The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Roosevelt kept up an intermittent correspondence with Abernathy about all things Oklahoman. He hoped that Abernathy would succeed as a marshal. Before long, however, Abernathy, under a storm of charges of conflict of interest, quit the job. A true Texan-Oklahoman, Abernathy was too lenient toward his outlaw buddies. While this never-turn-on-fourth-cousins attitude was commonplace in Oklahoma City, it didn’t play well in the East. Roosevelt remained loyal and found Abernathy employment with the U.S. Secret Service in New York. “My first assignment was in Chinatown and the subways,” Abernathy recalled. “I was required to visit the underworld resorts, among them being the opium dens often frequented by rich and fashionably attired society folks. In company with a U.S. Marshal, one night I ‘hit the pipe’ just to experience the sensation; also to get information from the addicts in the resort.”100

  Catch ’Em Alive wasn’t the only colorful westerner appointed to law enforcement jobs by Roosevelt. Bat Masterson of “Dodge City (when Dodge City was the toughest town on this continent,” as T.R. put it), famously, was appointed a deputy marshal in New York City. With hopes of saving the Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest, Roosevelt also promoted Ben Daniels—a former Rough Rider in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry—as U.S. marshal for the territory of Arizona. All three law enforcement officers—Abernathy, Masterson, and Daniels—epitomized the West as presented in The Virginian. Roosevelt saw their core moral values as reflecting his own. What Roosevelt wrote to Senator Clarence Clark of Wyoming about Daniels as being an American “Viking” also applied to Abernathy and Masterson.101

  There are no letters like this of Roosevelt trying to insinuate himself into eastern establishment traditions except when he was applying to Harvard. Without question, Roosevelt wanted to be accepted as a westerner of the “West that was.” He wanted to be associated in history with Quanah Parker, Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp, Ben Daniels, Catch ’Em Alive Abernathy, John Muir, and Joaquin Miller. Even the members of the east coast elite with whom he interacted—most noticeably George Bird Grinnell and C. Hart Merriam—had made their careers in the West. As for John Burroughs, he was sui generis, Oom John, an earnest American, the Transcendentalist in the modern conservation movement. And, to Roosevelt’s mind, his new buffalo pasture in Wichita Forest was a first step in preserving the historical memory of Oklahoma’s Wild West spirit. Lawton without buffalo on the plains was just another dull windswept Oklahoma town. Just as buffalo were roaming around Yellowstone National Park (between the Yellowstone and Lamar rivers), Roosevelt envisioned herds grazing along all the tributaries of the Missouri River.

  VIII

  The return of the buffalo to the Wichita Mountains was officially begun on June 2, 1905, with a “proclamation.” A tract of 60,800 acres had been set aside by the Roosevelt administration approximately where the president had coursed for wolves and had ridden with Quanah. Although Roosevelt didn’t specifically mention buffalo, he said that wildlife in the Wichita Mountains—including birds and fish—were off-limits to hunters.102 The USDA’s Forest Service would police the game reserve. And the fifteen white-tailed deer in the park needed to become at least 500 strong. A deer rehabilitation project was started. Additionally, the creation of the Wichita Game Preserve (inside the federal forest reserve) was a historic event: America’s first national game preserve. The Bronx Zoo was at last fulfilling its mission of saving endangered species from extinction. Baynes’s plan was now official: buffalo would again be the lords of the Great Plains. The first wave of buffalo would go to Winter Valley in the west-central portion of the Wichita preserve. With buffalo grass, bluestem, and rock-capped roundabouts for buffalo to hide among in winter, the Wichitas were the God-ordained place for the Bronx Zoo’s bison.103

  Credit for the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve must be given to William Temple Hornaday, who never threw in the towel. Ever since his study of 1889 lamenting that only 1,091 bison (wild and captive) remained in North America, he had worked overtime to save the bison as a species.104 He specialized in understanding herd dynamics and genetic integrity. Besides personally hand-feeding the Bronx Zoo herds, he and John Pitcher had encouraged restoration in Yellowstone National Park with domestic buffalo from the Goodnight Ranch in Texas and the Pablo-Allard Ranch in Montana. President Roosevelt’s positive firsthand report about the Wichita Forest Reserve in Comanche Country was important, but Hornaday wanted more specific information about the grasses on the reserve. Roosevelt agreed that this was advisable. On his return from Oklahoma Roosevelt dispatched J. Alden Loring—an energetic naturalist in his mid-thirties who worked for the New York Zoological Society and Biological Survey—to survey the exact part of the range ideal for buffalo.105 Roosevelt was impressed that Loring held the world record for preparing small mammal specimens in a three-month period: more than 900 collected in Europe for American museums.106

  On December 8, 1905, at the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday announced the creation of the American Bison Society (ABS), which was to be based in New York. His cofounders included Roosevelt and Charles J. “Buffalo” Jones. With determined earnestness the ABS demanded that the American people protect bison herds.107 Their mission was to numerically increase buffalo herds throughout the Great Plains and Rockies. The ABS simply refused to accept the possibility that buffalo were doomed and could survive only in taxidermy, photographs, or pictographs on cave walls. The Wichita Forest and Game Preserve was the opening salvo of the “buffalo common” movement. Hornaday and Roosevelt were now committed to having large swaths of the bison’s historic range restored. Centuries earlier, Father Marquette had drawn a picture of a wild buffalo he saw as far north as Green Bay, Wisconsin; ABS wanted the buffalo to range that far north once again. The ABS would also educate citizens about the bison’s endangered status. And large-scale bison conservation was now deemed a national imperative, arousing serious new scientific interest in grassland ecosystems.

  On March 4, 1907, all forest reserves were renamed national forests, so the area became the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve. On October 11, 1907, the fifteen buffalo from the Bronx Zoo were loaded onto a train at Fordham Station in New York, bound for Oklahoma’s national forest. Accompanying them on their journey were Frank Rush of Ponca City, Oklahoma, to tend the animals; Elwin R. Sanborn, to write about the event; and H. R. Mitchell, the New York Zoological Park’s chief clerk, to manage all the details. A steel woven fence seventy-four inches high was strung up in the Wichita Forest Reserve along oak posts. Sturdy gates were also built, to withstand a charging buffalo that might want to bolt. Congress had appropriated $15,000 to construct the high fence around 8,000 acres of an ideal Oklahoman buffalo habitat. The huge steel fence had been erected in the Winter Valley part of the Oklahoma reserve; what was unclear about this fait accompli was whether it was meant to keep the buffalo in the reserve or the poachers out. The Biological Survey conducted tests to inoculate the buffalo against the dreaded Texas fever. Large areas of the new buffalo reserve were burned to kill off ticks, which carried the fever. Eventually a dipping vat was constructed to eradicate the ticks. Rush also decided that the best way to protect the buffalo from ticks was to spray them with oil. Eventually the herd would become immune to Texas fever.108

  Hornaday saw to it that each buffalo had a padded compartment in Arms Palace cars from the Bronx-to-Ft. Sill, the kind used for the most valuable show horses. No crowded or foul, manure-filled quarters were tolerated; after all, these were Mr. Roosevelt’s buffalo. While the train was switching lines in Manhattan, Sanborn wrote excitedly about how revolutionary Roosevelt and Hornaday’s plan was. “It was a bit awe inspiring,” he wrote from Grand Central Terminal, “to realize that in the midst of this vast station with its multitudes of people, its coughing, booming trains, in the center of the greatest city in the new world, were fifteen helpless animals, whose ancestors had been all but exterminated by the very civilization which was now handing back to prairies…a tiny remnant born and raised 2,000 miles from their native land. Surely
the course of Empire westward takes its way.”109

  Hornaday, who always wrote copiously, left notes about the fifteen bison he selected for Roosevelt’s bold reintroduction plan. Because he had hand-fed the herd, these bison had become like pets to him. They had been pampered. And four were named in honor of the great Indian chiefs Lone Wolf, Geronimo, Blackdog, and Quanah.110

  Seven days after leaving the New York Zoological Society the fifteen bison arrived on rolling boxcars in the hamlet of Cache, Oklahoma. Pacing about and waiting anxiously in full war feathers for the buffalo that October 18 was Quanah. The autumn leaves were beginning to drop from the elm trees. The lakes and other waters were filled with migratory birds. Just seeing the buffalo unloaded at the station choked Quanah up. For a moment he stood in silence. Then he quietly helped load the buffalo onto wagons for their thirteen-mile journey to the fresh green of the Wichita Mountains.111 When they were unloaded, a great dust cloud arose in the air. And what a homecoming it was to the Plains Indians! Native Americans boulder-hopped, booted it, rim-walked, and hit the trail, to watch these fifteen Bronx-raised buffalo run. To the Plains Indians, they were symbols of how their ancestors had once lived—free and in harmony with nature. From the Chickasaw Nation and the Cherokee Strip, from the Kansas border to Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, crowds arrived by the tens of thousands to witness the return of the “Great Spirit’s cattle” to the windblown Wichita preserve. Few thought about huge meat piles or dressing the hides. Watching the animals graze in the open air of Winter Valley was their catharsis. It seemed that every Indian lodge within a four-state region was represented—a tribute to the power of word of mouth. Small coals were lit and pipes were smoked. Grass was taken out of saddle packs for feed, but Frank Rush said no—these were buffalo, not pets.

  Guardedly, Quanah poked at the buffalo’s rib cages like an agricultural inspector at a state fair, examining the Bronx Zoo herd carefully to make sure the “Great White Chief” wasn’t playing a trick. Quanah was a shrewd dealer, but he had been hoodwinked before by crooked buffalo hunters, cavalrymen, railroad barons, miners, cattle kings, farmers, and politicians. All of them were culpable in the destruction of the native buffalo. But not Roosevelt—not this time. Yes, these bison had black tongues and cloven hooves. Yes, they had unbranched horns. Knowing that buffalo have four stomachs, Quanah pointed the herd toward the rich grasses of the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve as if saying, “Eat away!” The extinction of the bison was starting to be reversed. Quanah now understood that no war club was strong enough to defeat a man of Roosevelt’s honest character. The “buffalo president” hadn’t broken his word.

  Few presidential gestures meant more to Native Americans than these seven bulls and eight cows. A great thing had happened. This was a true token of peace, generosity, wisdom, and goodwill. It coincided with the departure of the last cavalry regiment from Fort Sill in 1907. At least for this afternoon the Plains Indians, thanks to Roosevelt, felt that their ancestors’ spirit had rumbled out of Mount Scott. The higher peak in the preserve—the only one higher than Mount Scott—was Mount Pinchot (2,464 feet), named in honor of the chief forester of the USDA’s Wichita Game Preserve. And it wasn’t just those lucky enough to be at the Wichitas who celebrated the buffalo’s reintroduction. Indians celebrated throughout the Great Plains. Old-timers recalled the days of high-protein bison meat at every meal. Then, every part of the buffalo had been used: the bladder (for food pouches), teeth (ornaments), blood (paints), dung (fuel), tendons (arrow strings), scrotum (containers), tail (switches), brains (hide preparation), and so on.112 There had been many accomplishments during Quanah’s career: fathering twenty-one children; fighting against the onslaught of white civilization; conducting shuttle diplomacy between the Wichitas and Washington, D.C. None, however, equaled the success of helping to bring the buffalo back to the Great Plains.113 “The buffalo have plenty of good green grass and pure running water,” Rush reported to Hornaday. “They did not have a tick on them last summer.”114

  And Hornaday also sought other prairielands for buffalo to return to. In 1906, when Fort Niobrara Military Reservation in Nebraska closed (the U.S. Army was no longer worried about the Indian menace), the ABS stepped into the void. Following Roosevelt’s instructions, a private buffalo herd was eventually rounded up and moved to this new prairie range.115 Meanwhile, Roosevelt issued a second proclamation in 1906, adding 3,680 acres to the Wichita refuge (the Oklahoma City Club hoped that the reserve would therefore soon be elevated to national park status). By 1908, ABS and the Boone and Crockett Club—backed by the Biological Survey—were able to get Congress to appropriate funds for the creation of the National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.116 (This was, in part, America’s answer to Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, Alberta which had opened in 1907).117 Congress eventually authorized 13,000 acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation for a remnant buffalo herd. The National Bison Range constituted the very first federal appropriation to purchase acreage exclusively for wildlife protection. It eventually grew to be 18,763 acres, protecting not just bison but prong-horns, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep.118

  By 1911, Hornaday was able to declare that bison were no longer an endangered species. This was a tribute to the Roosevelt administration’s proactive resolve. Not only had the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve idea worked; it led to the creation of other bison refuges. By 1912 ABS had been instrumental in the creation of the Wind Cave National Game Reserve, with fourteen buffalo donated by the New York Zoological Society. As Roosevelt envisioned it, Wind Cave National Park, which he had established in 1902, needed a secondary attraction besides underground caves. With the naturalist J. Alden Loring of ABS doing the advance work, buffalo were imported to Wind Cave; visitors to the site are guaranteed to see herds.119 Run by the Biological Survey, the new Wind Cave National Game Preserve consisted of 4,000 acres from Wind Cave National Park, six acres from Harney National Forest, and eighty acres from private ranch lands.

  Before long the Sioux (Pine Ridge) and Crow also established herds—following Hornaday and Roosevelt’s protocol—in South Dakota and Montana. “The American Bison Society is a splendid organization,” Hornaday said when he retired as president in 1911. “It will go from strength to strength, until the time comes that it is no longer necessary to consider movements for saving of the bison. Then I predict your energies will be directed to saving other species of wild life that at present may be as much threatened with extinction as the bison was three or four years ago.”120 He started crusading to save the whooping crane, the trumpeter swan, the great sage grouse, and the prairie sharp-tailed grouse from extinction.121

  Because the buffalo flourished in the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve, Fort Niobrara, and Wind Cave, Roosevelt—after his presidency—began promoting the idea that other big game species be reintroduced throughout the West. The initial results were mixed. In 1911 eleven pronghorns were shipped to the national forest from Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the high-quality treatment that the buffalo had been given in transport, and two pronghorns died in their railroad car. The others could not survive the harsh Wichita Mountains winter. Wildlife introduction, then, had its limits. However, Roosevelt also wanted to have Rocky Mountain elk repopulate the Wichita outcrops. A herd from the Teton National Forest was shipped in from Wyoming by the Biological Survey in 1911. A bull was also imported from the Wichita (Kansas) Zoo. The elk thrived, a second herd was acquired from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a new era of wildlife management had begun.

  The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge today is the premier American place to better understand the science of species reintroduction. An odd assortment of wildlife was brought into the Wichitas to have a second chance. A Missouri trapper donated wild turkeys to the refuge, but only one survived for more than a year. The Biological Survey experimented with reintroducing wild turkeys and Rio Grande Bronze hens—they interbred and now thrive on the reserve. Pick your decade, and some animal sp
ecies was reintroduced (or introduced for the first time) in the Wichitas. Longhorn cattle that had escaped from corrals in Texas were rounded up and shipped to Frank Rush’s wildlife park by William C. Barnes and John H. Hatton, two cowboys who didn’t want buffalo to be the only symbol of the lost frontier. Rush shared their commitment to longhorns. He personally raised over 300 longhorns year-round on the Wichita Preserve, all safe from slaughter. The 1920s saw bighorn sheep imported from Alberta, but the sheep couldn’t survive the still heat of summer.122

  In 1936 Congress changed the name of the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve. It would now be called the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge and placed under the Bureau of Biological Survey. In 1939 all federal refuges moved back under the Department of Interior. From 1940 to today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has controlled the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge.

  By 2009 the Wichitas had so many buffalo that every October U.S. Fish and Wildlife began auctioning off surplus animals, many recently born calves. Tourists came to the Wichitas to see the buffalo herds grazing in a wild environment. But even though these bison appeared tame, they weren’t. Their behavior remained unpredictable and was likely to change at any time.123 As with the bears in Yellowstone, people now visited Oklahoma just to see a herd in the wild. The Wichitas, in this regard, were never disappointing. All over Oklahoma, in fact, in curio shops and general stores, buffalo souvenirs were sold. Roosevelt was right in thinking that Oklahomans needed buffalo in their lives. Just look at all the places named after them in the Sooner State: there is a Buffalo Creek as well as a Buffalo Springs, which isn’t far from the hamlet of Buffalo in Garfield County. In Harper County kids fish in another Buffalo Creek. What Lincoln’s legacy had become to the Illinois tourist trade, the buffalo has been to Oklahoma.124