The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (116 page)

Roosevelt spent October 20 at the home of a Delta planter. All in all, despite the deprivations, it had been a fine week of hunting and bird-watching. Fully rested, with a bearskin as a memento for a museum, he headed east to Vicksburg, once called the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Largely owing to the president’s lobbying, the Vicksburg battlefield was being preserved as a 1,800-acre national military park. There was a triumphant procession in the town for the first time since the Civil
War, and Roosevelt was given a grand welcome. A new monument was being erected, and the townspeople were excited. Everybody, it seemed, asked Roosevelt about the Louisiana bear hunt—such light conversation helped ease the tension between Democrats and a Republican president. Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, still furious over Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington, tried to spoil the special event, which was intended to honor the gallantry of both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. But although Vardaman injected some invective into the gala, Roosevelt was equal to the situation. Because he was in Vicksburg officially, to dedicate a war memorial to Union and Confederate soldiers, he made a concession for the sake of national unity by praising Jefferson Davis for the first and only time in his life. Surrounded by proud soldiers, he basked in every expression of American pride. Vicksburg—the site of a famous Union siege during the Civil War.

Vicksburg—where from 1899 to 1902 the Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River to flow into the old riverbed so that today the Yazoo, not the Mississippi, flows past the town. Vicksburg—the very word had been part of his life since his boyhood. Vicksburg—to Roosevelt it was a sacred site of both the Union’s glory and America’s eventual healing.

Following an obligatory speech in Leland, Mississippi, Roosevelt made his way back to Memphis and then headed by train to Washington, D.C. The combination of the Mississippi River steamboat trip followed by stalking bears in the Louisiana canebrakes had made him long for the vi
tality of his youth. How simple the outdoors life, rich with bird life, was: the search for wood, meat in the pot, the sound of painted finches singing in the dawn. Everything required to feel alive with God was available by walking through a meadow, the woods, or a bayou with an eye out for warblers and vireos. An idea started to percolate in Roosevelt. Perhaps he would lead specimen collecting expeditions to the three A’s: the Arctic, Africa, and the Amazon. There were still wild places left where an explorer could make his mark.

President Roosevelt in the Louisiana canebrakes with his hunting partners.
T.R. at the Louisiana canebrakes hunt. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

As a token of appreciation to Harley and Clive Metcalfe and Holt Collier, Roosevelt had three 45–70-caliber model 1886 Winchester rifles shipped to Mississippi as “treasured keepsakes.” On each weapon the hunter’s full name was engraved, with “1907” underneath.
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V

Reports of Roosevelt’s bear hunt sickened Mark Twain. He saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite: a purported conservationist but also an obsessive hunter. To Twain, the spectacle of the president, who was getting rounder by the day, trudging through swamplands in a downpour to kill one of the last black bears in East Carroll Parish was pathetic. Also, why was a busy president disappearing for days to beat the bushes for bears? Twain personally liked Roosevelt, who had once helped him with a tricky customs issue in Europe. He even enjoyed Roosevelt’s conversation from time to time. But the hunt in Louisiana was the tipping point. As America’s foremost humorist, Twain attacked Roosevelt by writing burlesque versions of the hunt. The gist of the ridicule was that Roosevelt had a rogue hormone, which caused him to light out after animals with deadly intent. A bear or cougar would be better off taking an anesthetic than having to encounter an inglorious death at the hands of a maniac shouting
bully
before pulling the trigger. Yet Twain was dealing with only one side of Roosevelt’s multidimensional self. As many others have noted, T.R. had thousands of sides, including bird-watching and forest preservation. But Twain, of course, wasn’t looking for balance.

And Twain, as he was apt to do, hit his mark. He had a legitimate ax to grind in this regard. A longtime animal rights advocate who had written
A Horse’s Tale
and
A Dog’s Tale
and condemned bullfighting, Twain now insisted that killing a bear with a pack of yapping hounds and mastiffs was the equivalent of shooting a cow in a pasture. In the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, he described two loafers in the town of Bricksville who enjoyed pouring kerosene on stray dogs and torching them.
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Turning to Roosevelt, he now imagined the unfortunate cow looking at the
president and saying, “Have pity, sir, and spare me. I am alone, you are many…. Have pity, sir—there is no heroism in killing an exhausted cow.” But Roosevelt—who Twain said was “still only fourteen years old after living a half century”—coldly refused. Sarcastically, Twain claimed that Roosevelt had shot the Louisiana black bear in an “extremely sportsmanlike manner” and then triumphantly hugged his planter guides as if he just scored the winning touchdown in the Harvard-Yale game. Then Twain essentially severed his friendship with Roosevelt by declaring that Roosevelt was “the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War.”
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Much as H. L. Mencken or (in our own time) Maureen Dowd cleverly attacked politicians, Twain started eviscerating Roosevelt, deriding the president as one of the most “impulsive men in existence.” Twain was baffled as to
why
the president was so widely admired as an embodiment of America malehood. Solve that mystery, and you would know the soul of the American people in all their cruelty and glory. Typically, Twain provided his own answer, saying that Roosevelt would “slap the Devil on his back and shoulder and say ‘Why Satan, how do you do? I am so glad to meet you. I’ve read all your books and enjoyed every one of them.’ Who wouldn’t be popular with an act like that?”

Twain’s feud with Roosevelt dated back to 1898, when they had opposing views of the Spanish-American War. Twain was twenty-three years older than Roosevelt, and the generational gap was a factor in his antagonism. Believing that his own hard-earned wisdom was much richer than Roosevelt’s impetuous vitality, Twain differed with Roosevelt on issues such as England against the Boers in South Africa and the revolution in Panama. But something more than foreign policy or disagreements over imperialism erected a barricade between these two colorful figures. Roosevelt’s idea of great literature tended to lean toward swashbuckling epics and romantic sagas. He disdained cynicism, irreverence, and irony in books; but all three attributes were Twain’s trademarks. Roosevelt did, however, consider Twain a “real genius” and thought that
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer
, and
Life on the Mississippi
were three all-time American “classics.” But he disliked
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
because it mocked the noblemen of the Round Table.
⁶³

What Twain was chastising Roosevelt about in 1907 was the Boone and Crockett Club’s “hunting ethos.” As Twain saw it, Roosevelt and other elite hunters would always stalk the largest male big game, the animals with the biggest antlers, tusks, heads, or necks. These hunters, then, were obsessed with
bigness
. Some modern scientists now believe that Twain was
on to something—that, perversely, such selective hunting causes the decline of the very species that elite outdoorsmen want saved. If Charles Darwin was correct in saying that “a law” was the “ascertained sequence of events,” then the shrinking of antler and horn sizes by the twenty-first century was probably an unintended result of hunters’ aiming particularly at game with large antlers and horns. In a landmark report in the January 2009 issue of
Proceedings of National Academy of Science
, Professor Chris Darimont of the University of California-Santa Cruz offered startling data about the fate of Canadian bighorn sheep’s shrinking curved horns. According to Darimont, modern-day hunters, by aiming for the “mightiest” and “lordliest” big game, had left surviving generations with a noticeably slimmer, less sturdy gene pool. “Human-harvested organisms,” Darimont told
National Geographic
, regarding his findings, “are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild.”
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What the National Academy of Science was claiming in 2009 turned the Rooseveltian sportsman’s ethos on its head while proving Darwin’s theory of natural selection once again prescient. Natural selection occurred quickly in the hypertechnological twenty-first century. Trophy hunting and pound-fishing for the
biggest
quarry were injuring species’ long-term chances for survival.
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“Hunting, commercial fishing, and some conservation regulations like minimum size limits on fish,” Cornelia Dean of the
New York Times
wrote, summarizing the report, “may all work against species health.”
⁶⁶
In a process called “micro-evolution,” species were apparently getting smaller, in part because hunters and fishermen were always zeroing in on the biggest game and catches. Not only was natural selection real, but Americans like Roosevelt, culturally obsessed with bigness, as typified by the Boone and Crockett Club, by fishing derbies, and by game management protocols that thinned out the largest species first, were completely wrong. The
Proceedings of National Academy of Science
report didn’t mince words: harvesting the largest organisms in the wild (whether these were Colorado bighorn sheep or Oregon salmon) was wrongheaded. Human predators—using guns and nets combined with technology—were causing species to shrink in size. “Our preference for largeness in vertebrates is culturally strong because now we can find the largest fish or the biggest brown bears with new gadgetry,” Professor Darimont explained in an interview. “It’s the worst thing a hunter or fisherman can do to aim for the biggest game or catch.”
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Meanwhile, in Alberta, Canada, for example, hunters targeting the largest specimens of Theodore Roosevelt’s beloved bighorn sheep had caused horn length and body mass to decrease by about 20 percent from
1979 to 2009. By the time Barack Obama became president, trophy hunting was also pushing polar bears and grizzly bears into the category of endangered species. What a strange twist of fate for hunters inspired by Roosevelt and Grinnell to contemplate! Killing the trophy game, taking out the alpha males, was adversely affecting the species they loved. At least, however, the Boone and Crockett Club had gotten some things right during Roosevelt’s presidency: it had fought for huge wildlife refuges, promoted seasonal hunting, insisted on licenses in every state, issued bag limits, and banned the killing of females during the breeding season and of young animals at any time.

Obviously, along the Tensas River in 1907, Roosevelt couldn’t have known about “micro-evolution.” Given how seriously Roosevelt took evolution, he might have reformed his hunting practices if he had read
Proceedings of National Academy of Science
. But such speculation is moot. All that history recorded of Roosevelt’s hunt was his
need
for a Louisiana black bear to donate to America’s growing natural history collection (and to satisfy his own desires). And the average American continued to cheer the president onward for his wilderness exploits. Roosevelt appealed to an almost mystical attachment that people had toward bears. The public both adored and feared them. Whether dead or alive, in zoos or as toys, bears were popular. The toy teddy bear remained the rage in 1907. And Roosevelt himself sometimes emitted bearlike grumbles when he was in the outdoors and pretended to be standing on haunches, mainly for comical effect. But now Twain was irritated that Roosevelt could so easily sell his bear act to the American people. It wasn’t Roosevelt’s charisma that Twain minded, but the way Roosevelt marketed himself as the “great bear hunter.” In face-to-face encounters, Twain continued to like Roosevelt. But he was nevertheless nauseated by the carnival atmosphere at the White House—a spotted pony in the elevator, a wolf-catcher at the dinner table, and a pet badger biting the ankles of visitors. Such ridiculous stunts were signs of arrested development—as was shooting a bear for no reason.

“Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century,” Twain wrote, “always showing off; always hunting a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off, and he would go to hell for a whole one.”
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Twain had a point. But he was blind to all the good work Roosevelt was doing for the wildlife protection movement. Twain simply never
mentioned that work in his interviews, articles, or books. No matter what Twain thought of him, Roosevelt didn’t have to run to Canada or Louisiana to show off his preservationist side in the fall of 1907. He did that with strokes of the presidential pen—and Twain never even noticed.