The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Of course, the fact that Bierstadt was an excellent painter didn’t necessarily mean he wrote well. The artist’s mother tongue was German, and his English was only passable. Nevertheless, as requested, Bierstadt wrote an accurate, lively account of his Maine–New Brunswick moose hunt. In reading the essay, Roosevelt discovered a bigger problem than atrocious spelling or awkward syntax: Bierstadt hadn’t actually shot the moose; his Indian guide had. This ran afoul of the Boone and Crockett Club’s eligibility rules—its members had to have killed a big-game animal personally, in a “fair chase.” Worse yet, Bierstadt’s submission expressed his disdain for the violence associated with hunting; he wrote that it was wrenching to pull the trigger on such a lovely North Woods moose: “I took the rifle then and ended his misery; he reeled, staggered, and tried to lean against a smaller tree which bent over as he gently breathed his last. My sketch book was in use at once. I have as you will see one big head; but I have made up my mind that I don’t want to kill any more moose, but to go and see them in their own haunts is a pleasure.” 38

  The situation seemed clear: either the Boone and Crockett’s constitution would have to be rewritten or the sixty-nine-year-old Bierstadt would have to be expelled from the club. But Roosevelt found a third way to handle the problem. He adeptly edited the story to make it seem as if Bierstadt had, in fact, bagged the animal himself. This “benign deception,” as two scholars later called it in the New England Quarterly, was uncharacteristic of the usually up-front Roosevelt. By recasting the death scene in the passive voice—“This bull was killed”—he excised the Indian guide’s marksmanship.39 Initially, Roosevelt’s creative edit achieved his overriding goal of preserving Bierstadt’s integrity by allowing this story to be published in American Big-Game Hunting while also adhering to the club’s constitution. However, Bierstadt wouldn’t agree to these artfully truthful but misleading edits. If he accepted Roosevelt’s solution, his article would, in fact, have degenerated from nonfiction to fiction. The painter suggested a compromise—the Boone and Crockett Club could publish his essay without using his byline or signature.

  Unwilling to compromise any farther, Roosevelt now balked. As civil service commissioner, he was busting lying scoundrels right and left. If the press discovered his cover-up of Bierstadt’s story, it would have a field day at his expense. He wasn’t going to risk what reporters call a blind item for the sake of somebody else’s problem. “Grinnell and I both feel that it would not do to put in any non-editorial article unsigned, and moreover that when we get a piece of yours it ought to be purely yours, and without emendations from us,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt on June 8 from Washington, D.C., unburdening himself of the whole ordeal. “So I shall have to trust to the hope that for our second volume we may persuade you to write a piece needing no emendation, over your own signature.”40

  There were some wonderful pieces in American Big-Game Hunting. Grinnell’s one contribution, “In Buffalo Days,” is arguably the most elegant meditation on buffalo ever written. Truly worried that the species was headed toward extinction, Grinnell expressed his love for the animal by describing every twitch and tail flap he had ever noticed as a naturalist. “It was in spring, when its coat was being shed, that the buffalo, odd-looking enough at any time, presented its most grotesque appearance,” he lovingly wrote. “The matted hair and wool of the shoulders and sides began to peel off in great sheets, and these sheets, clinging to the skin and flapping in the wind, gave it the appearance of being clad in rags.”41

  Among the other prominent contributors to American Big-Game Hunting were T.R.’s old Harvard friend Owen Wister (“The White Goat and His Country”). Living in Philadelphia but writing about the West, Wister had become a member of Boone and Crockett Club at Roosevelt’s invitation. After Harvard the two enthusiasts of the West grew close, frequently discussing the Rockies, buffalo repopulation, and the frontier cowboys. In 1893, Wister had visited Yellowstone and met Frederic Remington there. He and Remington decided to help in Roosevelt’s crusade to protect wildlife at Yellowstone. Known for encouraging rows, launching into diatribes, and harboring a sycophantic admiration for Ulysses S. Grant (of whom he published a biography in 1900), Wister was the kind of Harvard man Roosevelt could call a true brother in arms. The two struck up an informal pact in 1893 or 1894: Roosevelt would continue writing about the West as a historian, while Wister would write a great novel about a Rocky Mountains rancher, using the working title The Virginian. Along with Remington they would constitute a club of three amigos determined to popularize the American West along the Atlantic seaboard. They even wore the exact same outdoors clothes.42

  Others whom Roosevelt and Grinnell asked to participate in American Big-Game Hunting were Winthrop Chanler (“A Day with Elk”), Archibald Rogers (“Big Game in the Rockies”), and F. C. Crocker (“After Wapiti in Wyoming”). As coeditor of the book, Roosevelt had diligently corresponded with contributors, making suggestions about how to improve their manuscripts and struggling to create an overall unity of effect. Roosevelt, in fact, oversaw the physical look of the volume, choosing deep red cloth and a big-game head for the cover. The first fifth of American Big-Game Hunting explained the conservationist objectives of the Boone and Crockett Club to readers. The West Pointer Captain George S. Anderson, superintendent of Yellowstone, for example, led off with the hunter’s lament “A Buffalo Story.” Picking up the saga in the 1870s, Anderson traced the demise of the buffalo as a species in a longing, heartfelt way. Nevertheless, he gloated over killing a “lonesome George” just for its tongue. A veteran of the Indian Wars with the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Commanche, Captain Anderson was known as the premier “saddle officer” in the West. That was in the 1870s and 1880s. As of 1890, in a complete reversal, Captain Anderson’s enemies were no longer Native Americans in war paint but white settlers around Yellowstone engaged in poaching, vandalizing, and overgrazing.43 His conservationist evolution from buffalo skinner to buffalo protector was indicative of a new consciousness developing in the American West of the 1890s, one which Roosevelt was instrumental in promoting.

  Not wanting to be left out, Roosevelt took up the Great Plains in American Big-Game Hunting. His “Coursing the Prongbuck” (lifted, in tone and emphasis, from Hunting Trips and Ranch Life), again expressed his enthusiasm for the Badlands. He explained that pronghorn herds were thinning out from the Dakotas to Texas because of the pronghorn’s own curiosity; they were always investigating prairie schooners or human camps too closely. All a westerner had to do was wave a colored rag from behind a rock or sage, and the antelope would slowly head toward it—and, invariably, be shot as a result. “The pronghorn is the most characteristic and distinctive of American game animals,” Roosevelt wrote. “Zoologically speaking, its position is unique. It is the only hollow-horned ruminant which sheds its horns. We speak of it as an antelope, and it does of course represent on our prairies the antelopes of the Old World, and is a distant relative of theirs; but it stands apart from all other horned animals. Its position in the natural world is almost as lonely as that of the giraffe.”44

  Roosevelt also contributed “Literature of American Big-Game Hunting” to the volume, enthusiastically touting his all-time favorite naturalists and sportsmen. “The faunal natural histories, from the days of Audubon and Bachman to those of Hart Merriam, must likewise be included,” Roosevelt advised fellow hunters, “and, in addition, no lover of nature would willingly be without the works of those masters of American literature who have written concerning their wanderings in the wilderness, as Parkman did in his Oregon Trail, and Irving in his Tour on the Prairies; while the volumes of Burroughs and Thoreau have of course a unique literary value for every man who cares for outdoor life in the woods and fields and among the mountains.”45

  One conservationist from whom Theodore Roosevelt didn’t solicit an essay was Robert B. Roosevelt. Every time T.R. and his freewheeling, unpredictable uncle tried to collaborate on anything there was a clash of wills. The group R.B.R. had fo
unded, the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG), had shifted its focus from an early triumph—saving quail—to a new craze for trapshooting.46 Ever since the Interstate Trapshooting Association was formed in 1890,47 NYAPG’s members were using the association more or less as a rod-and-gun club for blasting plates on manicured fairways. Even the New York Times, not immune to the fad, started covering trap tournaments as if they were premier sporting events.48 But plates were the good part of the fad. Unfortunately, some clubs started using live pigeons instead of clay ones. Although not an animal rights advocate, Grinnell vehemently denounced the shooting of birds as both cruel and unsportsmanlike. In an editorial in Forest and Stream he lambasted not only the shooters but also the commercial netters who sold boxes of the pigeons to trapshooting clubs.49

  There is no record of whether R.B.R. felt hurt about not being tapped for the Boone and Crockett. Spending the late 1880s abroad as ambassador to the Netherlands during President Cleveland’s first term, R.B.R. let the conservationist mission of NYAPG slip away; preoccupied in The Hague, he had scant time to seriously challenge poachers in upstate New York. Seizing the opening, T.R. and Grinnell had created the Boone and Crockett at an appropriate time, entering the void left by the NYAPG’s slack course. Most important, instead of being a statewide organization like NYAPG, the Boone and Crockett Club was national in scope. Owing to his celebrity Roosevelt was able to attract the best people to his club. With apparently no sense of betrayal NYAPG’s lawyer, Charles E. Whitehead, for example, instead began doing pro bono work for T.R.’s Boone and Crockett Club.* “It was, in other words, an opportune time for a new organization,” the historian John F. Reiger has explained in American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, “one that would have a scope, as well as the self-discipline to stay focused on what was important.”50

  Following the publication of American Big-Game Hunting, it was becoming clear that Roosevelt was among those Americans best equipped to exert, as his sister Corinne put it, a “potent influence for good in Western affairs.”51 Coincidentally, Roosevelt’s The Wilderness Hunter reached bookstores around the same time; it included twenty-four full-page engravings (some drawn by Remington). To a modern-day reader, the book smacks of the influence of John Burroughs, starting with epigraphs from Walt Whitman and Joaquin Miller. Boasting like Moses in the Old Testament, Roosevelt declared in his preface that for a “number of years much of my life was spent either in the wilderness or on the borders of the settled country.”52

  Roosevelt’s preface goes on to explain that his firsthand outdoors experiences taught him that besides the thrill of the fair chase there was an aesthetic value in nature. Merely soaking in grand scenery and studying woodland creatures united the naturalist’s body and soul. “In after years there shall come forever to his mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering in the bright sun,” Roosevelt wrote, sounding like Katherine Lee Bates’s 1895 patriotic anthem “America the Beautiful,” “of vast snow-clad wastes lying desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in summer; of the crooning of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain masses; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness; of its immensity and mystery; and of the silences that brood in its still depths.”53

  Carefully studying Burroughs had taught Roosevelt to make the most minute and detailed observations of nature, from a blade of bunch-grass to a nagging gnat, from a dead fly on a windowsill to the highest branch of a towering redwood tree. Even when Roosevelt was stalking a wapiti (round-horned elk) in the Bitterroots, he now paused to note fallen timber, scolding chickadees, slippery pine needles, and loose gravel. One chapter of The Wilderness Hunter, ostensibly about hunting elk, evolved into an informed field study of Rocky Mountain birds modeled on Burroughs’s beliefs about the backyard as a universe.

  In The Wilderness Hunter Roosevelt no longer focused on “manly” bird sounds like eagles’ screams, loons’ cries, or owls’ hoots. There was a softening of presentation in this new book that harked back to the surging memories of his boyhood diaries. He was downright pastoral about celebrating land where the horses didn’t boss the streets. “The remarkable and almost amphibious little water wren, with its sweet song, its familiarity, and its very curious habit of running on the bottom of the stream, several feet beneath the surface of the race of rapid water, is the most noticeable of the small birds of the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote. “It sometimes signs loudly while floating with half-spread wings on the surface of a little pool.”54

  On August 6, 1893, a red-letter day, the New York Times hailed The Wilderness Hunter as a five-star delight. Roosevelt’s western hunting stories, filled with picaresque and sometimes gory detail, were written, the anonymous reviewer said, from a genuine love of the outdoors, told “without romance and with admirable clearness.”

  The Hay-Adams circle may have scoffed at Roosevelt’s obsession with wildlife, but to the Times this biophilic enthusiasm sprang from the same American grain as the Transcendentalists. The reviewer even applauded the influence of Whitman and Miller on the book (unaware that Burroughs was the secret lurking muse). Being a cheerleader about bison and beaver in an age of species eradication, the Times implied, was a good thing. “The Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt is not that of the old-fashioned Fourth of July orators,” the review noted. “He is a sound-hearted, sound-minded patriot who has realized that in the present day there is no lack in his country of men of learning and influence always too keenly alive to the most trivial faults of our social and governmental systems and ever ready publicly to deplore them, and has wisely set for himself the opposite task of stimulating a love of country in the rising generation. Americanism is not a good-looking word, and it is one that has been sadly misused. Yet we can think of none better to apply to Mr. Roosevelt’s creed and practice.”55

  That the review concluded with this approving recognition of Roosevelt’s vision—equating the western wilderness with nationalism—must have bolstered his self-confidence immeasurably. Without an iota of equivocation, Roosevelt instructed the outdoors community in The Wilderness Hunter that the killing of a female moose or deer was reprehensible. Over and over again, Roosevelt maintained that real hunters honored the game they shot, and that the opposite attitude (“butcher spirit”) was evil incarnate. Empty-headed hunters, Roosevelt insisted, those who shot wildlife just to kill, were to be rejected by their communities as pariahs. Forest and Stream, in a largely positive review, likewise pointed out that Roosevelt was unique among big-game hunters because the “blood and the killing” weren’t central to his wilderness reportage. “We can get enough of that,” the magazine sniffed, “by interviewing an employee at a slaughter house.”56 Even The Youth’s Companion, a widely popular boy’s magazine, praised Roosevelt’s book for lashing out at cold-blooded market hunters who shot moose stuck in snowdrifts, taking the fair chase out of the hunt and making it one-sided.57

  Besides overlooking his inherent conservationist attitude in The Wilderness Hunter, recent environmental historians have mocked Roosevelt as a weekend warrior, an urbanite with money to burn who bought himself a ticket to the wilderness for a few weeks and then returned home. At face value this analysis is true. But from the perspective of 2009 Roosevelt’s desire to connect with nature to rejuvenate himself has proved ahead of its time. Today only 1.9 percent of Americans are living in rural areas, compared with 40 percent when The Wilderness Hunter was published, so Roosevelt was anticipating a modern trend. As of 2008 Jefferson’s agrarian vision and the homesteading of the West were kaput. Even Thoreau’s back-to-nature ethos, based on self-reliance, which had a revisionist run in the 1960s, had become cultish at best, a matter of a few survivalists holed up in forlorn mountain cabins in the Sierra Nevada or Appalachians. But Roosevelt’s notion of extreme wilderness experiences in short fixes has become widespread. Shooting the rapids, mountain climbi
ng, rappelling—Americans crave an extreme fix from nature in hundreds of different ways. Whole cities such as Boulder, Eugene, and Asheville cater to consumers of nature like Roosevelt: claustrophobic city dwellers and suburbanites desperate to encounter a rare bird or cypress grove or desert ecosystem before it all vanished.

  III

  With the commercial success of The Wilderness Hunter, Roosevelt had enhanced conservationist stature. Using a civil service issue as a pretext to open a dialogue with Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith, he tried in April 1894 to influence U.S. government policy on law enforcement in parklands protection. “I am very glad of the position the Interior Department has taken in reference to the Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt wrote to Smith. “The next time we give a dinner I shall ask you to be our guest, as we much appreciate the stand you have taken in forestry matters and in the preservation of these parks. It will be an outrage if this government does not keep the big Sequoia Park, the Yosemite, and such like places under touch.”58