The deeply touched Roosevelt now felt he had a debt to repay. He began reading everything he could on the Olympic Mountains and sought photographs of Cervus roosevelti. The 800-pound “Roosevelt elk” was brown or dark beige with very dark underparts and a yellowish-brown tail. Much like their namesake, these elk were crepuscular, extremely active at dawn and dusk. Focusing on Washington state wildlife for the first time, he learned that the Olympics contained five distinct landscapes: temperate rain forest, rugged mountain terrain, large lowland lakes, cascading rivers, and saltwater beaches. As an ornithologist, Roosevelt hoped to soon see the black oystercatchers, with their long reddish beaks, crack open mollusks along the rugged Pacific shore. The mere thought of aromatic Sitka spruce and western hemlock appealed to Roosevelt just as much as seeing his namesake elk in their natural habitat.
Starting in 1897, Mount Olympus became Roosevelt’s new Matterhorn, another peak he wanted to conquer. The highest point in the Olympics chain, not even until 1907, it had eight tumbling glaciers and some of the finest strands of Pacific silver fir in North America. Mount Olympus—the very name enthralled Roosevelt—wasn’t going to elude him. The Pacific Ocean here was a sea of boulders, many larger than houses. For a marine biologist there were new universes to explore. While Muir championed the Yosemite Valley, Merriam studied northern Arizona, and Grinnell focused on northwestern Montana, Roosevelt developed an abiding fascination for the Olympics of Washington state and the forest reserves of Colorado; they were two unexplored western places (not counting Alaska) on his future itinerary. Fascinated to learn about Washington state’s big-leaf maples in rain forests adorned with epiphytic mosses and ferns, he became determined to save them—a feat he accomplished six years later as president. The only other rain forests as temperate as those stretching from Alaska to Oregon along the Pacific Coast were in Chile, New Zealand, and South Australia. Europe had nothing like them, so Roosevelt, as he educated himself about the Olympics, swelled like a toad with pride.
When Encyclopaedia of Sport, a British reference guide, asked Roosevelt to contribute an article on elk that year, he turned his focus to the herds he’d been studying with unremitting interest. “There are several aberrant forms of wapiti, including one that dwells in the great Tule swamps of California,” Roosevelt wrote. “There is also an entirely distinct species with its centre of abundance in the Olympic mountains of Washington and in Vancouver Island. This species, which Dr. Hart Merriam has recently done the present writer the honour of naming after him (Cervus roosevelti).” 84
Ironically, in the long run, Roosevelt’s position, that Merriam was creating too many species of mammals, triumphed. Cervus roosevelti would lose its species status in 1899, becoming a subspecies called Cervus canadensis roosevelti.85 Hearing the news of his demotion, Roosevelt asked Merriam, “By the way, is ‘Roosevelti’ merely a synonym of ‘occidentalis,’ for the Olympic Wapiti? My only glory gone!”86 Regardless of its designation, however, “Roosevelt elk” remains the common name for these gorgeous creatures that ranged throughout the dense redwood and rainforest country of the Pacific Northwest. The combination of his elk wandering among 2,000-year-old sequoias became—in his dotage—one of Roosevelt’s Edenic fantasies.
Roosevelt also worked side by side with Merriam on abolishing the unsportsmanlike practice of chasing deer to the water’s edge with packs of hounds in the Adirondack Park. This was a conservationist project in which they could be brothers in arms. The two men also wanted to ban the new practice of jacklighting (shining a spotlight into flocks of ducks which stunned so they could not fly off, and then firing away). As noted, in 1884 Merriam had written The Mammals of the Adirondacks Region of Northeastern New York, a careful examination of that area’s fauna. The Boone and Crockett Club recommended the book for sportsmen; and Roosevelt praised it in Trail and Camp-Fire. Offering an olive branch to Merriam in the public sphere, throwing out grand praise, Roosevelt called the federal biologist a “field naturalist in the highest sense of the term; the model of what we ought to have for the entire American continent.” 87
But Roosevelt’s interest in Adirondack deer wasn’t simply a matter of rebonding with Merriam. The declining deer population in those home-state woodlands troubled him. Like Uncle Rob, Theodore wanted to protect the Hudson River watershed by not cutting down too many trees—at times it seemed that most of the topsoil of upstate New York was ending up in Manhattan’s harbor. In 1897, after a concerted lobbying effort, the New York legislature enacted a law to protect deer. Proper wildlife management, Roosevelt boasted, truly got extraordinary results. “We set to work ridding the Adirondacks of the [hunting] dogs,” the New York conservationist John Burnham recalled of Roosevelt and Merriam’s push, “and it was a thrilling, dangerous job.”88
A year after the bans on dogs and jacklighting went into affect, the Adirondack deer and ducks started to rebound. In an early experiment in wildlife relocation, trapped deer from Maine were taken to upstate New York and let loose. The repopulation commenced as hoped for. (A similar reintroduction with buffalo, moose, and elks, however, failed). Still, Roosevelt was thrilled that his Adirondacks deer were being revived through a combination of wildlife and forestry law. Former president Benjamin Harrison, in fact, had just built a sporting home in the Adirondacks called Berkeley Lodge. Along with Roosevelt and Merriam, Harrison was a high-level proponent of the “Forever Wild” movement to save the Adirondacks from destruction. And he spoke up on behalf of deer, too. Starting in 1897 Roosevelt once again began exploring the region for bird sightings in hopes of updating his nearly twenty-year-old Summer Birds of the Adirondacks; he never, however, found the time.
Extraordinarily fine essays on hunting in Africa and Newfoundland were included in Trail and Camp-Fire when it was published in late 1897. On the book’s cover was a moose head with record-size antlers; the title page had an amateurish illustration of a mountain goat standing on a rock ledge. The volume’s scope was ambitious. On the conservationist front, the editors—Roosevelt and Grinnell—took up the cudgels for saving Adirondack deer by championing many new laws. There was also a self-congratulatory essay on the founding of the Bronx Zoo. Finally, Roosevelt once again provided a list of the essential natural history books all true-blue hunters and serious explorers needed to read. Four essays in this fat book—including Roosevelt’s “The Bear’s Disposition”—dealt with bear hunting and protection issues.
Grinnell’s own contribution, the long essay “Wolves and Wolf Nature,” was simply brilliant. It could have been published as a monograph instead of in an anthology. “In discussing wild animals, we are all very disposed to consider the species as a whole, and to deal in general terms, jumping to the conclusion that all the individuals of a kind are exactly alike, and not taking into account the marked variation between different individuals, for we consider only their physical aspect,” Grinnell wrote. “We forget that to each individual of the species there is a psychological side; that these animals have intelligence, reason, mind, and that at different times they are governed by varying motives and emotions, which differ in degree only from those which influence us.”89
Later, when Roosevelt became president, he lashed out at the novelist Jack London for not writing accurately about wolves in Call of the Wild. Roosevelt’s expertise on this matter stemmed largely from firsthand observation and from reading “Wolves and Wolf Nature.” Somewhat incongruously, Grinnell’s essay also served as an impetus for Roosevelt to go wolf coursing in Oklahoma a few years later with Captain Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy. However, Roosevelt took issue with Grinnell’s depiction of how gray wolves brought down prey, insisting in his essay “On the Little Missouri” that they attack prey at the hindquarters, feasting first on the flanks. “It will be noticed that in some points my observations about wolves are in seeming conflict with those of Mr. Grinnell,” Roosevelt wrote, “but I think the conflict is more seeming than real; and in any event I have concluded to let the article stand just as i
t is. The great book of Nature contains many passages which are hard to read, and at times conscientious students may well draw up different interpretations of the obscurer and least known texts. It may not be that either observer is at fault; but what is true of an animal in one locality may not be true of the same animal in another, and even in the same locality two individuals of a species may widely differ in their habits.”90
Roosevelt was now embracing the very criticism Grinnell made of T.R.’s first book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, as his own clear-headed scientific statement of purpose. Just why Roosevelt felt compelled to have these frays with Merriam and Grinnell is open to speculation; but one can probably attribute it to a mixture of egotism and his belief that he was correct. As a target of Roosevelt’s attacks, Grinnell, unlike Merriam, never let the jabs bother him. Supremely self-confident, Grinnell had, in fact, learned how to use Roosevelt for his own conservation cause in Forest and Stream, unleashing the feisty reformer’s combative personality at his own will.91
Grinnell and Roosevelt agreed on the precepts of conservation for the West: repopulating it with the buffalo and the elk, saving its natural wonders, and helping Native Americans there reconstitute their heritage. Two days before Christmas 1897, Roosevelt wrote to John A. Merritt, the third assistant postmaster general in the McKinley administration. All those holiday stamps he had licked for Christmas cards had given him an idea. Why not promote the West by issuing new stamps? When Merritt replied asking for specific recommendations, Roosevelt suggested a Cheyenne warrior with a bonnet of eagle feathers, a prairie schooner, a Remington cowboy illustration, and (if a real person could be used) an image of Kit Carson—Roosevelt always promoted Carson at every chance possible. Those were fairly safe choices. But, Roosevelt wrote, if the U.S. Post Office was truly interested in presenting the American West in a stamp series, it should focus on the region’s wildlife and wondrous natural sites. “By all means have one of those postage stamps with a buffalo on it,” Roosevelt instructed. “The vanished buffalo is typical of almost all the old-time life on the plains, the life of the wild chase, wild warfare, and wild pioneering. If any bit of scenery were taken I should suggest your going up to the Cosmos Club or to the Geological Survey and examine three or four of their photographs of the boldest [Arizona] canyon walls, or of Pike’s Peak.”92
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ROUGH RIDER
I
Starting in January 1897 William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World began reporting zealously on the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Up until then the U.S. Senate was for Cuban independence, but back burnered the issue. There was little clamor to send the American navy into a firefight. Still, through these jingoistic newspapers, the public was made aware of such heinous acts as a Spanish firing squad executing the Cuban revolutionary Adolfo Rodriguez and the horrific conditions of prisons in Havana. Public sympathy in America was turning against the ogre, Spain. Besides the Cuban insurrection, the Spanish authorities were also trying to squelch the Philippine liberation movement (the Philippine Islands were then a Spanish colony). Hatred for all things Spanish became widespread in the United States, fueled by—in large part—the Hearst and Pulitzer papers.
Influenced by this so-called yellow journalism, Roosevelt had no trouble actively disdaining Spaniards in 1897. To Roosevelt the Spanish government exuded a conceited authoritarianism that he despised. He believed that the United States had an obligation to challenge any brutal European monarchy that was thumbing its nose at the Monroe Doctrine. Disregarding the fact that American sugar tariffs enacted in 1894 had disrupted the Cuban economy, Roosevelt blamed Spain for Cuba’s impoverished living conditions. He was glad, if anything, that the tariff had helped set the Cubans against Spanish rule.
Roosevelt, as a Mahanian naval strategist, had serious concerns about Spain. In particular, he had carefully read “War with Spain—1896,” a national security document written by an astute naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant William Wirt Kimball for the Naval War College. Roosevelt thought Kimball’s analysis was spot-on. He had even written to Mahan that the “Kimball Plan” avoided the politics of imperialism versus anti-imperialism altogether. It was a blueprint for war preparedness. Kimball insisted that if war with Spain occurred, a naval engagement would be preferable to a land war in Cuba and the Philippines. This made great sense to Roosevelt. Boiled down, the Kimball Plan called for an offensive strike against Madrid in three war zones: the Philippines, Cuba, and on the high seas against Spanish shipping. The crucial strategic point was for the United States to cleverly draw the Spanish navy into protecting the far-flung Philippines, leaving Cuba wide open to a U.S. invasion. What Roosevelt as a naval historian most deeply admired about the Kimball Plan was its specificity: every Spanish ship was described and analyzed in minute detail. In many ways the document stylistically resembled his own Naval War of 1812. If war came T.R. wanted the U.S. Navy prepared for all the challenges the Kimball Plan presented. He wrote to Kimball, “The war will have to, or at least ought to, come sooner than later.”1
Around Christmas 1897 Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt became obsessed by the idea of war with Spain. He worried that if the United States didn’t confront Spain in the Western Hemisphere than there would be “disastrous long term consequences for future American security.” 2Overflowing with patriotic spirit, Roosevelt believed that fighting for the independence of Cuba and the Philippines was both a noble cause and a strategic imperative. Spain’s ambitions had to be thwarted. There were echoes in Roosevelt’s thinking of 1886, when he had promoted armed conflict with Mexico, and of 1891, when he had fantasized about shooting “dagos” in Chile.3 Although he found time to scold Frederic Remington for having drawn badgers improperly in an illustration in Harper’s Weekly and continued reading up on the Olympic Mountains, for the most part Roosevelt was consumed that holiday season with promoting an imperialistic pamphlet of quotations he’d assembled under the title Naval Policy of the Presidents.4 He also corresponded with Commodore George Dewey (whose fleet was maneuvering in the Pacific) and impetuously directed the North Atlantic Squadron to join the U.S.S. Maine at Key West, Florida, to immediately begin winter exercises.5
On January 25, 1898, the Maine dropped anchor in Havana harbor in what was essentially an exercise in showing the flag.6 America was inching closer to war with Spain. When on February 15 the Maine exploded in a fireball, killing 262 U.S. sailors, Roosevelt’s war fervor increased. He blamed Spain for the explosion. While President McKinley ordered a report to find out whether the Maine had been sabotaged by Spain or whether a short-circuit fire had blown up the gunpowder kegs, Roosevelt grew impatient. Believing that the U.S. Navy was in a perfect state of readiness, the best it had been since the Civil War, he wanted the Spanish forts in Cuba reduced to burned wood and rubble. All-out war against Spain, he believed, should be declared at once. “Cuban independence,” no longer a remote concept, had become Roosevelt’s new rallying cry and his response to those who advocated peace at any price. “Personally I cannot understand how the bulk of our people can tolerate the hideous infamy that has attended the last two years of Spanish rule in Cuba,” Roosevelt wrote to William Sheffield Cowles, “and still more how they can tolerate the treacherous destruction of the Maine and the murder of our men!”7
Pledging to go and fight in Cuba himself—even though he was nearing forty and had six children to help raise—Roosevelt famously declared that the cautious President McKinley had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”8 Warring with his own administration, Roosevelt said that come hell or high water he was going to fight on the front lines in Cuba or Puerto Rico (or even the Philippines if need be). He wrote to Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, a Bostonian physician with a world-class collection of Japanese art, on March 29, 1898, “A man’s usefulness demands on living up to his ideals in so far as he can. Now, I have consistently preached what our opponents are pleased to call ‘jingo doctrines’ f
or a good many years. One of the commonest taunts directed at men like myself is that we are armchair and parlor jingoes who wish to see others do what we only advocate doing. I care very little for such a taunt, except as it affects my usefulness, but I cannot afford to disregard the fact that my power for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.”9
Less than two weeks later, President McKinley reluctantly asked Congress for a declaration to interfere in Cuban affairs. Roosevelt was all for the declaration but emphatically against the annexation of Cuba, unless Havana wanted it.10 Congress became engulfed in a heated debate. Was war the right choice? Should America defend its honor in Cuba? These questions became academic when, on April 23, Spain declared war on the United States. President McKinley called for three regiments of volunteers to supplement the depleted army. Then on May Day, out of the clear blue sky, astounding news arrived. The previous day Commander Dewey—known for his fearless firefights along the Mississippi River as a Union naval lieutenant during the Civil War under Admiral David Farragut’s command—had crushed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, without losing a single U.S. sailor in battle. A few days later, on May 6, Roosevelt simply resigned as assistant secretary so he could implement the Kimball Plan, defend the Monroe Doctrine, and revenge the Maine. In quick order he received an army commission, purchased an appropriate outfit at Brooks Brothers, and departed for drill training in San Antonio, Texas. Nobody in official Washington could believe how childishly he was acting. Bigelow, who shared with Roosevelt a love of jujitsu,*11 wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, “If T.R. goes, the country will not trust him again.”12 Seconding that opinion was Henry Adams, who asked mutual friends, “Is he quite mad?”13
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