According to Birdseye, the Biological Survey originally hired him as an “assistant naturalist.” He said that he was part of a “scientific party, which was studying birds and mammals in New Mexico and Arizona.” The U.S. Biological Survey sent naturalists throughout the territories by horseback to estimate animal populations and study their habits—especially what the large predators preyed on. They largely discredited the ranchers’ claim that the wild predators were destroying livestock. While these animals did occasionally kill livestock, these domestic creatures were not their primary or preferred prey. In the case of coyotes, surveyors found that they mostly ate mice. But this did not stop the extermination program. In fact, one of the main missions of the 1973 Endangered Species Act was for the Department of the Interior to bring back all the animal populations it had destroyed at the beginning of the century with the U.S. Biological Survey.
Accustomed as he was to turning a profit from wildlife, Birdseye wondered what value there must be to the considerable numbers of killed coyotes. He asked at the Indian trading posts and was told that they were paying twenty-five cents apiece for the pelts from coyotes and bobcats. Surely, he reasoned, any fur must be worth more than that.
At the end of the summer he returned to New York and found a job with a New York insurance company and then with the city Department of Sanitation as a “snow checker”—the man who maintains records on the amount of snow removed from city streets after a blizzard.
But one of the first things he did upon his return to New York was to talk to furriers. He discovered that they would pay $1.25 each for bobcat and coyote pelts. He wrote to the traders to whom he had spoken in the Southwest and offered them fifty cents for pelts, allowing them to turn a 100 percent profit, and he then sold them in New York for $1.25. Even with shipping costs he earned $600 on his fur trading that winter. He returned to the Southwest for the U.S. Biological Survey in the summer of 1909.
In the Southwest he acquired some food habits that remained with him all his life. He developed a taste for the exotic. When Birdseye found something in nature, he always wondered what it would taste like and what would be the best way to cook it. This probably began with his natural curiosity, but he discovered that he enjoyed eating unlikely foods. He liked his rattlesnake cut in slices, dusted with flour, and then fried in salt pork. While they were camped on one of the still-undeveloped rims of the Grand Canyon, the only provision the naturalists had for dinner was pork belly, which they discovered had gone rancid. Not to worry, Bob Birdseye would find dinner. He gathered field mice, chipmunks, gophers, and even a few pack rats. He carefully skinned and gutted the little bodies and wrapped them all in cheesecloth. Then he simmered it in a pot of boiling water. He praised the resulting stew, though there is no record of anyone else sharing his enthusiasm.
His colleagues rarely partook of the Birdseye specialties, preferring the canned food—mostly beans, corn, and tomatoes—that they took with them as they traveled the countryside by packhorse. Birdseye was struck by the extent to which westerners lived on canned food. Traveling by horse, he would see something sparkling in the sun on the horizon and realize they were approaching a ranch or a town, which was consistently marked by the piles of discarded cans. Though he always regarded canning as an inferior way of preserving food because it had to be heated and was no longer in its fresh state, and while he played a major role in the decline of canned food in the American diet, he personally had a great fondness for it. “He just loved canned food,” said Gypsy, the wife of his eldest son, Kellogg. It was the food of his youthful adventures and filled him with nostalgia.
In the winter of 1909–10, Birdseye strengthened his ties to the U.S. Department of Agriculture with a bureaucratic job in the capital. At the time the secretary of agriculture, James Wilson, a McKinley appointee, had held the post for thirteen years. William Howard Taft, Wilson’s third president, had retained him, and he stayed until the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1913. He remains the longest-serving cabinet officer in American history. Under him the Department of Agriculture was greatly expanding its gathering of data on wildlife, farming, horticulture, and forest protection, and there were many opportunities for an ambitious and adventurous young man such as Clarence Birdseye. But although Birdseye was looking for opportunities, he appeared to be more interested in those that involved adventure rather than career building.
In 1910, Washington, D.C., was a genteel southern town, with horse-drawn carriages and hitching posts still common. But construction was booming, and it might have become a high-rise megalopolis like Manhattan, except that year a law was passed restricting building heights to the width of the adjacent street plus twenty feet.
It is not surprising that a smart and adventurous young man from a distinguished New York family would meet the geographer Samuel S. Gannett. Like C. Hart Merriam, the head of the U.S. Biological Survey, Gannett was one of the thirty-three founding members of the National Geographic Society.
The society had been formed in 1888, led by Gardiner Hubbard, a Boston lawyer who had financed Alexander Graham Bell’s development of the telephone and had been the first president of the Bell Telephone Company. When the society was founded, Hubbard had declared, “When we embark on the great ocean of discovery, the horizon of the unknown advances with us wherever we go. The more we know, the greater we find our ignorance. Because we know so little, we have formed this Society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.”
This was Birdseye’s kind of language. By 1910 the society’s magazine had distinguished itself for exploration, investigating new ideas, and photography—all passions of the young Birdseye. Under its editor, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, a former Amherst history professor, the magazine avoided all political controversy. This too was Birdseye’s style. The rest of the Birdseyes were not apolitical. His daughter Ruth would be active in the League of Women Voters, for instance. His own children and their spouses never knew if Birdseye was a Democrat or a Republican, even though they were mostly loyal Democrats. On the other hand, his father had been an outspoken Republican. But there is no record of Birdseye ever uttering a political statement. He was not a rebel. He never denounced religion, war, or corporations, but his participation in such institutions was always slightly removed. At heart he was something of an outsider, the odd kid they called Bugs, a likable maverick who knew how to get along with people. And so he had something in common with the National Geographic Society, adventurers who tried to remain apolitical at the center of the Washington establishment.
The National Geographic Magazine at the time Birdseye came to Washington was growing in circulation because photography was becoming increasingly popular, and it was known for its excellence in a certain type of documentary and anthropological photography. In 1907 it had created a sensation with Edward Curtis’s portraits of American Indians. Birdseye, like many of his generation, was enthralled by the possibilities of photography. In fact, he harbored dreams of becoming a photographer, going to far-off exotic places, and recording the landscape and customs.
Samuel Gannett was the younger brother of another of the original thirty-three National Geographic Society founders, Henry Gannett, chief geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey, an organization whose topographical maps of the American West in the late nineteenth century set a new standard for mapmaking. Gannett used longitude and elevation from sea level for charting these maps, which made them not only handsome maps but also more accurate than anything preceding them. The Gannetts, like the Birdseyes, were of old New England stock. In fact, the first Gannett arrived in 1638, one year after the first Birdseye. Henry and Samuel were raised in the boatbuilding port of Bath, Maine. As a topographer, Henry Gannett traveled in some of the roughest terrain in the American West and was one of the first to ascend to the top of Mount Whitney in California. In 1906, shortly before Birdseye went west, the highest peak in Wyoming, Gannett Peak, in the northern Wind River Range on the Continental Divide, was named for Henry Gannett, o
ne of the first to ever climb it. Today it is still considered the most difficult peak to climb in the continental United States.
Henry’s younger brother Samuel was also a geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey, and he accomplished numerous feats of exploration. The West still had uncharted territory, and as a surveyor Samuel Gannett defined the borders of several new western states.
Among the wildernesses opening up to exploration were the frozen lands of the North. When Birdseye arrived in Washington in 1909, Admiral Robert E. Peary had announced that he had been the first man to reach the North Pole. There was considerable controversy because a physician who had served on earlier Peary missions, Dr. Frederick Cook, claimed to have reached the North Pole on his own expedition the year before. It seems certain that Birdseye was following the exploration and the controversy because it fell on Henry Gannett to verify the claim and of course it was all covered in the National Geographic Magazine. Peary’s expedition had shot color photographs with a process invented in 1907; the magazine published the photos.
Peary was already a famous arctic explorer who had led expeditions in Greenland and other far northern territories and was known for learning Inuit ways of dress and survival. He traveled by dogsled and was famously photographed wearing native-style arctic furs. Another remarkable thing he was known for was that his wife sometimes accompanied him on these arduous journeys.
All of this must have seemed exciting to young Birdseye, and much of the Peary story was to later be mirrored in Birdseye’s own adventures. But what particularly interested him at the time was Samuel Gannett’s daughter, Eleanor. Little is known about their courtship. Politics was not the only thing Birdseye didn’t like to discuss. He did not talk about girls or his love life, nor did Eleanor talk much about such things. She was the shy one of the couple.
When they met, she was finishing her B.A. degree at George Washington University, an unusually well-educated woman for her generation. They dated for five years, during most of which they didn’t see each other, because he was constantly off on his adventures. Then they married, and for forty-one years had the most unshakably devoted relationship. Could Eleanor, coming from the world of explorers and inventors, see what he would become?
He didn’t talk about being an inventor; in fact, even after he became one, that was seldom a word he used to describe himself. At least she could have seen that he had an insatiable curiosity and a great sense of adventure. He always wanted to understand how things worked and what would make them work better, and he was always looking for how to turn things others thought were waste into a profit. She thought he was brilliant, an impression that grew over the years. Life with him would probably be like how it was with her father and her uncle. And Birdseye could see that despite her quiet ways, Eleanor did not come from the kind of conventional home that he did, and she was not looking for the kind of Birdseye who would become a prominent lawyer or a Wall Street businessman. She was a woman who would accept and understand her husband’s taking off on expeditions.
This was apparent because she was not put off by his habit, even when they were first dating, of leaving for distant destinations, of running off on adventures. By the spring of 1910, the Department of Agriculture had something interesting for him to do.
Nothing shows more clearly the distance between the real Clarence Birdseye and the image he liked to present to the public than his experiences in Montana in the spring and summer of 1910. According to Birdseye, he found this great job as a hunter for a medical project on Rocky Mountain spotted fever. To collect ticks, he was allowed unrestricted hunting of wildlife—permitted to shoot far over the normal limits. His was always a tale of adventure with a few good yarns thrown in. What he almost never talked about was that the campaign against spotted fever was extremely important and extremely dangerous; that he took a job few would have been willing to do; and that he played an important role in research that is a significant chapter in medical history, has saved many lives, and advanced understanding of a whole family of deadly diseases.
Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rickettsia rickettsii, is a life-threatening disease. Much is still unknown about how it spreads and how it acts on the human body. But in 1910 nothing at all was understood about it. It was a uniquely American disease, occurring only in the Western Hemisphere. Rocky Mountain spotted fever was its local name. In other places it had other labels, such as São Paulo fever, New World spotted fever, and American spotted fever. But it was first identified in the Rocky Mountains and so labeled. It has also been found in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama. There are tremendous differences in the mortality rate from the disease in different areas, and the reason for this remains a mystery. In one area it may kill 5 percent of victims and in another 70 percent. Typically, an outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever will kill one in five victims, a high enough mortality rate to terrify a stricken population.
A victim can have the disease for as long as two weeks without exhibiting any symptoms. Then there is a sickish feeling for a few days resembling the signs of an oncoming cold or flu. Then the patient often experiences an extremely severe headache and painful joints. Light begins to hurt the eyes, and the neck becomes stiff, accompanied by dangerously high fever. At this point doctors sometimes suspect meningitis. The patient cannot sleep and at times becomes delirious. After several days of these symptoms, slightly raised red spots appear on the skin, easily confused with measles. We now know that the organisms known as rickettsias invade the cells lining the capillaries, causing them to swell and break, and blood seeps through the capillary walls. These tiny welts show up on the entire body, including the palms of hands and soles of feet. Without any treatment whatsoever, many people will recover in a matter of weeks. But a significant number, especially over the age of forty, will die.
There was probably a nineteenth-century history of the disease. But its pathology was not understood. There are records of an outbreak of something called black measles during the Civil War, and there are accounts of diseases with similar names among westward-moving nineteenth-century pioneers. But until the U.S. government began researching the illness in the beautiful and wild Bitterroot valley of western Montana in 1910, there had been no formal scientific study of the disease. At that time scientists had only recently identified Rocky Mountain spotted fever as a distinct illness. It had often been confused with European rash-producing diseases such as typhus, the plague of the Napoleonic Wars.
Birdseye had been born into not only a new age of invention and technology but also a new age of medicine. It began with Louis Pasteur, the French chemist who in the 1850s demonstrated that fermentation was caused by the growth of microorganisms, living things too small to be seen by the naked eye. This led to the process of protecting milk from spoilage that bears his name, though his U.S. patent was for applying the technique to beers and ales. But it also led to something much bigger. Pasteur proposed that microorganisms caused diseases. As with all great discoveries he did not arrive at it in a vacuum. In 1546, the Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro claimed that seedlike creatures caused epidemic diseases. In 1835, another Italian, Agostino Bassi, demonstrated that a powdery substance that, in fact, was thousands of living organisms was killing silkworms. In 1854, John Snow demonstrated that an outbreak of cholera in the Soho section of London was being caused by something in the drinking water. A new field was emerging, first developed by the German doctor Rudolf Virchow in the mid-nineteenth century and known as cellular pathology—the study of the role of microscopic cells in the development of diseases.
But Pasteur was a prominent figure and explained his pathogenic theory of medicine well, and it launched an international debate about “Pasteur’s germ theory.” American doctors did not think much of the germ theory. Weren’t the French always having theories? But in 1883, three years before Birdseye was born, the entire approach to medical science began to change because a German scientist, Robert Koch, demonstrated that a microscopic cre
ature, a microorganism that he named Vibrio cholerae, caused cholera. The germ theory was right. The following year this organism was found in the harbor water in Marseilles during a cholera epidemic. Armed with this new knowledge, medical researchers began traveling the globe conquering epidemics. Cholera was often eradicated, including in New York City, by purifying the drinking water. Viruses were identified in outbreaks of numerous diseases, including bubonic plague, typhoid, leprosy, and tuberculosis. During the 1898 Spanish-American War, Walter Reed, a U.S. Army physician, went to Cuba and found that a microorganism carried by a specific species of mosquito caused yellow fever, which was decimating American troops. Yellow fever became manageable through mosquito control, making the Panama Canal project viable.
These were romantic figures, these scientists and doctors who traveled to remote places and conquered dread diseases. It was dangerous work, and some died, including a close coworker of Reed’s in Cuba. In 1910 the U.S. government decided to send such medical crusaders to the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, and among them was Clarence Birdseye.
The Bitterroot valley is a hundred-mile stretch of wooded flatland, once a lake bed, between the Bitterroot Mountains and the Sapphire range. The Bitterroot River runs through it, an agreeable spot sheltered by the mountain ranges. The Salish, or Flathead, Indians, who gave the place its name from the bitter roots they ate from a pink wildflower, were a healthy people. The Lewis and Clark expedition, which made a point of reporting on local medical conditions, had no diseases to report from its 1805 visit to the Bitterroot. The whites started settling there in the mid-nineteenth century with no particular health problems. The first documented case of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the Bitterroot valley was in 1873. The patient was one of the few white men living there, and he died of the disease. In the late nineteenth century the widespread occurrence of this strange disease coincided with the spectacular expansion of the lumber industry. Was the disease related to the chopping down of trees? The west bank of the river, where the lumbering was done, was also where the disease was most prevalent.
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man Page 4