VI
While Roosevelt was in Colorado, Edith had decided to purchase a little cabin for her husband in Albemarle County, Virginia, fourteen miles south of Charlottesville. She called it Pine Knot; a favorite phrase of her husband. By a happy coincidence the first lady had journeyed to Keene, Virginia, on May 6 to spend time with Joe and Will Wilmer (family friends). Both Ethel and Archie accompanied her. The Blue Ridge Mountains had long attracted Roosevelt, who particularly liked Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. Edith must have known this. Besides enjoying the countryside, she was looking for a wilderness cabin where Theodore could escape Washington’s hubbub to “rest and repair.” She was tired of seeing him traipse off to Colorado for weeks every time he needed to return to the outdoors. On the Wilmers’ horse farm, tucked away among red and white oak, red cedars, dogwoods, red maples, and black cherry trees, was a rustic worker’s cabin. Almost on the spot she purchased the cottage, plus fifteen acres, for $280, although the deal didn’t go through at the bank until June 15. (She purchased an additional seventy-five acres in 1911.82)
Roosevelt loved reading books on nature, hunting, and literature. Here he is with his little dog Skip on his lap in a Colorado cabin.
T.R. in Colorado cabin with Skip. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Returning to the White House with Skip, the president was full of stories about Oklahoma’s wolves and Colorado’s bears. Wildlife photographs taken by the versatile Dr. Lambert were being developed in a darkroom. Anxiously, Roosevelt waited to see the photos with Catch ’Em Alive Jack. The whole experience at Big Pasture–Wichitas was imprinted on his mind like a brand. Quickly, he ordered the paperwork drawn up to create the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve. He signed the executive order on June 2, 1905, and transferred the newly formed Forest Service headed by Gifford Pinchot to the Department of Agriculture. At Merriam’s Biological Survey, last-minute legalities were being completed to create two new federal bird reservations in Michigan: Siskiwit Islands and Huron Islands.83 Lawyers at the Department of the Interior were also looking into preserving some interesting geological formations and archaeological ruins in the Southwest, such as Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. “Arizona and New Mexico hold a wealth of attraction for the archaeologist, the anthropologist, and the lover of what is strange and striking and beautiful in nature,” Roosevelt wrote. “More and more they will attract visitors and students and holiday-makers.”84
Edith was likewise bursting with news of the outdoors. All she could talk about was Pine Knot—the two-story cottage in the middle of a bird paradise. A piazza, she said, offered views of open fields and the Blue Ridge foothills. Everything about the place, she believed, was ideal for solitude. Yet it was also a practical acquisition. While it was isolated from Washington, Pine Knot was not really too far from civilization. Only half a mile away was a general store, and Christ Church could be reached simply by walking across a horse pasture. And Pine Knot had historical significance which Edith knew her husband would cherish: it sat along Scottsville Road, where General Sheridan had marched 5,000 troops in 1865 on a maneuver to destroy the James River canal locks.85 “Mother,” T.R. wrote to Kermit after returning from Colorado, “is a great deal more pleased with it than any child with any toy I ever saw.”86
It was agreed that after Roosevelt concluded the Russo-Japanese negotiations in early June, he would head south to stay at Pine Knot for a few relaxing days. He could start a Virginia bird count there. Edith went first as an advance scout, setting up furniture and making sure the potbellied stove was in working order. This was not an Adirondacks hunting lodge but a cabin in the rustic tradition of John Burroughs’s Slabsides in New York. On June 9, after extracting a promise from Russia and Japan to negotiate face-to-face, Roosevelt took the Southern Railway (train No. 35) to Red Hill, Virginia. A few locals were at the station when he arrived. All T.R. offered them was a boyish declaration that he was glad to become a Virginian homeowner.
After sleeping one night in the ocher-colored cottage—which had a cedar roof, dark green shutters, and a hardwood tree growing inside—Roosevelt declared Pine Knot “the nicest little place of the kind you could imagine.” Not everybody in Blue Ridge country, however, was happy to have President Roosevelt as a neighbor. Anger over the dinner with Booker T. Washington had made Roosevelt persona non grata in parts of Albemarle County. No reconciliation with these bigots was possible. Also, Roosevelt’s admiration for General Sheridan—who was to Virginians what General Sherman was to Georgians—didn’t endear him to the locals. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s attempts at taking land in the Blue Ridge Mountains for federal forest reserves had angered local timber companies. So, this was hostile country to some degree. Nevertheless, Roosevelt refused Secret Service protection; that was a reluctantly agreed upon precondition with Edith. He instead chose to sleep with a pistol at his bedside, thumbing it open to check the bullet chambers before blowing out the light. A real man, Roosevelt believed, protected his own family in the woods.
What Roosevelt enjoyed most about Pine Knot was the sound of birds, which reminded him of the Elkhorn Ranch in North Dakota. Ahhh—all of his weariness evaporated in the woods. He was like a refugee who had fled the Washington battlefield, escaping the knife blade to the throat by the grace of God. “It was lovely to sit there in the rocking chairs and hear all the birds by daytime,” he wrote to Kermit, “and at night the whippoorwills and little forest folk.”87 Visiting Pine Knot also gave Roosevelt a chance to cook his favorite food, fried chicken, on a kerosene stove. Just as Roosevelt had played at being an Oklahoma wolf hunter with Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, he now played at being John Burroughs in the grove. And at Pine Knot he ate like a glutton—a dozen eggs for breakfast, washed down with glasses of milk. No longer was he trim and fit. He was taking on a little of the girth of Grover Cleveland. As Edith’s biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris noted, Theodore believed that “a man with a huge brain needed plenty of nourishment.”88
And President Roosevelt’s brain was needed more than ever during the summer of 1905. On the death of Secretary of State Hay, Roosevelt took up the Russo-Japanese peace negotiations himself. The melancholy prospect of endless war had seemed likely, but now diplomats from both sides came to Oyster Bay to search for common ground. Roosevelt then selected the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire as the site of a further, more intense round of negotiations. What made the Russo-Japanese War so unusual was that the fighting was taking place in neutral nations: China and Korea. Today many military historians call the conflict the first modern war because the telegraph, advanced torpedoes, minefields, and armored battleships were introduced. Roosevelt wanted to prevent a global cataclysm—this was the reason why he threw himself so wholeheartedly into the diplomatic fray. At stake was the balance of power for the entire Pacific.
Using diplomatic muscle, Roosevelt achieved a stalemate. Such large-scale wars, he believed, should be obsolete. His negotiation skills and his aggressive diplomacy, which culminated in the Treaty of Portsmouth (signed on September 5, 1905), won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Roosevelt had persuaded Russia to stop its expansionism into East Asia, while the Japanese won control of the Korean Peninsula. Neither side was very happy with the negotiated peace. Still, as a warrior-cum-statesman Roosevelt understood the vital importance of stopping a war between such highly armed powers as Japan and Russia; and both parties conceded that he had been fair. Two rare samurai swords were presented to Roosevelt by the Japanese war hero Admiral Togo at Sagamore Hill, as a token of appreciation for his statesmanship.
VII
In September 1905 George Herbert Locke, an editor at Ginn and Company of Boston, sent Roosevelt a complimentary copy of William Joseph Long’s new Northern Trails; Some Studies of Animal Life in the Far North. It was disingenuous of Locke, who knew that Roosevelt considered Long a nature faker and a prig with epicurean tastes. But controversy sells books. Roosevelt read Northern Trails and was infuriated by Long’s inaccurate de
scription of wolves. Feeling empowered by his field observations in the Goat Pasture, Roosevelt sent a private letter to Locke, lambasting Long as a fraud. “There are statements made in the story which from my own knowledge of animals I am confident are utterly inaccurate,” he wrote. “To anyone who knows the relative prowess of a single big wolf and of a lynx, or has seen the ease with which a good fighting dog who knows his business will kill a lynx without himself getting harmed, the whole account of the way two wolves kill a lynx is absurd. Then again, take the account of the killing of the caribou by the white wolf, by a quick snap where the heart lays. The whole account is full of inaccuracies which it is hard to understand in any observer who knows anything about wolves or deer.” 89
Sounding like a fact-checking schoolmaster, Roosevelt listed more than a dozen errors Long had made pertaining to wolves alone. Besides having mastered zoological books on wolves, Roosevelt had listened carefully to Catch ’Em Alive Jack in the Big Pasture. This combination led Roosevelt to believe he was the world’s foremost authority on wolves. At least, he said, London in Call of the Wild and Kipling in the Jungle Books made it clear that they were writing fiction. By contrast, Long, had again written in his preface, audaciously, that “every incident is minutely true to fact.” Balderdash! was Roosevelt’s response. “Wolves normally kill any large animal by biting at the flanks or haunches,” Roosevelt fumed. “Occasionally, but much more rarely, they seize by the throat. I have known them in the hurly-burly of the fight to seize in many different ways, but never under any circumstances have I known them to seize in the way described by Mr. Long.”
Roosevelt sent a copy of this letter to Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy. These two outdoorsman, both astonishingly indifferent to risk, now operated in tandem when it came to wolf studies: the president and the backwoodsman formed a united front. When they were together, they exchanged knowing looks, implying that they shared frontier values which could not be understood by easterners. Roosevelt claimed that Abernathy was an American original. In the fall of 1905 Roosevelt insisted that Catch ’Em Alive, scuffed boots, plain manners, and all, visit the White House as his guest of honor. Roosevelt was eager to show Abernathy off to his Ivy League friends. He treated Abernathy, in fact, like a trophy from the Wild West. Roosevelt held dinners in Abernathy’s honor and invited, among others, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and John Jacob Astor. “Although I made no pretensions as a conversationalist—and do not now for that matter—I did not need much initiative in a talk with the aging author of Innocents Abroad,” Abernathy recalled of meeting Twain. “He had plenty to say and was quite willing to do most of the talking.”90
On arriving at the White House for the first time, Abernathy was escorted into a cabinet meeting. Only one chair was available, so he took it. The president was not yet there, and the clock ticked on. The cabinet members, including Elihu Root, eyed Abernathy with suspicion. He was wearing a six-shooter and seemed ready to fan the hammer. Suddenly Roosevelt burst into the room, eyes flashing at Abernathy in pure delight. “John you’re getting up in the world—occupying the President’s chair at a cabinet meeting,” Roosevelt laughed. An embarrassed Abernathy, all his swagger evaporated, realizing his mistake, started to get up. Roosevelt forced him down again—they were frontier brothers and shared everything.91
What transformed Abernathy into a national celebrity was the publication of Roosevelt’s Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter in November 1905. The book was an omnibus of Roosevelt’s best outdoors essays written between 1893 and 1905.92 His preference had been to call it Outdoor Pastimes of an American President, but he worried about commercializing the executive branch. The first half of Outdoor Pastimes dealt more with hunting, the second half more with conservation. Chapter 3 was about “Wolf Coursing” with Abernathy and was accompanied by dramatic photographs (taken by Lambert and Simpson). The images included the president and a captured coyote, saddling the Big D cow pony, greyhounds resting in a run, and much more. There were other chapters about hunting in Outdoor Pastimes, taking up Colorado’s bears and Idaho’s mountain sheep, but it was the chapter on wolf-coursing that stole the show.
Five of the chapters in Outdoor Pastimes were new; the other six had originally appeared in The Deer Family. (The first three chapters were reprints of four articles Roosevelt wrote for Scribner’s while he was president.) Preserving nature is an overriding theme in the book. In rapturous prose, Roosevelt wrote about the beauty of Yellowstone and Yosemite in his chapter “Wilderness Reserves.” Many passages in this essay represent his most glorious writing ever about the national park movement. Phrases in the essay were calculated to make the reader want to take a hike or watch birds; basically, the essay was a meditation by America’s top wildlife manager. In Outdoor Pastimes Roosevelt championed the preservation of buffalo, bears, deer, and wapiti in federal reserves as never before. “The most striking and melancholy feature in connection with American big game,” Roosevelt wrote, “is the rapidity with which it has vanished.”93
The average reader could be forgiven for finding Catch ’Em Alive Jack the most colorful character in Outdoor Pastimes, but the book’s intellectual muse was Oom John. In a series of long, radiant vignettes Roosevelt recounted his time with Burroughs in Yellowstone. Burroughs, in fact, looms large throughout the book. Not only did Roosevelt dedicate Out-door Pastimes to Burroughs, but he began the book with an open letter to his dear friend, dated October 2, 1905: “Dear Oom John,” it started. “Every lover of outdoor life must feel a sense of affectionate obligation to you. Your writings appeal to all who care for the life of the woods and the fields, whether their tastes keep them in the homely, pleasant farm country or lead them into the wilderness. It is a good thing for our people that you should have lived; and surely no man can wish to have more said of him….” From there, Roosevelt went on and on in the same salutary vein.94
Burroughs was flattered beyond words, and The New York Times said that those, like Burroughs, who “make the study of wild life” would love the book for its utter “accuracy.”95 Furthermore, Oom John wasn’t the only outdoorsman whose career the president boosted in Outdoor Pastimes. In 1906 Roosevelt, encouraged by the fame Outdoor Pastimes had brought Abernathy, appointed him U.S. federal marshal of Oklahoma. Annoyed because easterners didn’t believe that Abernathy actually caught wolves alive, Roosevelt also sent a movie crew to Oklahoma in 1907 to make a motion picture of Catch ’Em Alive’s feats.96 Even by the standards of modern filmmaking, which uses sophisticated special effects, footage of Abernathy remains riveting. It’s like an early herky-jerky black-and-white western; even Animal Planet hasn’t yet captured such a crazy episode on film. On this hunt Abernathy came just a hair away from being mauled to death by a wolf. Eventually Abernathy was able to wire the muzzle of the 128-pound wolf and get the animal into a cage. All this was captured on film which Abernathy immediately brought to show the president. “That is the best show,” Roosevelt beamed, “that ever has been in the White House.”97
Roosevelt was so impressed by the footage that he asked Hornaday to allow Abernathy to course for wolves in Oradell, New Jersey. The idea was to get first-class motion picture cameras from New York to film the event. Hornaday would let seven wolves loose on an estate in New Jersey, and Abernathy would recapture them. Sam Bass and a couple of other horses were sent by railroad from Oklahoma, as were Abernathy’s best dogs. “The wolves were easily tracked in the new-fallen snow,” Abernathy wrote. “Two of them were found within one hundred yards of the cage from which they had escaped. They did not seem wild or disposed to flee at the sight of men with horses and dogs. On the contrary they seemed half tame and inclined to be playful in the snow.”98
Critics of Roosevelt thought Abernathy was a ridiculous carnival attraction, not worthy of all this attention. Also, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, were furious at Roosevelt for trying to get Abernathy a marshalship in Oklahoma; they tried to characterize him as a drifter type. According to one
charge against Abernathy, he was nothing more than “a bronco rider, and a wolf catcher; was reared in a cow camp; has been a fiddler at country dances, a cotton picker, a patch digger, and a friend of the outlaws—and is not a politician.” Telegrams poured into Washington, D.C., from Oklahoma City and Tulsa protesting Abernathy’s appointment as marshal. Some senators, adding to these complaints, said that Abernathy played the fiddle at honky-tonks and got into barroom fights. But Senator Freeman Knowles of South Dakota was sympathetic. “Well, Marshal I am going to call you Marshal, since your name already has gone to the Senate,” he said, “tell us some wolf stories.”
Abernathy gladly obliged Senator Knowles and was easily confirmed. One thing that worked in Abernathy’s favor was his knowledge of all the business operations of the Indian Tribes in Oklahoma. And Abernathy knew how to let his horse pick the trails along the Cimarron River—a sure sign of a first-class tracker. Many whites considered the Comanche and Kiowa terrorists; Abernathy didn’t. “Thus I became Marshal of Oklahoma,” he wrote in Catch ’Em Alive Jack. “The position was one of great responsibility and trust. The salary was five thousand dollars a year (a big sum to me) and all expenses incurred while in the discharge of duty.” Law enforcement, however, wasn’t Abernathy’s forte. He didn’t want to turn down cash offers for catching wolves. “My Dear Marshal,” Roosevelt wrote to Abernathy June 4, 1906: “I guess you better not catch live wolves as a part of a public exhibition while you are Marshal. If on a private hunt you catch them, that would be alright; but it would look too much as if you were going to show business if you took part in a public celebration.”99
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