“I am delighted with the good news about the wolves, but please do not have any taken alive and turned out,” Roosevelt wrote to Lyon on March 16. “I would not care to hunt any that were loosed for that purpose. It would not do, on more accounts than one. If we can put them up and kill genuine live wolves and have a genuine hunt, I shall be very glad…. If not we shall take jackrabbits or coyotes; but nothing must be turned loose after having been captured.” 2
Roosevelt had an additional reason to be wary. The day he wrote to Lyon, two white police officers in Mississippi were murdered by a black mob at H. L. Foote’s plantation, not far from the birthplace of the “teddy bear.”3 When this news reached the president, he was bound for New York City to attend the private wedding of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt (both were his cousins). Roosevelt was horrified by the bloodshed: segregationist Mississippi seemed to be a bottomless chasm of violence and injustice. At all costs, Roosevelt instructed his staff, he wanted to avoid galloping into a race war on his trip to Texas and Oklahoma. His advance team was instructed to tread carefully, avoiding political potholes. With regard to other matters, his staffers dutifully found him the right bridles, spurs, and whips, to use in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. A fast, fearless, long-winded hunt horse was also procured. And, of course, what Roosevelt called “outdoors books” were ordered; they dealt with Oklahoma’s wildlife species and included range maps and pertinent life histories.4 What Roosevelt didn’t want was a hotel with concierge, elevators, and white washbowls with copper fixtures, once he was out of Texas. The White House also announced that Roosevelt intended to spend time with his friend Quanah Parker, the last of the Comanche chiefs to surrender to “the white man’s stony road.”5 (A small contingent of Comanche insisted that Parker wasn’t their real chief, but that thieving white politicians had anointed him as such.)
According to the plan that was developed, Roosevelt would spend April around Fort Sill, hunting wolves in the surrounding primeval prairie dotted with solitary towers. Then he would venture to the Rockies in search of grizzly bears. (Only T.R. could get away with vanishing for weeks on end and still have the public cheer.) Once again the president wanted to explore the Colorado high country, which was the birthplace of his favorite rivers: the Rio Grande, San Juan, North and South Platte, Yampa, Gunnison, Arkansas, and Dolores—and, most famously, the Colorado. Meanwhile Edith, and three of the Roosevelts’ children—Ethel, Kermit, and Archie—would spend a holiday on the Atlantic coast of Florida on the yacht Sylph.
Roosevelt, for his part, was advancing the notion of statehood for the Twin Territories (Indian and Oklahoma) as a single entity: Oklahoma. His choosing to hunt wolves in the Wichitas–Great Pasture area rather than in Texas contributed to that message. Until Roosevelt’s presidency, the Twin Territories were considered largely no-man’s-land to everybody but the mounted warrior cultures of the Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, and Wichitas (considered the ablest bison hunters on the Great Plains). The Spanish explorer Coronado had journeyed through the Oklahoma plains in 1541, looking for a “lost city of gold” but decided there wasn’t one. (He carved “Coronado 1541” on Castle Rock where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Cimarron River.) Thomas Jefferson acquired southwestern Oklahoma in the Louisiana Purchase, but it was considered the least valuable part of the purchase when President Andrew Jackson marched the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States down the Trail of Tears to the area.
Oklahoma! Everything loose or lost in America seemed to have tumbled into the territories as if through a giant chute. The population included reservation Indians, felons, paupers, drunkards, dirt farmers, fortune seekers, gamblers, and losers of every stripe. The smart pre–Civil War pioneers, those who were not seeking instant wealth, stayed on a network of trails and kept heading west. No pause. No rest in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, or Elk City. Just onward toward Amarillo by twilight and across the great desert lands to the shimmering Pacific Ocean. Others simply followed the Cimarron River, driving longhorns up to Kansas, where Christian settlements had taken hold. But only a rather optionless breed of humanity stayed in Oklahoma for very long.
Because people ventured to the Twin Territories to exploit resources or simply pass through, the basic tenets of conservationism were largely anathema to residents. In 1878, the last buffalo herd was reported to have been obliterated in Oklahoma—all the big game was rapidly disappearing from the Great Plains. Railroad expansion helped end the “golden age” of big game hunting in Oklahoma.6 There were, however, plenty of smaller animals and birds. And Oklahoma still had vast natural beauty. The Cross-Timbers region was a great forestland that stretched from southeast Kansas to northern Texas, dividing the western plains from southeastern forests. In general, the Plains Indians lived to the west and the Five Civilized Tribes to the east. Seldom did the two meet. Wintering waterfowl, nesting wood ducks, and neotropical migratory songbirds all lived in the spurs of the Oklahoma mountains.
There was something still peculiarly western about the Twin Territories, for this hard-living region was unsettled. Oklahoma City, for example, was erected virtually overnight between 1889 and 1895, because of the cheap land. When President McKinley’s “great land lottery” was announced in July 1901—Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation land was being given away—homesteaders came pouring into the region by railroad and on horseback. Luckily for posterity, a conservation easement was attached to the lottery. Coinciding with the homesteading act President McKinley—at Vice President Roosevelt’s urging—saved 59,019 mountainous acres to create the Wichita Forest Reserve (administered by the Department of the Interior’s Forestry Division of the General Land Office). Fortunately, fragments of the Cross Timbers survived at the Wichita Forest Reserve (eighty-nine square miles, considered sacred by Native Americans, just outside Lawton–Fort Sill.) The entire Wichita mountain range covered a 1,500-square-mile region that extended into Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Jackson, Greer, and Tillman counties.
So, onward to the pure air of Oklahoma! Roosevelt craved a long stay on the prairie before the Twin Territories became one state. His mere presence in any Indian-Oklahoma territorial hamlet would guarantee it a mention in the history books. Roosevelt wanted to inspect the Wichita mountains landscape, first inhabited by Paleo-Indians more than 10,000 years ago. He would be scouting for an ideal buffalo pasture. The buffalo at the Bronx Zoo, he believed, were ready to return to their home range in Oklahoma, where Coronado first saw these animals in the sixteenth century.7 According to Charles “Buffalo” Jones, whom Roosevelt appointed as game warden of Yellowstone, the bison then living in Mammoth Valley had become such a popular attraction at the national park that railroad companies were promoting them to tourists. One advertisement exclaimed: “BISON once roamed the country now traversed by the Northern Pacific. The remnant of these Noble Beasts is now found in Yellowstone Park reached directly only by this line.”8
During the Christmas season of 1904 Roosevelt spent an evening with the naturalist Ernest H. Baynes of New Hampshire, an animal trainer who went everywhere, befriended everyone, and noticed everything. Concerning buffalo, he liked to express original zoological ideas—often sounding brilliant—and then brag about his originality. In September 1904 Baynes had cooked up for Roosevelt a detailed plan to reintroduce buffalo. The initiative called for Roosevelt to remove from private individuals as many of the remaining American buffalo as possible. The U.S. government would offer large-scale ranchers like Charles Goodnight and Howard Eaton a fair price ($1,000) for each buffalo they owned.9 Baynes even suggested that the government acquire the few remaining Canadian herds. Once all the remaining buffalo were procured, refuges would be established for them throughout the Great Plains. The Wichita National Forest in Oklahoma would be the first. Baynes’s plan also offered a compelling reason why numerous reserves (not just the Wichitas) were needed: “If a contagious disease should strike any one of these herds not too large a proportion of the existing animals would be wiped out at the same
time.”10
After the election, Baynes’s plan was put into action. Roosevelt even promoted big game preserves in his Fourth Annual Message on December 6, 1904, in a way that would have pleased George Catlin:
I desire again to urge upon the Congress the importance of authorizing the President to set aside certain portions of the reserves, or other public lands, as game refuges for the preservation of the bison, the wapiti, and other large beasts once so abundant in our woods and mountains, and on our great plains, and now tending toward extinction. We owe it to future generations to keep alive the noble and beautiful creatures which by their presence add such distinctive character to the American Wilderness.11
Just after New Year’s Day, William Temple Hornaday and Madison Grant of the New York Zoological Society went to work getting the buffalo ready for Oklahoma. The zoo herd had been donated to them by William Whitney of Massachusetts, a wealthy wildlife protection activist. At the time, the federal government owned only two herds: at Yellowstone National Park and National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. Baynes was authorized by Roosevelt to start identifying private buffalo herds to be acquired by the federal government for a third preserve and a fourth preserve. Meanwhile, Congressman Lacey lobbied every U.S. senator about the new game reserve bill. After a few weeks of congressional seesawing, on January 24, 1905, the bill (33 Stat. L., 614) passed easily. The buffalo would soon be back on the Great Plains.
Essentially, the Wichita Forest Reserve became an experimental laboratory for the Roosevelt administration. A stipulation of the new Lacey Act was that 3,500 to 5,000 livestock grazing permits would be issued annually to local ranchers. Although hunting was strictly forbidden in the Wichitas, a special provision was made to allow wolf and coyote drives as part of a predator control program. At the time, big game managers believed that if buffalo were to survive, the wolves, coyotes, and cougars had to go. Oddly, guns were not allowed on these wolf and coyote hunts—only dogs. Secretary of Agriculture Wilson also made it clear that if these drives scared the livestock or deer, they would be abolished.
But the Wichita rangers had a more menacing threat to the ecosystem than predators. Although homesteading had been banned in the Wichitas, mining was allowed. From 1901 to 1905, prospectors poured into southwestern Oklahoma hoping to strike it rich. Shafts were built in the granite. Assay offices were set up, it seemed, in every one-horse town. Mining camps were established, including in Meers, Oreana, and Craterville. For a fleeting moment the Wichitas were like the Yukon or the Black Hills. But in the end, there was no gold, and luckily, the forest rangers were somehow able to protect the integrity of the Wichita Forest Reserve during the mining boom, with only limited damage.
From January to March 1905, on Roosevelt’s instruction, groundwork was done by the New York Zoological Society to establish the Wichita Forest Reserve and National Game Preserve.12 Secretary of Agriculture Wilson asked the Biological Survey to assist in finding the ideal location in southeastern Oklahoma for the game reserve. The Senate approved the plan. The part of the Wichitas that seemed to be the most highly recommended site was Winter Valley. So on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration, which was to be followed by his hunting trip to the Wichitas, the buffalo project was on a fast track. Baynes’s articles promoting it, first published in the Boston Evening Transcript, had been widely syndicated. An Adrian, Michigan fence company, had huge spools of product ready to ship off at the president’s beck and call.13 It had been a long, hard fight since the 1880s to establish federal sanctuaries for the vanishing big game of North America. But all the efforts by the Boone and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological Society had finally paid off in the spring of 1905.14
On April 1, the president’s specific travel plans became known to reporters. Things were happening quickly. Instructions had been received at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, from the White House to have a detachment of soldiers ready at the railroad outpost of Frederick (population 200 at best) for April 8. They would serve as the president’s Secret Service detail in the Big Pasture–Wichitas. After touring Texas (Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, etc.), Roosevelt planned to cross the Red River to hunt in the Indian Territory with Chief Quanah. Thoreau had preferred nature in winter, but Roosevelt (like Burroughs) was a springtime man. With “thoroughly congenial company” he would ride on “the flats and great rolling prairies which stretched north from our camp toward the Wichita Mountains and south toward the Red River.”15
Roosevelt was also eager to visit Fort Sill. On January, 8 1869, Major General Phil Sheridan had chosen this strategic site for a cavalry fort; he named it after a friend. It had been his headquarters during his successful effort to quash the Plains Indians’ border raids. Comanche and Apache had been pillaging pioneer communities in Texas and Kansas even after the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 had declared the frontier closed. Fort Sill was a form of revenge. Hiring Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok as scouts, Sheridan used the fort as U.S. Army headquarters in the Indian wars. Eventually, the army pacified all the Indians on the South Plains. In 1867 the Medicine Lodge Treaty was signed by the chiefs—all under duress—of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who thereby agreed to reservations in southwestern Oklahoma. After being recalcitrant for a difficult eight years, in June 1875 Quanah Parker had his Quohada Comanche surrender at Fort Sill. With no buffalo herds present for sustenance, his people couldn’t go on. Quanah considered escaping as Chief Joseph had done with Nez Perce, disappearing into the Guadalupe Mountains between Carlsbad, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. But he didn’t. He couldn’t put his people through the necessary deprivations and ordeals. A new, less bloody era had arrived in Comanche country.16
With the Comanches pacified and McKinley’s homesteading lottery operating, approximately 29,000 Americans moved to Oklahoma. No hill or knoll was unclaimed. Suddenly, Lawton, the town attached to Fort Sill, grew into the third-largest city in Oklahoma. Sensing the closing of the frontier, and aware that raids were a thing of the past, Roosevelt soon transformed the mission of Fort Sill from cavalry to field artillery. On many days in Lawton, china cupboards would shake from cannon blasts. Curiously, after four or five years of mortar rounds, the usually skittish songbirds seemed to decide that the army practice wasn’t a menace: they paid little attention to the loud artillery. The birds had adapted; call it Darwin’s natural selection at work. As a western historian, Roosevelt was deeply interested in studying the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers, and the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers. And, in keeping with his hobby, he wanted to see with his own eyes where Sheridan had once trained troops. Therefore, Fort Sill was a special American place to Roosevelt—like Valley Forge, the Alamo, the Chalmette Battlefield, and Appomattox Court House—simply because Sheridan had been connected to it.
Surrounding Fort Sill were the rugged Wichita Mountains—a jumbled landscape of rocky outcroppings, rock-crowded peaks, towering sentinels, granite ridges, and huge boulders strewn around 60,000 acres of prairielands. The Wichita Uplift—which occurred during the Pennsylvania Period about 300 million years ago—had created a number of peaks over 2,000 feet above sea level; they were older than the Alps or Himalayas. Four types of habitats could be found in the Wichita Mountains: rocklands, aquatic, mixed grass prairie, and cross-timbers.17 In this strange range, bunch grass was interspersed with scrub oak forest, cactus, and aloe plants. The Wichitas were a botanical crossroads (ecocene) with more than 270 bird species taking advantage of the buffet, fattening up for the winter. It was said by western frontiersmen that the ancestral Wichitas—this series of rock prominences—was where the East met the West at the vertex of the Great Plains.18 The Red Beds here—formed by prehistoric ocean currents, huge earthquakes, and glacial shifts—resembled the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs. It was a geologist’s dream, a rock garden in which boulders hung off cliffs, seemingly ready to tumble in a roaring avalanche with a northerly gust.
The president’s lead guide in the Big Pa
sture and Wichita Mountains was going to be Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy, a white, Anglo counterpart of Holt Collier; though his specialty was hunting the prairie wolf (Canis latrans) with catch rope instead of hunting the black bear with a knife. Born in 1876 in Bosque County, Texas, colorful Abernathy cut such a swath across the Red River valley of Texas-Oklahoma that he became a legend to drovers from Amarillo to Tulsa. By the time Abernathy was fifteen years old he had already had successful careers as a cowboy on the A-K-X Ranch and as a bronco buster with the J-A outfit. Nobody, it was said, could saddle a wild horse as skillfully as Abernathy. Some people complained that he overworked and underfed his stallions. But everybody agreed that at dusk, Abernathy was usually the last man to hobble his horse.
Brickish and bullnecked, Abernathy was an excellent pianist and bluegrass fiddler in the fast Smokies style of eastern Tennessee. At his regular gigs in bars in Sweetwater, Texas, “Dixie” was still the most frequently requested song, followed by “Ole Paint” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Gregarious to the point of causing irritation, Abernathy had the smile of a dedicated drinker. In reality, he was nearly a teetotaler, taking only an occasional shot or two of bourbon for a toothache. “My six-shooter was my friend,” Abernathy wrote of his youthful days, “and constant companion.” 19
Refusing to be an antihero Abernathy, a proud and devout Christian, lived on the straight and narrow. A man who could defend himself in a scrape, he was dutifully married and had five children. Abernathy was always looking for freelance law enforcement work; handcuffs often dangled at his side. Fairly regularly, he served as an under-sheriff or posse leader for day wages. Townspeople looked up to him. He also took on short ranch jobs at regular intervals. Around a campfire, Abernathy was always the guy tossing kindling on the flames, hoping to keep the conversation going. With his white horse, Sam Bass, and his brave dog Catch (a Scottish shepherd), he was as close to the character called “the Virginian” as was possible in north Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. Owen Wister could easily have woven Abernathy’s trademark quip—“I am a goner for keeps”—into The Virginian. Adding to his western appeal, a kind of Fort Worth drawl colored Abernathy’s utterances: “cow” was “kyow” and was “womb-man.” But for all of his decency, Abernathy wasn’t a nester. Restlessness was his normal condition.
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