In Roosevelt’s “With the Cougar Hounds”—which appeared in his 1905 book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter—Roosevelt mentions Merriam by name three or four times, with interesting elaborations.51 Clearly, Roosevelt was determined to make readers understand that his hunt wasn’t just for sport; it was a scientific expedition. Fourteen cougars both male and female were shot between January 19 and February 14, and Roosevelt recorded detailed data about each one. The largest was eight feet long, and the shortest was under five feet. Zoological tables were compiled by Roosevelt to help Merriam and others at the survey understand the precise circumstances in which the cougars were killed. His field reports from Colorado were the work of a professional, recording whether the cougars’ coats were tawny golden or gray-brown. “The fourteen cougar we killed showed the widest variation not only in size but in color, as shown by the following table,” Roosevelt wrote. “Some were as slaty-gray as deer when in the so-called ‘blue’ others, rufous, almost as bright as deer in the ‘red.’ I use these two terms to describe the color phases; though in some instances the tint was very undecided. The color phase evidently has nothing to do with age, sex, season, or locality.”52
Roosevelt’s relationship with cougars was complex. In The Wilderness Hunter, as a western rancher, he portrayed them as “bloodthirsty” killers attacking cattle with vicious abandon.53 There was even an overdramatized illustration by J. Carter Beard of a rabid-looking cougar Roosevelt had shot in September 1889. But Roosevelt’s respect for the cougar had grown over the years. He liked the fact that a male cougar would defend between 50 and 400 square miles on its own. But he worried that the cougars’ prey were elk and deer. Cougars were obligate carnivores that depended on deer and elk as part of their primary diet. If the cougars weren’t controlled in the Rockies, then the big game couldn’t come back. So Roosevelt saw himself on a four-pronged mission in Colorado: helping the Biological Survey better understand Puma concolor; working to eradicate the cougar from the White River region to enhance the elk and deer populations; claiming his place as the North American authority on these big cats; and selling a couple of articles (illustrated with Stewart’s photographs) for the October and November issues for the Scribner’s Magazine. For a sportsman, cougars, blessed with diurnal and nocturnal vision, were extremely difficult to hunt. In the days before radio telemetry devices it took a truly gifted outdoorsman to track them at all.
Accompanying Roosevelt, Stewart, and Webb on the hunt was John B. Goff, considered the finest tracker of the “ghost cats” in Colorado. This was always Roosevelt’s secret as an outdoorsman; he had a genius (and the money) for finding the best hunt guides available for every expedition. Roosevelt’s deft writing about the hunt—when published in 1905—contained the most anatomically correct descriptions of Colorado cougars, from their white muzzles to their huge paws, ever written up until that time. Carefully crating his kills in Denver, Roosevelt had shipped his cougars’ heads, paws, and skins directly to C. G. Gunther’s Sons on Fifth Avenue in New York City for preparing.
The trip to Colorado whetted Roosevelt’s appetite for more cougar collecting. Word from Yellowstone National Park was that cougars were wreaking havoc on the elk herds. Encouraged by Merriam, Roosevelt planned on heading up to the park within the year to find more specimens for the Biological Survey and help out the bands of elk. “Many conservationists of the day, including Roosevelt, believed limiting predation would increase ungulate populations,” the historian Jeremy M. Johnston explained in Yellowstone Science, “allowing them to recover from the results of the intensive market hunting that occurred in the park before the ban on hunting.”54
IV
Roosevelt returned to Washington tremendously improved in appearance. In Colorado, he had written a dozen letters detailing his hunt for the cougar (and lynx). What he seemed to admire most about cougars was that they ate meat only fresh and clean—and, of course, the way they mastered topography; they were able to live in isolated cliffs or remote alpine valleys far removed from civilization. Armed with all his detailed measurements and field notes regarding cougars and lynx, Roosevelt denounced William Henry Hudson, best known in history as the author of Green Mansions, for his “preposterous fables” about cougars in his recent book The Naturalist on the Plateau.55 Roosevelt kept score on those whom he considered “nature fakers,” preparing for a frontal assault in the near future. Unlike bears—which were omnivores with meal alternatives like berries, roots, shoots, and pine nuts—cougars were able to eat only meat; Roosevelt believed this was the reason they were overdramatized as bloodthirsty killers.
Famously, Mark Hanna once quipped that Roosevelt was a “damn cowboy,” now only “one heart beat away from the presidency.” But the word “cowboy” would imply that Roosevelt was a rubber stamp for the stockmen’s associations of the Rocky Mountains, which he clearly wasn’t. The reality, in fact, was far worse than Hanna contemplated. Roosevelt was a pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist who had been trained at Harvard as a Darwinian-Huxleyite zoologist and now believed that the moral implications of On the Origin of Species needed to be embraced by public policy. The GOP was in trouble.
While Roosevelt had been in Colorado a great oil boom was under way. It was big enough to have befuddled John D. Rockefeller himself. Roosevelt didn’t know whether it was a cause for celebration or woe. Near Beaumont, Texas, at a place known as Spindletop, black gold spouted 200 feet in the air. The western plains of Texas and Oklahoma, he knew, would never be the same now that oil had been found. Somehow or other Roosevelt found a way to be at war with the Standard Oil Company for his entire life. Meanwhile, on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration as vice president J. P. Morgan and Company announced the formation of a humongous corporation, U.S. Steel, with a capitalization of $1.4 billion. That development didn’t much impress Roosevelt’s usually outsized curiosity. Talk of automobiles replacing horses—which R.B.R. envisioned as the wave of the future—irritated him further. The mere thought of Duryeas in Yellowstone or Wintons in Yosemite was anathema to Roosevelt. Society didn’t let Studebakers drive into cathedrals or art museums, did it? A “stern moral code” dictated all aspects of his life, causing him to reject what the Blum called in The Republican Roosevelt “the amorality of business.”56
For all of his cutting-edge talk of science, Roosevelt was really an old-fashioned camper type, a rustic, enamored with the very notion of log cabins or hunters’ and naturalists’ shacks. As he took his oath of office his primary concern wasn’t Spindletop or J. P. Morgan; it was conservation. As for foreign policy, Roosevelt promised he would backstop President McKinley’s policies. When it came to building a new great naval fleet and administering the Philippines, Roosevelt believed, President McKinley, to his credit, was an expansionist. Roosevelt’s only real complaint (and it was a big one) was that McKinley was a slow-moving, incremental expansionist. As an admirer of Mahan, Roosevelt wanted the United States to make permanent naval bases in Cuba, Panama, Guam, and Puerto Rico. In February 1900 he had written a sharp protest letter to Secretary of State John Hay over the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty; he felt U.S. rights to build an isthmus canal across Panama or Nicaragua hadn’t been properly protected under the terms.57
The challenge for Vice President Roosevelt—particularly when it came to conservation—was to be a team player in the McKinley administration. The Senate session Roosevelt presided over lasted for only five days—March 4 to 8—and then adjourned until the late fall. Roosevelt’s big accomplishment as vice president was, as the historian H. W. Brands succinctly put it, having “gaveled the session open and closed.”58 Roosevelt was forced to console himself by considering that his real work took place during the campaign, so it didn’t now matter whether he fell into a life of “unwarrantable idleness.”59
Fame has an ugly dark side in America: the sniping by the tabloid press. Because Roosevelt was the vice president–elect while he was in Colorado, hunting cougars, he was a p
articularly tempting target for irresponsible journalism. A story was propagated by Senator Thomas MacDonald Patterson of Colorado—the Democratic, free-silver populist editor of the Rocky Mountain News—that Roosevelt had been drunk on a train with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and a few others. It was pure rubbish. The Associated Press also went after Roosevelt for “grossly dissipated conduct.” In defense, Roosevelt claimed that the wire service was “controlled” by Bryan, who wanted him bruised.60 A barrage of belittling stories appeared in the Colorado press about Roosevelt’s White River hunts, alleging that he was afraid of bears and that he shot treed cougars chased down by other men. For the first time ever, Roosevelt had journalists turn on him in packs. “To go mountain lion hunting sounds much more ferocious, but it really is not,” Roosevelt wrote to Winthrop Chanler of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The only danger I run is from the infuriated yellow press, and this is moral, not physical. It is very exasperating to have humiliating adventures which never occurred attributed to me in connection with bears and wolves (neither of which animals did I so much as see) and then to have the very same papers that have invented the lies state that they were sent out by my press agent with a view to my own glorification. However, I suppose it is all in a day’s work of a public man in our free and enlightened country.”61
That March Vice President Roosevelt—after reading a draft of “The Merriam Report” from the Harriman expedition—had become obsessed with protecting Alaskan wildlife. A member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Casper Whitney, had been quoted in Outing as suggesting that Alaska adopt a single commissioner for forests, fish, and game—an idea that Roosevelt had promoted in New York. Roosevelt agreed that this was the “ideal” solution to stop the slaughter of caribou, elks, and seals. What Alaska needed, Roosevelt believed, was one first-rate advocate of protecting wildlife and forests (like the Boone and Crockett Club’s president, W. A. Wadsworth), who would be in charge of managing the territory’s natural resources. Any time three, four, or five men were on a playing board, Roosevelt told Whitney, game laws tended to be watered down. “I wish to Heaven it were possible to get Congress to act about Alaska,” Roosevelt wrote. “As far as I know they simply provide for free rum, by voting to prohibit the sale of liquor there, and I do not know that they know anything about the game laws. Well, things are a little discouraging at times.”62
Being back at Oyster Bay gave Roosevelt time to read. Two of his favorite new titles were Thomas Huxley’s Autobiography and Graham Balfour’s The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.63 The novelist Hamlin Garland had sent Roosevelt his recent collection of outdoors stories, Her Mountain Lover, and found a truly receptive audience in the vice president. “Your account of the Alaskan trail appealed to me very strongly,” Roosevelt wrote to Garland on April 4. “I suppose I am utterly illogical, but it always gives me a pang to think of the fate that befalls the pack horses under such conditions. I am very glad you brought your pony home and rode it. I find it just as you say—that is, about three days restores me to my case in the saddle; though I am sorry to say I have grown both fat and stiff so I should now hate most bitterly to try to manage what we used to call on the range a ‘mean horse.’”
Then, changing the subject Roosevelt told Garland about his recent hunt for cougars, noting that he hadn’t shot deer or elk. His tone was that of a hunting addict, pleased that he had found a cure, able to restrain from shooting even when big game was smack in front of him. As a fellow writer Roosevelt knew that Garland had singular gifts, and considered his novel A Son of the Middle Border a masterpiece. “As I grow older I find myself uncomfortable in killing things without a complete justification,” Roosevelt continued to Garland, “and it was a real relief this year to kill only ‘varmits,’ and to be able to enjoy myself in looking at the deer, of which I saw scores of hundreds every day and never molested them.”64
There was also a loose end to take care of—getting Merriam the cougar and lynx skulls and skins, which were still being prepared at C. G. Gunther’s Sons; an impatient Roosevelt resented their taking so much time. He also compiled with great exactitude the relevant naturalist data collected in Colorado. Unfortunately, Roosevelt got a blast of bad publicity because the owners of C. G. Gunther’s Sons invited the press into their Manhattan shop to see Roosevelt’s kills. Jokes were already widespread about Roosevelt disappearing into the wilds of Colorado before his inauguration as vice president, and being more interested in cougars than foreign policy. “Gentlemen,” Roosevelt began his curt note to C. G. Gunther’s Sons. “I am exceedingly sorry you have written to the press asking them to visit the collection. I had no objection to anyone seeing it who wanted to; but the one thing I was especially anxious to avoid was advertising, or seeming to advertise, it in any shape or way. It is most annoying to have had papers like Life, the Journal etc. notified. Will you please send on the skulls at once to Dr. Hart Merriam, together with the two largest lynx skins? & begin to make up the other skins; and show them to no one from this time on, unless he had my written authority.” 65
When Merriam received the specimens, from C. G. Gunther’s Sons, he sent a congratulatory message to Roosevelt, saying that “your series of skulls from Colorado is incomparably the largest, most complete, and most valuable series ever brought together from any single locality, and will be of inestimable value in determining the amount of individual variation.”66 Two cougars, however, stayed with Roosevelt, serving as rugs for his Sagamore Hill library.
Because Roosevelt kept the cougar heads on these rugs, visitors to Sagamore Hill could be forgiven for thinking that he was showing off his hunting skills. Roosevelt even acquired two Alexander Proctor sculptures of cougars, which he used as props to stimulate conversation about his Colorado hunts. Essentially, he had fallen into the same trap as all persona manipulators. For years he promoted himself as a big game hunter extraordinaire—for example, having photographs taken of himself in buckskin holding a rifle. Although he clearly was the leading light of the wildlife protection movement, many average Americans knew him merely as a hunter. After the bad publicity Roosevelt received over the Colorado hunt, in the future he had naturalist-inclined friends at his side to offer testimonials that he was a scientifically-minded hunter, not a bloodthirsty rogue. Confusion over this issue caused Roosevelt deep anguish throughout his years as vice president, president, and ex-president. The sad reality was that most newspaper readers preferred hearing the details of Roosevelt’s hunts, not the biological minutiae about the variation of rings on a lynx’s tail. Roosevelt could be a grave, serious man when it came to studying wildlife genera, but hardly anybody knew it.
V
Shortly after Roosevelt became vice president, he began casting a wide net in hopes of bringing first-class men into the Forest Service and the Biological and Geological Survey. Writing to Gifford Pinchot, for example, Roosevelt tried to get Jacob Riis’s eighteen-year-old son Edward attached to an “outdoor government trip.”67 He also lobbied to get his old friend from Maine, Bill Sewall, a job as postmaster of Island Falls. “He is a true American type of the best sort,” Roosevelt wrote in his letter of recommendation, “as strong as a bull moose, fearless, shrewd, honest and kindly.”68 Worried that animals weren’t being properly represented with biological facts in various popular books—especially the short stories of Ernest Seton Thompson—Roosevelt started promoting true animal experts like William Temple Hornaday, not literary imposters.69 As for hunting, Roosevelt wrote a series of letters touting the use of knives rather than guns; a knife at least improved the odds for the animal being pursued. Roosevelt and William Wells of Forest and Stream believed they could, once and for all, get cougars written about in a truthful, detailed, zoological fashion. “That cougar of yours which measured eight feet four inches is the longest of which I have any authentic record,” Roosevelt wrote to Wells. “My biggest one measured eight feet and weighed two hundred and twenty-seven pounds. I sent its skull on to Dr. Hart Merriam, the naturalist, at Washington and he w
rites me that it is the biggest skull that he has ever seen. From this it is easy to see what perfect nonsense is written by those who speak of ten and eleven-foot cougars.”70
That June the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club appointed a special committee to propose ideas for establishing big game refuges throughout America. All of Roosevelt’s closest conservationist allies were on the committee, including Caspar Whitney, Gifford Pinchot, George Bird Grinnell, Archibald Rogers, and D. M. Baringer. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in the case of Geer v. Connecticut, held that the state owned the wildlife even in a national forest—a verdict Boone and Crockett didn’t like. The club found a convenient way around the impasse in United States v. Blassingame, in which the court ruled that forest reserves were the private property of the federal government and that it could protect acreage from trespassers in the same manner as any private landowner. The ruling made it legal to create refuges in the national forests—the objective of the club.71 Alden Sampson served as chairman of the committee and issued the following mission statement. “The general idea of the proposed plan for the creation of Game refuges is that the President shall be empowered to designate certain tracts wherein there shall be no hunting at all, to be set aside as refuges and breeding grounds, and the Biological Survey is accumulating information to be a service in selecting such areas, when the time for creating them shall arrive.” 72
Furthermore, that June Roosevelt started grappling with the whole Darwinian concept of man as descended from apes in a serious way. With the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, he hoped Arthur Erwin Brown, vice president and curator of the Academy of National Sciences of Philadelphia, would put all his anthropological articles and pamphlets on the subject of human evolution into a book. What could be more exciting work, Roosevelt thought, than tracing the real origins of man? Not for a minute, however, did he suggest that natural selection determined human advancement. He leaned toward eugenics but never accepted it. The species with the greatest fecundity—such as rats and mice—had hardly advanced up the biological pecking order. “It has always seemed to me that we should ultimately have to put the branching off of man’s direct ancestors from the mass of the other primates to a remote tertiary period,” Roosevelt wrote to Brown, “and I am interested in your view that the parent stem branched off directly from the early lemuroid forms, instead of from some monkeylike form after the latter had itself branched off. As I understand it, the belief now is that the existing species even of the sharply defined and small rhinoceros family represent three stems which have remained wholly distinct since eocene times.” 73
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