The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (100 page)

“[Abernathy] held the reins of the horse with one hand and thrust the other, with a rapidity and precision even greater than the rapidity of the wolf’s snap, into the wolf’s mouth, jamming his hand down crosswise between the jaws, seizing the lower jaw and bending it down so that the wolf could not bite him,” Roosevelt later recounted, rather breathlessly. “He had a stout glove on his hand, but this would have been of no avail whatever had he not seized the animal just as he did; that is, behind the canines, while his hand pressed the lips against the teeth; with his knees he kept the wolf from using its forepaws to break the hold, until it gave up struggling. When he thus leaped on and captured this coyote it was entirely free, the dog having let go of it; and he was obliged to keep hold of the reins of his horse with one hand. I was not twenty yards distant at the time, and as I leaped off the horse he was sitting placidly on the live wolf, his hand between its jaws, the greyhound standing beside him, and his horse standing by as placid as he was…. It was as remarkable a feat of the kind as I have ever seen.”
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Day after day Abernathy caught ’em alive and Roosevelt glowed with approval. Abernathy always paid dividends as promised. Roosevelt, in fact, came to be strangely in awe of him. In his novel
The Secret Agent
, Joseph Conrad wrote that “shrinking delicacy” exists “side by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature.” That was the case here; Roosevelt the New York bird-watcher had overnight turned into the admirer of an Oklahoman wolf catcher. The conflict between Roosevelt as a preservationist versus Roosevelt as a conservationist and hunter had taken a bizarre turn. John Muir would have been appalled at the grotesque “catch ’em alive” spectacle.

“The fact that I had won the friendship of the president in such a short time,” Abernathy later recalled, “naturally raised great popular inter
est.”
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Unfortunately, Burnett and Waggoner grew more and more envious of Abernathy. They kept muttering half-comical innuendoes at his expense. Ignoring these gibes, the president kept showering Abernathy with attention. Although the press was not present for the wolf-coursing, Lambert was on hand to photograph the catches. When other members of the hunt tried to pose with the president for a photo, Roosevelt waved them off. “I want this picture with just Abernathy and myself in it,” Roosevelt said. The loyal Lambert, sensing the value of the publicity, said to Roosevelt excitedly, “You can say that this picture was snapped about a minute from the time Abernathy started the chase and made the catch.”
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The plains and its sentinels had once again captured Roosevelt’s imagination. The more harrowing the encounter, the happier the president was. A six-foot rattlesnake had lunged at Roosevelt four times before he killed it with his eighteen-inch quirt.
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Even the god-awful sound of a gray wolf being tackled by Abernathy seemingly calmed his nerves. On day three of the hunt, Quanah brought his three wives along for the fun, accompanied by his son and baby daughter. Self-sufficient and uncomplaining, Quanah and his family had their own wagon. With temperatures in the low seventies and bright sunshine turning the prairie grasses different hues of green and blue, Roosevelt was in his element. For lunch he enjoyed eating beef strips by hand, all reeking from wood smoke. He kept blurting out
bully
. In this land where sound preceded sight, Roosevelt was happy that there wasn’t a lamppost for miles. “The air was wonderfully clear, and any object on the sky-line, no matter how small, stood out with startling distinctness,” he wrote. “There were few flowers on these dry plains; in sharp contrast to the flower prairies of southern Texas, which we had left the week before, where many acres for a stretch would be covered by masses of red or white or blue or yellow blossoms—the most striking of all, perhaps, being the fields of the handsome buffalo clover.”
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Fascinated by wolves, Roosevelt here ponders one caught by Jack Abernathy.
T.R. with a roped wolf. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

Just in case the taxpayers thought President Roosevelt was on a naturalist adventure at their expense—which he was—he once again invoked the Biological Survey. Roosevelt sent a minutely detailed scientific report to Dr. C. Hart Merriam about the weight and coloration of more than a dozen coyotes. With a uniform collecting technique that would have made Spencer Fullerton Baird proud, Roosevelt recorded facts about Oklahoma’s coyotes that are still used for reference. Doing some on-the-spot calculations, Roosevelt wrote to Merriam that the average weight of a coyote in the Wichita Mountains region was thirty pounds. Skulls, skins, and paws were likewise shipped from Fort Sill to Washington, D.C., for the Biological Survey to properly analyze. “All but one are the plains coyote,
Canis nebracensis
,” Merriam informed Roosevelt. “They are not perfectly typical, but are near enough for all practical purposes. The exception is a yearling pup of a much larger species. Whether this is
frustor
I dare not say in the present state of knowledge of the group.”
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What prevented Roosevelt from considering the whole experience perfect, however, was the absence of buffalo. They were gone—and sadly, even the white-tailed deer were vanishing. A wilderness not abounding in game was a contradiction in terms. All Roosevelt could do was ride the buffalo trails, the great highways of Oklahoma, which were the easiest route to water, and imagine the Old Days. Francis Parkman had caught the tail end of them in the summer of 1846 with the Oglala band of Sioux. If you wanted to see a wild buffalo in North America in 1905, Yellowstone and the northern woods of Alberta were your only bets.
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For now, Roosevelt studied the ancient buffalo herds’ well-worn paths. He wore cowboy leggings and felt superior for having left his silk shirt behind in a closet in the East Wing.

Once again Roosevelt was playing the “great natural man.” While talking with Quanah one evening at Star House, Roosevelt mentioned Baynes and Hornaday’s idea of a bison refuge. “Grandfather wanted to entertain Roosevelt just so-so,” Quanah’s granddaughter Anona Birdsong Dean recalled of the evening. “He had a table that sat thirty people. Each
woman had a job. Mother went to see if the table was set properly. She found goblets filled with wine setting next to each plate. Grandfather, who never drank, had gotten wine somewhere and told one of the women to fill big glasses with the wine. Mother said, ‘Why did you do that?’ Grandfather explained that when he went to Washington, Roosevelt served wine in small glasses and he wanted to be more generous than Roosevelt.”
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But now Roosevelt was truly offering buffalo! Quanah realized that Roosevelt was a generous man at heart, and the very notion of the Wichita Forest Reserve repopulated with buffalo brought tears to his eyes. Although Quanah spoke several dialects and was fluent in English and Spanish, he was nevertheless speechless.
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Could his peyote vision be becoming true? Could a boyhood dream he had on the lonely Llano Estacado now be reality? Would Oklahoma—or at least a portion of its most scenic terrain on the western side of the Cross-Timbers in the Indian Territories—become a bison refuge?

A few days after that historic dinner, Quanah hung an autographed photo of Roosevelt on his dining room wall. To him, Roosevelt truly was the “Great White Chief.” More than any other white man, Roosevelt had his heart in the right place, and Quanah knew that few Americans had ever loved the Wichitas–Big Pasture as Roosevelt did. He and Roosevelt smiled when rattling off the colorful names of the Twin Territory’s towns as if they were superior to anyplace Queen Victoria had ever seen: Arapaho, Bowlegs, Etowah, Hydro, Oologah, Talihina. Side by side on horseback, snacking on pecans, the two warriors spoke of black-tailed prairie dogs, armadillos, bald eagles, and the rare black-capped vireo.

Besides bird-watching and wolf hunting Quanah spent time teaching Roosevelt how to properly track horse thieves. Roosevelt, in turn, gave him a thick porcelain cup. Both men enjoyed being conspicuously attired and talking nonstop. In Washington, D.C., the press corps called Roosevelt the “cowboy president.” Quanah knew better: Roosevelt was the “buffalo president.” As if a spell had been cast over him, Quanah told the Comanche that Roosevelt loved the beauty of southwestern Oklahoma like someone born and raised along the Red River. Roosevelt, in turn, wished that the chief had been a Rough Rider. It had been rumored that William “Buffalo Bill” Cody had offered Quanah $5,000 to perform in Europe with the legendary Wild West Show. Quanah said no. “I’m afraid I would be put in a little pen,” Parker informed Roosevelt. “And I no monkey.”
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In 1901, when President McKinley created the Wichita Mountains as
a forest reserve, nobody imagined that it would become the focus of a federal buffalo reintroduction program. But Roosevelt was always thinking and listening. Some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had come from the Wichitas area and had been full of stories about the landscape’s lyrical, magnetic charm. Now, in 1905, as Roosevelt rode amid the strange rock formations with Quanah, he learned why the area was considered sacred by the Comanche, Kiowa, and other tribes. For example, there was a magnificent rock formation 2,464 feet high, designated by the U.S. Army as Mount Scott. Quanah told Roosevelt that a Kiowa medicine woman had prophesied that all the Great Plains buffalo, after being chased by murderous American hunters, had disappeared down Mount Scott’s summit in single file. They descended farther and farther, into the earth’s core. Inside this safe haven, everything sparkled for the buffalo; the world was “green and fresh” and rivers “ran clear, not red.”
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Someday, the Kiowa medicine woman prophesied, the buffalo would return to the plains from the top of Mount Scott, erupting like a volcano. A gregarious herd would trot out happily, resurrected and with a fierce unity of purpose, for a new day on the Great Plains.
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Roosevelt, of course, didn’t subscribe to this prophecy, but he nevertheless enjoyed hearing the legend. And he had to admit that the elegant pyramidal sentinel that stood watch at the eastern gate—like an island in the sea—was the energy source of the entire Wichita preserve.
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For 70 million years, ever since mammals eclipsed reptiles as the dominant vertebrates in Oklahoma, Mount Scott was the home of buffalo or their ancestors. Roosevelt understood the importance of their return. “The extermination of the buffalo,” he had lamented, “has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”
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Now, at Mount Scott, they were going to make a stand with the help of buffalo men. Roosevelt spoke to the Wichita Forest Reserve rangers—who operated out of a little white clapboard hut with cedar posts—about the imminent prospect that the park would become America’s first National Game Preserve for buffalo
and
deer. A wooden archway was soon built in an attempt to keep poachers out; it gave the reserve a legal feel.

Not since his youth had Quanah Parker been so excited about anything as he was about Roosevelt’s repopulation scheme. Before long Roosevelt received public support for the idea from the Boone and Crockett Club and the League of American Sportsmen (of which Hornaday was vice president). Hornaday also worked hard to find exactly the right spot in Winter Valley, with grasses and with canyons to provide shelter from the winter weather. Daily, a typical bison herd foraged on vegetation over
a two-mile radius, so the acreage of the reserve had to be fairly large. If everything worked according to plan fifteen buffalo—a nucleus herd of breeding cows and young bulls—would be shipped by train to the Wichita reserve in 1907. Hornaday, biologically cautious, selected the buffalo from numerous bloodlines to avoid inbreeding. There was only one chance to get it right.
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V

Following the Oklahoma hunt Roosevelt, as a courtesy, asked to meet Mrs. Abernathy and the five children. Approving of their pioneer stock he enjoyed them immensely. The six days at Big Pasture had been
bully
, a brief return to the heroic days before the Indian Wars. Roosevelt extended an open invitation to the entire Abernathy family to visit him in the White House. Clearly, Roosevelt honored Abernathy even though other Texans might consider him a court jester. “The petty rivalry of which I had been the object during the course of the wolf hunt in the Big Pasture was but a small incident in comparison with the experience that was awaiting me when I was now unexpectedly drawn into public life,” Abernathy wrote, “as a result of my new friendship with President Roosevelt.”
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Now that the hunt was over the
Washington Post
cast it in glowing terms. Seldom, if ever, had the
Post
been so enthusiastic about a president. Even Roosevelt’s secretary, Loeb, might have blushed at reading the copy. “Mr. Roosevelt acquired in the Indian country a complexion that would do credit to an Apache warrior,” one article read. “He is now as brown as a berry and in fine spirits, and the warming up of the past few days has put him in a good trim for the more exciting and hazardous sport which he will experience in Colorado, where for the next four or five weeks he will make life miserable for members of the cat and bear family that happen to come his way.”
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