The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (102 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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 description 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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