Diligently, Roosevelt had tweaked drafts of the first annual message, searching for exactly the right phrases. This wake-up speech wasn’t a pedestrian tract on the virtues of utilitarian forestry. It was meant for the ages, meant to be bound in gilt-stamped leather. The embryonic wildlife protection movement (best epitomized by the Boone and Crockett Club and the Audubon societies) had now come to fruition on a large scale at the federal level. The U.S. government was headed into the business of saving elk, deer, and buffalo. Even though the address was read by the clerk, listeners could envision the president jabbing his finger at disputants, determined to topple their built-in predispositions. “Roosevelt respected expert opinion and made use of it to a degree which was unmatched among the public, men who were his contemporaries,” Pinchot explained. “Men of small caliber in public office find scorn of expert knowledge a convenient screen for hiding their own mental barrenness. So true is this that one of the best measures of his own breadth and depth of mind is the degree to which a public man acknowledges the value of expert knowledge and judgment in fields with which he himself, in the nature of things, cannot be familiar. By this standard Roosevelt stood at the very top.” 42
At about the time of the First Annual Message, Roosevelt encouraged Merriam to increase the hiring of so-called “camp men” who could help the Biological Survey’s field reporters inventory native plants and animals. For a salary of about twenty-five dollars a month, these camp men (usually hunt guides from the area) would assist the trained scientists working for the Biological Survey. Together the egghead and the rough-and-ready would set traps, prepare skins, and ship species back to Washington, D.C., where they could be carefully studied in laboratories. Roosevelt wanted thorough field notes with biotic summaries accompanying every shipment. One of Roosevelt’s favorites among Merriam’s “field agents” was J. Alden Loring (who upon his recommendation in 1899 became assistant curator of mammals at the New York Zoological Park). Always encouraging Loring to become a public figure, to stop concealing his genius, Roosevelt tapped him as a talent scout taps a promising athlete. Proud of the way Loring was following in Merriam’s estimable footsteps, Roosevelt later had the young naturalist collect for the U.S. National Museum in Europe. Loring also helped reintroduce buffalo back to South Dakota and accompanied former president Roosevelt on his 1909 African safari.43
What impressed Merriam about Roosevelt was that even while living the “strenuous life,” he never stopped being a faunal naturalist. The microscope had turned a new generation of biologists to studying minute organisms, but Roosevelt stayed focused on what Merriam called the more “obvious forms of life.” Starting in November 1901 and continuing until he left office in March 1909, Roosevelt would telephone Merriam quite regularly, particularly during the spring migration, making sure that the warblers in the White House elms were blackpolls or that the flocks of rusty blackbirds along the Potomac basin hadn’t decreased in numbers from the previous year. Not long after becoming president, in fact, Roosevelt had asked Merriam to take a twilight bicycle trip with him from the White House to Rock Creek Park to watch a beaver build a lodge. “He was ‘delighted’ to see the beaver cut a willow and swim with it to a floating log,” Dr. Merriam recalled in Science, “where he sat up and ate the bark.”44
Regularly Roosevelt would walk from the White House to Merriam’s home to study his world-class collection of mammal bones and skins.45 He was like a child wandering into F.A.O. Schwartz on Christmas Eve. Merriam’s huge library was the “zoological salon” of the District of Columbia. “Few people are aware of Roosevelt’s knowledge of mammals and their skulls,” Merriam recalled. “One evening at my house (Where I then had in the neighborhood of five thousand skulls of North American mammals) he astonished every one—including several eminent naturalists—by picking up skull after skull and mentioning the scientific name of the genus to which each belonged.”46
Besides rattling off the genus of skulls, Roosevelt was proud that some of the Biological Survey’s best cougars were courtesy of his prodigious hunting efforts. Two weeks after Roosevelt delivered his Annual Message he wrote to Yellowstone’s acting superintendent, Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, about shooting cougars to control predation. The president wanted to arrive in Yellowstone that June and hunt “varmints” that were “not protected.” A backwoodsman, John B. Goff, would serve as a guide, using his pack of hounds to chase the big cats. If Roosevelt collected ten or twelve cougars from Wyoming he could ship them to Merriam to be compared with the ones from Colorado. Being president shouldn’t mean relinquishing his reputation as the world’s leading expert on cougars. From Major Pitcher’s perspective this was an insane request. The president of the United States, busy with international crises, wanted to summer in the wilds of Yellowstone to “thin out” the cougars? But Major Pitcher—particularly as acting superintendent—wasn’t going to tell his boss no. He started making arrangements.
The rumor that Roosevelt was coming to Yellowstone had C. J. “Buffalo” Jones whooping with excitement. Sidestepping Major Pitcher, Jones started to make plans for a hunt in Yellowstone. He was especially anxious for the president to see some of the buffalo he’d raised like cattle. Most Americans in 1901 could see bison only in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or at Bronx Zoo or the Goodnight Ranch in Texas. Jones was determined to change that sad fact. An old buffalo runner, he had reformed and was among the best bison breeders in the American West. Sickened that his own slaughtering of buffalo had almost brought about their extinction, Jones wanted to show his hero, President Roosevelt, how he had made a 180-degree turn. Roosevelt was greatly interested in Buffalo Jones’s claim to have successfully crossbred bison with cattle (producing “catalo”) and even reportedly broken a few of the offspring to harness. Unfortunately, one of Jones’s captive Yellowstone buffalo—named “Lucky Knight”—had trampled a Wyoming resident to death. Refusing to let Lucky Knight be butchered, Buffalo Jones instead trained it to pull his buckboard. He bragged that he had the only killer buffalo in the West.47 Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s 1902 trip to Yellowstone was postponed for a year owing to an unexpectedly heavy workload. The anthracite coal strike, heightened Russo-Japanese tension, and other serious presidential concerns forced Roosevelt to postpone seeing Buffalo Jones’s bison herd until April 1903.
That Christmas season President Roosevelt grew intrigued by the creation of the new American Scenic and History Preservation Society in New York (it was an outgrowth of Andrew H. Green’s Trustees of Scenic and History Places and Objects, which had helped Roosevelt save Palisades Park back in 1900). Just as Roosevelt wanted the Biological Survey to inventory all of America’s plants, birds, fish, insects, and wildlife, this new nonprofit organization, modeled after Britain’s National Trust, was going to protect both historic sites and scenic places. Roosevelt believed—thanks to Congressman Lacey’s inspection tour—that, for example, the Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado and the Pueblo Chaco Canyon in New Mexico needed protection. The new trust was going to start doing that and more. Among the places the trust saved were Stony Point Battlefield (thirty-five acres on the shore of the Hudson River near West Point), Lake George Battlefield (thirty-five acres on Lake George), and Fort Brewerton (in Hastings at the foot of Oneida Lake). Wishing he could have founded the trust, Roosevelt began scheming to find new ways for the federal government to interface with it. And Roosevelt started lobbying the trust to save Chalmette Battlefield in New Orleans, the site along the Mississippi River where Andrew Jackson gave the British their comeuppance; he sent Green the appropriate chapter of his Naval War of 1812, which documented the historical significance of the battle.* Contained in the trust fund were the seeds of what would become Roosevelt’s grand preservationist accomplishment—the Antiquities Act of 1906.
Congressman Lacey had truly gotten President Roosevelt to start thinking in earnest about preserving Chacoan heritage sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The cultural blossoming of the Chacoan people
had begun in the mid-800s (after Christ), long before Saint Augustine was born and of course even longer before the supposed “oldest city” in North America was named after him in Florida. The Chacoans built a network of fairly sophisticated villages throughout the Southwest. The huge Four Corners high-desert valley was once a hub of Anasazi life. Tribesmen farmed lowlands and constructed elaborate cliff dwellings. The Chaco Anasazi were extraordinary masons, and their towns were monuments to creative architecture. A burning question in archaeological and ethnological circles in 1901 was: what happened to the Anasazi? The answer seemed to be that a great drought had killed them off. The message to Roosevelt was clear: aridity was the death card in the Southwest. To be sustainable, communities had to develop water reservoirs. In 1901 Europeans considered Aztec and Maya ruins in Mexico and South America grand antiquities. The nationalistic Roosevelt scoffed at such boosterism by the European art world on behalf of Mexico. The United States, he said (thumping his chest, as it were), had just as fine ancient rubble in its own Southwest as existed in Peru or Bolivia. The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado, were our Machu Picchu.
Since his days at Harvard, in fact, Roosevelt had been interested in the mysteries pertaining to the vanished Chacoans. The photographer W. H. Jackson of the U.S. Geological Survey had written extensively about how Chacoan stairways were carved into cliffs at Mesa Verde. Unfortunately, the plates of photography he took weren’t properly developed, so he brought back to New York only diary notes. But in 1888 the Bureau of American Ethnology spent six weeks in the Four Corners region photographing Chacoan sites for a huge project on Pueblo architecture. It also reported that vandals were looting the antiquities. When Roosevelt was the U.S. civil service commissioner he denounced Chacoan “pot hunters” as being as swinish as the poachers at Yellowstone.
Between 1896 and 1900 the great archaeologist and trail guide Richard Wetherill began excavating the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. At the same time the American Museum of Natural History in New York began analyzing Pueblo Bonito. When Roosevelt was governor he inspected crates of artifacts from the Southwest when they arrived at the American Museum of Natural History and were eventually put on permanent display. Therefore, by the time Roosevelt became president in September 1901 the fact that the GLO was promoting the idea of a Chacoan national park was old news to Roosevelt. Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the committed archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett—a quiet, unassuming intellectual enamored of the Chacoan past—was mapping various sites at Four Corners in preparation for preservation, as head of the School of American Research. Hewett made it a personal crusade to save these amazing archaeological sites. There were dozens of legal hurdles to clear (not the least being Wetherill’s claim to the land around Chaco Canyon), but Roosevelt told Congressman Lacey they’d find a way to preserve Chacoan sites. In 1902 Lacey—hiring Hewett as coconspirator—began working on sensible legislation. It would evolve into the Antiquities Act of 1906.
III
So Roosevelt had started to put the wheels in motion for preservation early in his administration. Polishing up his credentials as a naturalist and one of the four or five popular authorities on North American mammals, Roosevelt also published, on May 7, 1902, a book titled The Deer Family. Written while he was vice president, The Deer Family was issued as the first volume of the American Sportsman’s Library (edited by Casper Whitney of the Boone and Crockett Club).48 The book was done in collaboration with his fellow naturalists T. S. Van Dyke (on Pacific Coast elk and Columbia black-tailed deer), Daniel G. Elliot (on caribou), and A. J. Stone (on moose), and Roosevelt wrote the first four chapters himself. The publisher of The Deer Family—the Macmillan Company—made much of the fact that it constituted, as the Washington Times noted, “the first time in the history of the country a book has appeared bearing the name of the President of the United States as that of the author.”49
Collaboration between authors was fairly commonplace in the academic world of 1902, and scientists usually presented scholarly papers at conferences with three or four names attached to their joint research. But Theodore Roosevelt was president: whom he decided to share his title page with was automatically news. And he didn’t mind working with Darwinian eccentrics. The three men Roosevelt chose to be associated with in publishing this historic book were among the very best naturalists in America. All of them held a Darwinian belief in the importance of fossil records and the interconnectedness of environment and life. One of Roosevelt’s major motivations for writing his essays in The Deer Family, in fact, was to swing a lantern over the names of these naturalists, big game hunters, and explorers, in gratitude for their decades of largely unsung work. And the Boone and Crockett Club, in a congenial way, was circulating petitions in the Great Plains to promote the notion of big game preserves; The Deer Family was an important tool in this wildlife repopulation effort.
President Roosevelt had been in awe of Professor Elliot ever since age nineteen, when Theodore Sr. had introduced them in Italy. Honored all over the world for his bravery and his zoological discoveries, and known especially for his astounding papers on birds, Elliot had been vaguely associated with the American Museum of Natural History since its founding. He was also active in the American Ornithological Union. Darwin had detailed the courtship rituals of the Australian bowerbird; Elliot did the same for shorebirds. No fewer than ten nations had decorated Elliot for his first-rate empirical work in the natural sciences. Throughout the 1890s he interacted with Roosevelt socially in New York, swapping stories of bird sightings like a couple of old fuddy-duddies from the British Museum. Playing the eager student, Roosevelt had read Elliot’s monographs, all saturated with facts, including Family of the Pheasants and Birds of Paradise. With his large walrus mustache, which stood out more vibrantly than his pointed beard, Elliot was easily distinguishable in a crowd. When the naturalist Dr. Albert Bickmore heard that Elliot had been chosen by the Field Museum of Chicago to be its zoology curator in late 1894, he lamented that New York had lost “one of America’s first scientists.” In 1898, while Roosevelt was in Cuba with the Rough Riders, Elliot was the first serious naturalist to systematically study the Olympic Mountains in the Washington Territory (home range to Roosevelt’s elk). Elliot had initiated a movement to save the state of Washington’s Mount Olympus from the timber conglomerates.
Then there was T. S. Van Dyke, whose book The Still Hunter was considered a classic in the sporting genre. Van Dyke was less scientific than Elliot and was blessed with the ability to spin a good yarn about cougars; Roosevelt admired the way he brought wild creatures into the lives of everyday Americans without scientific pretension. He had a tremendous knack for powerful, accurate generalization. Nobody in the United States wrote prose as similar to the president’s as Van Dyke. There was a tradition that was passed down from Reid to Van Dyke to Roosevelt. The president was enthralled by a popular article of Van Dyke’s, “The Hills of San Bernardino,” and recommended it to everyone. “We have left far behind us the mellow flute of the valley quail,” Van Dyke wrote, “but his double-plumed and gay cousin of the mountain well supplies his place. From the lowest valley to the loftiest point where vegetation grows, you often see his mottled waistcoat of white and cinnamon, his bluish coat, and long nodding plumes; may hear the gentle patter of his little feet on the pine-needles as he steals softly away, and hear his ordinary quit-quit-quit-quit queeah changed into a dismally-anxious queeeee-awwk, as he leads the little brood from danger.”50 Just as Elliot was making his mark studying the Olympics, Van Dyke became the preeminent mountain climber-naturalist of California’s Palomar mountain range. Fancying himself as the Joaquin Miller of any California landscape south of Big Sur, Van Dyke also wrote The City and County of San Diego, published by a small local press.51 Unlike that of the other authors in The Deer Family, however, some of Van Dyke’s work was clearly mediocre. And at times, as when he claimed to have shot four wildcats with one shotgun blast, he defied believability.52
Rounding out The
Deer Family’s quartet was A. J. Stone, the naturalist wunderkind of the moment. As a corresponding member of the Zoological and Ethnological Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society he spent the years 1897 to 1899 living around the Arctic Circle with only his kayak and sled dogs as companions.53 Taking off from Fort McPherson, the Hudson Bay Company’s northernmost outpost, he trudged up through sea ice to forlorn Herschel Island. During one five-month stint Stone hiked 3,000 miles above the Artic Circle, shattering all previous land travel records. With the bitter wind assaulting him, and temperatures often falling to minus seventy or eighty degrees Fahrenheit, he nevertheless traversed snowdrifts as tall as the White House. Polar bears, northern fur seals, and arctic foxes were all vividly described in his field notes. When the harpooner hero returned to America the New York Times saluted his circumnavigation as finishing “one of the most remarkable trips in the history of the North American continent.”54
The selection of Elliot, Van Dyke, and Stone as coauthors of The Deer Family represented three distinct sides of Roosevelt’s conservationist persona, though perhaps the president did not realize this. There was the intrepid Elliot, the man of letters, naturalist, and globe-trotter, known for the precision of his scientific work in ornithology and mammalogy (but also heartily equipped to endure leeches and snakebites). The dominant strain of the big game hunter–naturalist was represented more than adequately by the indomitable Van Dyke, who was roaming the West Coast in search of bears, as he had done in Montana. Like Roosevelt’s, Van Dyke’s prose was action packed, yet careful about wildlife observations. Being a naturalist explorer was an occupation that the president coveted more than any other. Recognizing that the Artic Circle was one of the last frontiers, Roosevelt, from temperate Washington, D.C., chose Stone, who had exhibited the grit, individualism, and adventurousness in the wild taiga and tundra at the top of the world, tethered to a dogsled. They shared a fundamental attitude of no retreat. Clearly Stone, like the president himself, had learned to overcome wind chill, distance, and isolation while still managing to read Tolstoy on a inflatable mattress by quiet candlelight in a makeshift outpost shack.
The Wilderness Warrior Page 56