The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (15 page)

Even though Robert B. Roosevelt found Manhattan’s social life fulfilling, he was continually drawn to the woods of rural Long Island. Trolling in the waters of the Great South Bay became his favorite hobby. Eventually, Robert purchased property along the bay, where the snipe and geese were plentiful, to build a country estate surrounded by pristine nature. But R.B.R.’s primary residence remained the five-story brownstone on
East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, next door to what the National Park Service now oversees as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace.
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A door on the second floor connected the two residences, making them a single-unit dwelling.
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(There remains speculation in the Roosevelt family that Theodore Sr. moved to West Fifty-Seventh Street to get his impressionable children away from their colorful uncle Rob
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).

Animal stories were the mainstay of R.B.R.’s skill as a first-rate raconteur. To Uncle Rob treed opossums and sneaky foxes were more colorful than boring gossip about the sexual affairs of fellow socialites. Whenever young Theodore visited his uncle’s home, in fact—as he often did—he encountered a veritable menagerie: guinea pigs, chickens, parrots, and ducks coexisting in total mayhem. A cow even pastured in the parlor while a pony walked in circles around the dining room table.
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A pet spider monkey dressed in ruffled shirts would often greet visitors at the front door. A German shepherd was allowed to dine at the main table. Somewhere along the line Uncle Rob made it a consuming hobby to collect “Brer Rabbit” stories from African-Americans and dutifully wrote them down as an ethnologist would, mastering the slave-culture diction. Unfortunately, when he published these stories in
Harper’s
, readers paid them little mind. “They fell flat,” T.R. would later recall, although he was proud that Uncle Rob had been ahead of Joel Chandler Harris in collecting this Georgian folklore. “This was a good many years before a genius arose who in ‘Uncle Remus’ made the stories immortal.”
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That R.B.R.’s affinity for animals eventually developed into conservationist activism owes much to the influence of a British-born outdoor writer, Henry William Herbert. The indefatigable Herbert had been educated at Cambridge University and launched a literary career as a romance novelist, influenced by Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. Moving to America in 1831, he adopted the pseudonym Frank Forester for his outdoor writing.
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Both a fine writer and a pen-and-ink artist, Herbert cofounded the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1833, believing that outdoors prose needed a fresh, clever popular outlet. The magazine flourished. But it was Herbert’s conservationist activism in such books as
The Warwick Woodlands
(1845)—denouncing “game hogs” and advocating a measured conservationist approach—that caused alarm in hunter-angler circles.
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R.B.R., for one, took keen notice of Herbert’s grim warning that “the
game that swarmed of yore in all the fields and creeks of its vast territory are in such peril of becoming speedily extinct.”
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Robert B. Roosevelt joined Herbert’s crusade to replenish the trampled fisheries of New York. In 1844 Herbert helped found the New York Sportsmen’s Club, whose mission was to have the state legislature place seasonal limits on the hunting of deer, quail, and woodcock. The club’s first successes were the passage of model game laws in three counties: New York (Manhattan), Orange, and Rockland. As soon as R.B.R. joined, he championed an important auxiliary mission for the club, declaring that his priority in life was to enact laws protecting trout, shad, and perch. Indiscriminate fishing practices in general, he believed, had to be curtailed at once if the waterways of New York were to maintain even a semblance of their old abundance.
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Thus R.B.R. became—as his editor friend at the
New York Times
John Bigelow dubbed him—the “Piscicultural High Priest or Pontifex Maximus.”
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What Robert B. Roosevelt admired about Frank Forester was that he was an able practitioner of “outdoor” literature. Writers in this genre recounted hunting and fishing trips, as opposed to nature writers (who usually refrained from killing wildlife) and latter-day environmental writers (who were more technical in their approach). When Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, most outdoors writing was Anglophile. It was impossible to find a good angling book, for example, about Florida’s reefs, Louisiana’s bayous, Hawaiian atolls. John Skinner’s
American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine
in 1829 was filled with pedestrian prose. Henry’s creation of Frank Forester changed all this, demonstrating that American soil was fertile ground for outdoor writing. Single-handedly, he made “hook and bullet books” respectable; this was the genre at which Theodore Roosevelt was determined to excel.
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Young Theodore, however, never fully cottoned to Frank Forester’s instructive style. To him, outdoor writing meant pushing one’s limits, seeking danger, and developing survivalist instincts in the brutal wild. Forester was too tame for him, too concerned with what was proper hunting attire for flushing grouse after noontime tea. T.R. was drawn to the more adventurous stories of Captain Mayne Reid. (Roosevelt also fell under the spell of the founder of
Forest and Stream
,
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Charlie Hallock, whose 1877
Vacation Rambles in Michigan
made him curious about the Great Lakes
islands and grayling.
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) Eight-pound trout, snarling cougars, grizzly-bear paws larger than a human’s head, virgin forest that even Lewis and Clark hadn’t trampled—these were the kind of “manly” pursuits the teenager wanted to read about in the 1860s and early 1870s. He wanted to experience outdoor life before the telegraph wire spoiled it all. “Unfortunately, [Forester] was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports,” T.R. later wrote, “and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself.”
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Following Herbert’s suicide in 1858, R.B.R. eased away from his other civic obligations and focused on protecting the fish populations. He wrote a Herbert-like tract on New York and New England angling.
Game Fish of the Northern States of America, and British Provinces
was a sensational critical hit, blending personal experiences and conservationist convictions with recipes for cooking fish.
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Young Roosevelt was only four years old in 1862, when the success of
Game Fish
resulted in Uncle Rob’s being praised as the “Izaak Walton of America.”
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Although R.B.R.’s main concern was recreational fishing, his book included chapters about how millions of Americans would become deprived of a great foodstuff if U.S. rivers and lakes were fished out. Much of the book was about fish hatching. The editor of London’s
Land and Water
, in fact, credited R.B.R. with introducing American fish into English waters, feeling he deserved more public credit for this transatlantic pisciculture.
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Usually fishing books, even Walton’s venerable
The Compleat Angler
, appealed only to a select audience of patrician sportsmen. But
Game Fish
managed to have a profound influence, becoming the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring
. Only Thaddeus Norris’s encyclopedic
American Angler Book
(1864) came close with regard to celebrating the fish found in the United States’ waters.

What worried R.B.R. most was the scarcity of fish. The two waterways flanking Manhattan—the East and Hudson rivers—for example, had become cesspools for industrial waste and raw sewage. The situation wasn’t much better for the waterways of Long Island, which were serving as garbage dumps. In the Hudson, river men used to netting tons of shad were coming back to land empty-handed. Regarding the Great Lakes Robert worried the walleye and trout might soon go the way of the dodo and the great auk. Ferociously, he corresponded with fellow gentlemen anglers in New Hampshire and Vermont, who had toyed with scientific concepts like “artificial propagation” to replenish their fished-out lakes and streams.
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Wildlife management was embryonic in the mid-nineteenth century, but R.B.R. pioneered in introducing scientific concepts relating to fish. Refusing to temporize, in a torrent of lucid (if self-indulgent) books, articles, and harangues, R.B.R. urged fishermen to develop “moderation, humanity, patience, and kindness under all circumstances.” He promoted fly-fishing mainly because it’s far harder and more of a sporting challenge than bait fishing (it also resulted in fewer ancillary kills), as he simultaneously awakened the nation to the perils of overharvesting lake fish. In his second book,
Superior Fishing; Or, the Striped Bass, Trout, and Black Bass of the Northern States
(1865), which recounted a trip to Lake Superior and its tributaries (plus other freshwater fishing sites), Roosevelt jumped to the then radical conclusion that fish “poachers,” those scoundrels who netted whitefish and yellow perch out of season, should receive the “contempt of all good sportsmen” and deserved nothing less than “the felon’s doom.”
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To fully comprehend the importance of R.B.R.’s legacy, it’s best to remember that he—like his nephew T.R.—relished slaying dragons, pounding away at adversaries. In political fights Robert B. Roosevelt was always taking on fiendish “rings” with “off with their heads delight.” These included the “Rivermen Ring,” the “District of Columbia Ring,” and the “Tweed Ring” he wanted to be a pallbearer for them all. Corruption of any kind was anathema to R.B.R.’s code of noblesse oblige. In his third conservation book,
The Game Birds of the Coasts and Lakes of the Northern States of America
, R.B.R. merged the sportsman’s ethics with natural history and prosecutorial prose. Basking in his newfound literary celebrity, he spearheaded the preservationist agenda of the New York Sportsmen’s Club. In 1874, at R.B.R.’s urging, the club changed its British-sounding name, becoming the New York Association for the Protection of Game (NYAPG). Three years later R.B.R. was elected president (a post he held until his death in 1906).
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Whether the issue was white-tailed deer, mallard ducks, or brook trout the members of NYAPG were hunters who believed wholeheartedly in conservation. The organization was instrumental in the majority of New York legislation aimed at saving wildlife during the 1870s and 1880s.
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What distinguished R.B.R. from other members of NYAPG was that whereas they promoted preservation, he fought for “restoration.” In this regard R.B.R. was furthering the teachings of Henry W. Herbert, challenging the so-called big bugs of his day for killing off America’s waterways. There were many fine books published on fish culture in the
nineteenth century—including the U.S. Fish Commission’s annual
Reports
, which began in 1871—but none had the literary flair of R.B.R.’s efforts.
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IV

Analyzing contemporary “fish culture” and heading a conservationist club weren’t enough for Robert B. Roosevelt. For twenty years, he served as the head of the New York State Fish Commission, an unpaid position. What enraged him most was the fine-mesh nets fishermen draped across the Hudson to catch huge schools of shad, thereby preventing any fish from swimming upstream to their spawning grounds. A firm believer in effecting change through the legislative process, R.B.R. lobbied state lawmakers in Albany, and soon it was decreed that nets could have a mesh no smaller than 4½ inches. Numerous laws followed: fines would be issued to fishermen who operated nets or traps on Sunday; fishing seasons for some species were established; rivers were ordered restocked; and catch limits were enacted to further protect shad during the two-month season (April 15 to June 15).
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Robert B. Roosevelt was a workhorse on the fish commission. Because he was independently wealthy, he had time to send his fellow commissioners a barrage of white papers on pisciculture, and his colleagues usually rubber-stamped his decisions. Nobody doubted that R.B.R. was
the
voice of the commission. Still, Robert was too much of an autocratic gentleman to persuade working fishermen who needed to troll long hours just to feed their families. A spokesman was needed who could talk with no hint of refinement about the virtues of artificial propagation of fish. R.B.R. recruited Seth Green—the fashion-defying “Fish King,” considered the premier angler in America around 1868—to join the commission and be his mouthpiece in promoting hatcheries.

Raised near Rochester, New York, Green learned to hunt and fish around the Genesee River’s lower falls. As an adolescent, he learned “fishing secrets” from the local Seneca Indians. By the time Green turned forty, in 1857, he was the top fish dealer in New York and was considered the ace commercial fisherman in America; he and his crew caught ten to twenty-five tons of fish a month.
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Meanwhile, Green developed the rudimentary science of artificial insemination. He stripped the female trout of her eggs, catching them in a tin pan like the ones gold miners used. Next, he milked the male trout’s milt to drain into the same pan. A series of other tasks were performed before these pans were placed on the hatching beds. A high level of pa
tience was necessary. Forty or fifty days later, using a magnifying glass, he was able to detect the eyes of a little fry. Around 120 days later eggs hatched.

At first, Green had a success rate of only 25 percent. Not content with that, he experimented, and before long his trial-and-error approach paid off. He discovered that water should never be mixed in with the spawn and milt, because it diluted potency. Using a method he called “dry impregnation,” Green had a 97 percent efficiency rate. He secretly produced fish at his compound for a couple of years, cutting brook trout fillets for market and selling his spawn in Buffalo, Niagara, and Rochester.
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