The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  55 nests with 1 egg each

  63 " " 2 eggs " "

  23 " " 3 eggs " "

  63 " " 1 young each;

  46 " " 2 young each;

  Such field calculations enthralled Kroegel. He thought Chapman was spot-on with his estimate of 2,736 pelicans for the island. The famous ornithologist had also captured the glory of what it sounded like to hear a pelican hatch, calling the young chicks’ first noise on earth a “choking bark.”29 Besides writing about Pelican Island in Bird Studies, Chapman, under Roosevelt’s urging, gave public presentations with stereopticon slides in Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York, bringing the plight of Florida’s tidewater rookeries to a wider audience. He even kept a “bird count” of species he saw women wearing as apparel on Fifth Avenue. In one hour of one day in 1885, he identified 174 birds of forty different species adorning ladies’ hats. In his lectures, he would verbally confront such women for indulging a penchant for precious feathers. Chapman implored them to switch over to domesticated ostrich feathers, which could be plucked or collected without hurting the bird. He had done so himself at an ostrich farm in Florida. The feathers from these flightless birds—celebrated for their fleet-footedness by ancient Egyptian kings—were gorgeous, ideal for hats, decor, and masks. If a woman really wanted to strike a theatrical pose, Chapman would say, then she should don an ostrich feather.

  IV

  One afternoon Kroegel actually got a chance to meet the mild-mannered, owlish Chapman, who resided at the Oak Lodge in Micco, Florida. The ten-bedroom boardinghouse—situated along the “soothing breeze” belt of the Atlantic Ocean between Melbourne and Vero Beach—was run by Mrs. Frances Latham (known as Ma Latham), a die-hard bird enthusiast who prayed that Pelican Island would someday become a sanctuary. Chapman called Ma Latham a “born naturalist” overflowing with “great enthusiasm and energy” for saving wild Florida.30 “To me she was a combination of mother and guide,” Chapman recalled, “and when…my search for Neofiber [round-tailed muskrat] was rewarded I believe that her pleasure and excitement equaled my own…I never lacked for a sharer of my joys.”31 Salty, no-nonsense, and razor smart, Ma Latham often collected sea turtle eggs to give to herpetologists; once, she collected a full series of loggerhead embryos acquired on daily seashore walks for sixty days.32 She was among the first U.S. naturalists to truly study the egg-burying habits of loggerheads along the east coast of Florida in what is now the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge. With her sun-wrinkled face and no-frills pioneer-style dresses, she epitomized hardscrabble Florida slowly entering the automobile age. Turning her back on the Florida gold rush for feathers and eggs, she challenged all plumers and eggers with a cold glare that caused them to cast their eyes downward in guilt.

  By the time Roosevelt was president, Oak Lodge had become a way station for Ivy League–trained scientists, naturalists, and botanists enthralled to find more than 2,000 varieties of plants just a short walk away. After an arduous day of collecting, the wildlife lovers would retreat to the lodge at dusk to watch the sun set over the Indian River Lagoon. Over drinks Ma Latham regaled Chapman and the visiting naturalists with offbeat stories about Florida panthers and black bears, which roamed beaches looking for sea turtle eggs to dig up. Abhorrence, however, came easily to Ma Latham when she thought nature was being violated. For example, she strongly opposed haul-seining, a destructive fishing method in which dories were launched into the Atlantic surf with a long net that was then dragged onto the beach by oxen harnessed to a rope. After such intensive labor it was bounty time for the fishermen. However, Ma Latham believed that such unrestricted harvesting would eventually wipe out the tarpon, red snapper, and other fish species. Over time Chapman had learned to love everything about Ma Latham, as did other distinguished New York conservationists such as William Dutcher, William Beebe, Arthur Cleveland Bent, George Shiras III, Outram Bangs, John Burroughs, Louis Aggasiz Fuertes, William T. Hornaday, Herbert K. Job, and Abbott Thayer.33

  So it was that in 1900, sensing the main chance to save Pelican Island, Kroegel, a friend of Ma Latham, met with Chapman. She had sent word to Kroegel by boat mail that the great New York ornithologist had arrived. It was just over six miles from Sebastian to Micco, and Kroegel made the trek in record time. The meeting apparently went exceedingly well. For all of Chapman’s urbane book knowledge of birds, Kroegel actually lived amid the cornucopia of rookeries year-round. As a field naturalist Kroegel had studied pelicans longer and harder than Chapman. For obvious reasons Chapman was deeply impressed with the self-taught Kroegel. Certainly the former Wall Street financier and the swamp accordionist weren’t cut from the same socioeconomic cloth. But their shared love of birds made them a formidable united front. Together they constituted a sort of two-man Rough Riders cavalry unit—one from the backwoods, the other from the eastern elite—both determined to save the Pelican Island ecosystem. One can imagine them sitting in the amethyst twilight at Oak Lodge among myrtle oaks—a roaring campfire serving as a mosquito repellent—strategizing about how to save the little rookery from the marauders.

  Years before Chapman had met Paul he had, in a sense, been a plume hunter himself (albeit for science). In 1898, for example, he took his new wife, Fanny, to honeymoon on Pelican Island. Other New York dandies may have traveled to Niagara Falls or Bermuda on such an occasion, but Chapman (using Oak Lodge as headquarters) went with Fanny to the Indian River Lagoon to shoot and skin pelicans for the American Museum of Natural History. It turned out to be an inspired choice: the Chapmans marveled at the teeming seabird colony they encountered on that beloved lump of mud and mangrove. Late in life Chapman, by then a well-traveled naturalist, wrote that Pelican Island was “by far the most fascinating place it has ever been my fortune to see in the world of birds.”34

  Now, two years after his honeymoon, Chapman had returned to Pelican Island and discovered a 14 percent decline in pelicans. This troubled him greatly. Listening to Kroegel tell about his difficulties protecting the islet, Chapman grew indignant. He recognized that the “Feather Wars” were being fought, and that Kroegel was actually risking his life daily on behalf of the Florida Audubon Society. Then and there Chapman decided that enough was enough. He was now prepared to take the “Feathers War” directly to Roosevelt in the White House. Intuitively Chapman knew that his friend Roosevelt would immediately approve Kroegel’s gun, boat, and “badge,” sponsored by the Audubon Society. Roosevelt would want to shut the plumers’ operation down. Like the cowboys and ranchers Roosevelt admired in the Dakota Territory and the Rough Riders he led into battle—and like what Roosevelt fancied himself to be—Kroegel was a steely, live-off-the-land, never-say-die lover of wildlife. It was as if “the Virginian” had arrived in Vero Beach.35

  But Chapman was too wise to pester Roosevelt without first having a sensible game plan. He knew he needed to start with his fellow AOU members William Dutcher and Theodore Palmer. Dutcher was chairman of the AOU Bird Protection Committee and Palmer was assistant chief of the Division of Biological Survey. Both men were instrumental in advocating for bird protection throughout the United States. In fact, they were successful in helping persuade twenty-three states, including Florida in 1901, to pass the AOU model law protecting nongame birds. Florida’s new law enabled the AOU to begin employing wardens to enforce bird protection. Even before this new law was passed, Chapman understood that at Pelican Island more wildlife protection would be needed. He urged Dutcher and Palmer to investigate the possibility of purchasing Pelican Island. A year later, in April 1902, Dutcher hired Paul Kroegel as one of the new Audubon wardens, on the recommendation of Ma Latham.36 And the AOU had a cadastral survey of Pelican Island drawn up by J. O. Fries in July 1902.37

  Here was the problem Chapman, Dutcher, and Palmer faced in trying to save Pelican Island: since the federal Lacey Act passed in 1900 and the AOU model law passed in Florida in 1901, the AOU had failed to purchase Pelican Island with Thayer Fund monies, as a result of a serious technicality. Because Pelican Islan
d was designated “unsurveyed” U.S. government property, the General Land Office couldn’t legally authorize its acquisition to create a bird sanctuary. William Dutcher, however, cleverly directed Thayer Fund dollars to commission a survey of Pelican Island acceptable to the General Land Office. He may have been too clever by half. For just as Pelican Island was being officially surveyed—under Dutcher’s impetus—the AOU learned that it had opened up Pandora’s box: once the General Land Office approved the AOU survey, Pelican Island could then be made available to homesteaders. Free land for all who promised to grow crops or plant grapefruit trees—the worst possible scenario for saving the rookery. Even if the homesteading could somehow be averted, Dutcher feared that the New York millinary industry, with its deep pockets, would purposely outbid him just to spite the bird nuts and stick it to the Audubon Society.38

  Deeply concerned, Palmer and a fellow AOU member, Frank Bond, asked the Public Surveys Division Chief—Charles L. DuBois—what their options were. It would be suicidal to get into a real estate bidding war against the millinary lobby or try to gain an exemption from homesteading. Wisely, DuBois suggested to them that Pelican Island could legally be made a so-called government reservation by executive order of the president of the United States. The next day Palmer sent that message to Dutcher, in a letter dated February 21, 1903. Palmer urged Dutcher to immediately write to the secretary of agriculture requesting that Pelican Island be set apart as a government reservation.

  This would, of course, be unprecedented, but it could nevertheless be done. What a helpful suggestion for DuBois to make! If there was one thing Roosevelt loved, it was setting precedents. You can almost see a cartoon of Dutcher and Chapman thinking “Eureka!” All they needed, to procure Pelican Island for posterity, was (1) to schedule a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt and (2) to convince him on the idea of a bird reservation. Knowing of Roosevelt’s insistence that wildlife protection wasn’t possible without police protection, Chapman now had Paul Kroegel to present as the ideal warden, a counterpart of Captain Anderson at Yellowstone, Ranger Warford in Arizona, or Seth Bullock roaming the Black Hills.39

  V

  Chapman and Dutcher set up the March 1903 meeting at the White House. And, as noted in the “Prelude,” Roosevelt handed them their reservation on a silver platter. With little more than a wave of the hand, Pelican Island was established as a federal bird reservation by the president’s “I So Declare It.” This was a revolutionary moment for biological conservation. Throughout America in 1903 land was being set aside for wildlife; but it was for private game preserves. The Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, had sequestered a pristine 100,000-acre forested preserve, and a resort hotel in Virginia saved 10,000 acres along the Chickahominy River for fishing and hunting. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in fact, in its 1903 Yearbook, indicated that more and more large tracts of wilderness were being sold on the private market to the highest bidder. Pelican Island, the department noted, was an anomaly.40

  Roosevelt’s initial “I So Declare It”—instituted through the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Biological Survey division (or, more simply, “Dr. Merriam’s shop”)—wasn’t difficult to establish. It slipped by essentially unnoticed among reams of government appropriations and bills. Immediately, Roosevelt wanted to know the next steps needed to protect Pelican Island’s wildlife. Could Kroegel manage to protect the rookeries in Indian River Lagoon on his own? What other bird sanctuaries needed saving in Florida and elsewhere? These were the kind of probing questions Roosevelt wanted to ask Chapman and Dutcher. Appropriately, the ornithologists, their spirits high, pondered the president’s questions and answered them directly. Breeding grounds in Louisiana and North Dakota were high on their list. Both unofficial advisers believed that only lots of game wardens could curtail the relentless slaughter of birds in Florida. Wildlife needed paid guards to protect it from marauders. At Yellowstone National Park in July 1902, Colonel Charles J. (“Buffalo”) Jones had been appointed game warden—the first in U.S. governmental history. Now, Kroegel joined him as number two. (And Kroegel was the first on behalf of birds). Hiring wardens like Jones and Kroegel was ideally suited to Roosevelt’s innate “sheriff” temperament. As a law enforcement zealot the president liked to brag that he’d personally track down and shackle bird-killing scoundrels himself, if necessary, to send a broad message throughout Florida that there was a new management in town.

  Immediately, Roosevelt appointed Kroegel as his first national wildlife refuge warden for Pelican Island. In a U.S. Department of Agriculture letter dated March 24, 1903, Kroegel was put “in charge” of the rookery effective April 1. He would report directly to Merriam.41 Roosevelt was going to organize the Biological Survey as his special force on behalf of wildlife protection. “Paul was a convincing person,” his granddaughter Janice Kroegel Timinsky recalled. “By the time Theodore Roosevelt was president when he told these hunters to flee he was pure intimidation. It helped him psychologically, I think, to have the Audubon Society on his side. Don’t get me wrong—he didn’t change. He was still kind of silent. He didn’t like shouting or yelling. But after the Lacey Act, and with President Roosevelt in charge, they knew Grandpa wasn’t bluffing when he pointed his gun.”42

  There was, however, a hiccup. Because the Department of Agriculture had no money earmarked for wardens, the Audubon Society stepped in and paid for Kroegel’s modest salary: one dollar a month. (A couple of years later the Department of Agriculture gave Kroegel a substantial raise, to twelve dollars a month.43) But Paul never balked at the low salary. He was now Warden Kroegel. That’s what mattered. Although he had voluntarily protected wildlife on Pelican Island for years, Kroegel now held the distinction of being America’s first “refuge manager.” On April 28, 1903, Dutcher wrote Kroegel with a laundry list of federal instructions, noting that at all costs he was to “prevent the killing of wild birds or taking of their eggs,” and adding that any violations of President Roosevelt’s executive order should be “reported at once.”44

  Word had been delivered loud and clear: President Roosevelt wanted the plumers and eggers flushed. Following Roosevelt’s executive order a ferocious federal crackdown on market hunters rocked Florida. Roosevelt actually relished using the rule of law to incarcerate all the plumers and eggers who could be found. “His sense of right and duty was as inflexible as adamant,” John Burroughs wrote in his diary. “Politicians found him a hard customer.”45

  When Kroegel heard that Pelican Island had become a federal bird reservation he matter-of-factly lit his pipe to celebrate. His son Rodney later said he was in a kind of controlled stupor, half-imagining that the Pelican Island decree was a parlor trick from Washington, bound to be revoked. There was, however, no hocus-pocus. The opening salvo in the crusade to save American wildlife had been fired by President Roosevelt. When Warden Kroegel now pointed a rifle muzzle at a pelican poacher, he was doing so with the full authority of the president of the United States. Once again, Roosevelt’s genius as a conservationist was that he never listened to other politicians about how to get things done. His instinct was always to turn to the professional biologists, foresters, and field naturalists first. He always consulted with Darwin-minded men like Chapman, Dutcher, or Pinchot and then acted. Once the biological imperative was established he engaged the rough-and-ready outback types like Kroegel. Over and over again, this was the formula Roosevelt used to eventually set aside more than 234 million acres of America for posterity.

  With reserved pride, and a sense of genuine responsibility, as of April 1 Warden Kroegel proudly flew a huge American flag—which the USDA had sent him—on a twelve-foot pole at the end of his long dock at Indian River Lagoon. The instructions from the Roosevelt administration had been for Kroegel to put the gigantic flag on the island itself as an unmistakable federal warning to all encroachers. But Kroegel worried that the bright red-white-and-blue flag might scare away the birds. So the flimsy wooden dock it was. The Kroegel homestead now
had the look of a U.S. Coast Guard customhouse. “Folks would be more inclined to not mess with the birds if they saw that flag,” his granddaughter Janice Kroegel Timinsky recalled. “It was his way of saying, ‘Don’t tread here.’”46 The flag also served as a sentinel. When boats sailed past, they would invariably give a patriotic salute by sounding their horns. This alerted Kroegel to head off potential vandals.

  Just a couple of months after saving Pelican Island as the first federal bird reservation, Roosevelt decided that he should pay a long-overdue courtesy visit to the author of Florida Game Birds at Lotus Lake on Long Island’s South Shore. Bringing his oldest boy, Ted, who was fifteen, with him (along with his cousin Emlyn Roosevelt’s kids), Roosevelt had much to talk to Uncle Rob about. Together they went bird-watching and drove an automobile around Sayville reminiscing long into the night. Environmentally, two of the states R.B.R. had fought hardest to protect—New York and Florida—were now safeguarded by his nephew. The Roosevelts—Robert and Theodore—were protectors of wild Florida at a time when most rich Americans were searching for development dollars from the coastal state with year-round warm weather.

  VI

  Kroegel now wore a badge issued by Roosevelt and had framed his diploma-like appointment letter with its raised seal (both courtesy of the Department of Agriculture). But this didn’t mean the Feather Wars of Florida were over in the spring of 1903. For starters, Pelican Island had decades before been shot out by plumer gangs. Seeking roseate spoonbill feathers in full spring color, they had sprayed bullets in every direction, leaving shattered bone and guts strewn about the mangrove islet. Not only did the adult roseate spoonbills die, but the young chicks, suddenly parentless, perished too. Essentially, two whole generations of these birds, among other unlucky species, were simultaneously wiped out.