crockett relics and old-time hunting and trapping equipment.19 It was situated on a man-made island called the Wooded Island, in a man-made lagoon, and was next to the Japanese pavilion. The “cabin” staff hired a long-haired hunter as host. Schoolchildren could watch him perform public demonstrations that included curing venison jerky and constructing a box trap.20 Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett cabin had to compete with an exact replica of the Old Times Distillery of Kentucky, which gave out free whiskey samples. A New England cabin was also on the grounds, providing “good old-fashioned” seafood stews for the tasting. Still, owing to the Crockett memorabilia, Roosevelt’s cabin was a popular tourist destination.
The very announcement that Roosevelt was erecting a frontier cabin at the Chicag
o Exposition brought him a lot of mail. One was from an old hunting friend and guide on his trip to the Bighorns. In spite of its clearly anti-Indian, illiterate tone Roosevelt relished in the letter’s colorful slang:
Feb 16th 1893; Der Sir: I see in the newspapers that your club the Daniel Boon and Davey Crockit you Intend to erect a fruntier Cabin at the world’s Far at Chicago to represent the erley Pianears of our country I would like to see you maik a success I have all my life been a fruntiersman and feel interested in your undertaking and I hoap you wile get a good assortment of relicks I want to maik one suggestion to you that is in regard to getting a good man and a genuine Mauntanner to take charg of our haus at Chicago I want to recommend a man for you to get it is Liver-eating Johnson that is the naim he is generally called he is an olde mauntneer and large and fine looking and one of the Best Story Tellers in the country and Very Polight genteel to every one he meets I wil tel you how he got that naim Liver-eating in a hard Fight with the Black Feet Indians thay Faught all day Johnson and a few Whites Faught a large Body of Indians all day after the fight…Johnson was aut of ammunition and thay faught it out with thar Knives and Johnson got away with the Indian and in the fight cut the livver out of the Indian and said to the Boys did thay want any Liver to eat that is the way he got the naim of Liver-eating Johnson.
“YOURS TRULY” ETC., ETC.21
Another Rooseveltian scheme for the Chicago World’s Fair was to commission the artist Alexander Proctor to design and erect life-size sculptures of American wildlife on the bridges connecting the fairgrounds and lagoons. At Roosevelt’s behest Proctor, who had been raised in Denver, created life-size polar and grizzly bears, elks, cougars, and moose for public display. To Roosevelt, Proctor’s naturalist work, influenced by Darwin, was the highlight of the entire exposition. Both Roosevelt and Proctor insisted on exactness of animal composition. Wanting to honor his sculptor friend for a job well done, Roosevelt held a salutatory dinner for him at the Boone and Crockett cabin display in Chicago. In between toasts declaring Proctor the greatest sculptor of the American West, a man who understood the intersection of nature, wildlife, and science, the wildlife artist was asked to join the club. In coming years Proctor achieved some degree of renown for his bas-relief Moose Family, commissioned by the forester Gifford Pinchot in 1907 after Roosevelt became president.22 “For the men of the Boone and Crockett Club,” the historians Jesse Donahue and Erik Trump wrote in Political Animals, “Proctor was representative of the vanishing West, both through his work and in his person.”23
Roosevelt also got into the fair’s futuristic spirit by offering advice on the Forestry Building interpretive center, constructed with a rustic wraparound veranda made solely out of indigenous wood. He also found the Idaho pavilion impressive: this three-story western cabin was made of basaltic rock, volcanic lava, and stripped cedar logs; with large chimneys, an arched stone entranceway, and a reception room fitted out like a trapper’s den, it became a prototype to be emulated in future national parks for information centers or lodges.24 What Roosevelt appreciated in the Idaho Pavilion was a new type of western architecture, which easily blended into the natural setting. (Little did Roosevelt know that in 1893, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright constructed Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois, considered the first of his free-flowing prairie-style homes, which brought the natural world directly into the hearth instead of blocking it out.25)
Although 27 million people streamed into the exposition between May and October 1893, the two biggest attractions in Chicago—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Ferris wheel—operated outside the gates. It has long been speculated that Roosevelt adopted the name Rough Riders for his Spanish-American War outfit from watching William “Buffalo Bill” Cody perform there, with live buffalo herds and cowboy-and-Indian re-creations.* 26 Most of the Forest and Stream crowd disdained Buffalo Bill for his “skinning” career—he slaughtered bison for the railroads—but Roosevelt admired the “steel-thewed and iron-nerved” showman for his “daring progress [to open] the Great West to settlement and civilization. His name, like that of Kit Carson, will always be associated with old adventure and pioneer days of hazard and hardship when the great plains and the Rocky Mountains were won for our race.” 27
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition looked to the future, even as it celebrated the past. In fact, it became a showcase for the revolutionary marvels of harnessed electricity. Everything from the first phosphorus lamps to the first neon lights was on display. Virtual shrines to the wonders of alternating-current power were opened to the public courtesy of Brush, Thomas Edison, Western Electric, and Westinghouse.28 And there, in the shadow of the electrical exhibit, was Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club log cabin, a throwback to a distant era, lit up only on a few chilly autumn nights by a newly trimmed fire. While America was abuzz about the electrical wonders of tomorrow, Roosevelt, with retro satisfaction, busied himself promoting the gospel of rustic renewal. Still, he was extremely proud that American ingenuity—from the log cabin to the electric mansion—was being showcased to the world. “Indeed Chicago was worth while,” he wrote in June 1893. “The buildings make, I verily believe, the most beautiful architectural exhibit the world’s ever seen.”29
For the history of U.S. wildlife conservation, something else occurred at the fair—something far more important than electricity on parade, or an obscure history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison eulogizing the American frontier, or schoolchildren touring log cabins. The National Game, Bird, and Fish Protection Association (NGBFPA) was created that year in Chicago. Going forward, the Boone and Crockett Club, the Audubon Society, and other wildlife preservation organizations would work together, sharing lobbyists and coordinating strategies. By January 1895, the NGBFPA had adopted resolutions to encourage federal propagation of game birds and federal interdiction of interstate game traffic. Even though wildlife didn’t have the economic importance of timber or water, more and more Americans were starting to care about species survival.30
II
As president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt edited American Big-Game Hunting, a volume of essays about hunting and conservation, to be published in the fall in time for the fair’s last gasp. As fate would have it, this was not a propitious time for selling an expensive book. The Panic of 1893 had brought hard times to most Americans. Unemployment was high; wages were low; money was tight. Speculative finance and laissez-faire capitalism squeezed the wallets of ordinary Americans, from immigrants to workers in urban sweatshops to Midwesterners desperate to redeem silver notes for gold. Many banks failed, as did railroad companies like the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe. According to the journalist J. Anthony Lukas in Big Trouble, in Colorado alone 435 mines and 377 related businesses closed because of the panic.31 Western cities like Denver—known as the Queen City of the Plains—which had relied on the silver mining boom were particularly hard hit. Bitter and broke, many settlers in Pueblo and Durango, Colorado, deemed the uncut Rocky Mountain forests now designated as “federal reserves” a serious insult to their inbred sense of manifest destiny economics.32
As the Panic of 1893 gripped the Midwest and West, there were clamorous demands that the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 be revoked. The only people the reserves benefited, their opponents said, were “nature cranks” and the “athletic rich.”33 In this uncertain financial climate, the high price of Big-Game Hunting—ten dollars—meant it would appeal only to the well-off or antiquarians. “We thought,” Grinnell recalled, “that perhaps there were enough big game hunters in the country to make it possible to publish the book without too great a loss.” The idea of the Boone and Crockett Club’s publishing venture had originated with Roosevelt. Grinnell recalled that Roosevelt financed the first printing of 1,000 copies with a personal check of $1,250. “He never said anything about this,” Grinnell recalled, “and I never asked about it.”34
Personally immune to the Panic of 1893, Roo
sevelt and Grinnell recruited stories for American Big Game Hunting from founding club members. Roosevelt carefully edited and pruned the prose of the submissions, proving to be well suited for the task. Always ready with red pencil, Roosevelt actually asked Grinnell to send an overwritten submission his way so he could “slash it up” by a third.35 This presented a delicate problem in the case of one submission.
Back in 1887, Roosevelt had tapped the famous landscape painter Albert Bierstadt to become a member of the Boone and Crockett. Bierstadt’s sublime paintings of the Rockies and the Mojave Desert, in which settlers were shown (if at all) as dots dwarfed by the vast American West, promoted the inherent value of wilderness. In addition, Bierstadt, whose notebooks are filled with sketches of American wildlife, had killed a huge moose along the New Brunswick–Maine line.36 With a rack sixty-four and a half inches wide, it was determined to be the eighth-largest set of antlers ever recorded.*
Bierstadt had realistically painted this triumph in Moose Hunter’s Camp, so Roosevelt was eager to get a first-person account from him for the book. “At the last meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club it was decided, subject to the approval of the rest of the members or of a majority of them, to see if we could not produce a volume to be known by some such title as that of the Boone and Crockett Club, and to consist of various articles on big game hunting, etc. by members of the Club,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt in February. “We intend to issue it annually if we find it reasonably successful. To do this would need some money, probably five or ten dollars annual dues for each member being sufficient. I hope you approve of the scheme and that if we decide to get out the book you will give us an article on moose hunting. I should greatly like to have in permanent form one or two of your experiences. Have you ever published an account of the way in which you got your big head? If not, do write it out for us at once.” 37
The Wilderness Warrior Page 35