The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (18 page)

Despite his apparent eccentricities, Theodore was popular with and re
spected by his classmates. Nobody ever questioned his bedrock honesty or inbred decency. Years later, Richard Welling—in an article in
American Legion Monthly
—revealed perhaps the strangest personality trait of Roosevelt at Harvard. Whenever Roosevelt was performing gymnastics indoors—doing somersaults, skipping rope, or doing pull-ups—he acted hesitant and clumsy. His caution and trepidation were evident. As Welling bluntly put it, Roosevelt was “verily a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development.” But when Welling went ice-skating with Roosevelt at Fresh Pond—a kettle-hole lake that served as a reservoir for Cambridge—with the wind-chill factor around zero, the brutal cold would send everybody else home shivering, but Theodore would get an adrenaline rush, shouting, “Isn’t this bully!” He had no fear of frostbite or pneumonia.
*
This was unusual behavior. Welling realized his friend was overcompensating for something. Nature at its most brutal flipped some switch of fortitude in Roosevelt’s peculiar makeup. “Roosevelt had neither health or muscle,” Welling concluded. “But he had a superabundance of a third quality, vitality, and he seemed to realize that this nervous vitality had been given in order to help him get the other two things.”
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Detachment
might be the best word to characterize Roosevelt’s measured indifference to Harvard in 1876 and 1877. Even though his grades were good, he didn’t buy into all of the traditional aspects of undergraduate life as one would have expected. Regularly he would send his father updates from Cambridge, describing in detail his asthma flare-ups and his prayer sessions at the local church. There were soirees at Chestnut Hill and Beacon Hill to report, usually with reassurances that his morals were intact, but his reportage from Harvard seemed contrived. It was his two touchstone places—Oyster Bay and the Adirondacks—that continued to arouse his enthusiasm. And he thought a lot about Maine.

III

Ever since Frederick Osborn had drowned in the Hudson River, a void had existed in Roosevelt’s life. He needed a close chum to share his enthusiasm for ornithology, someone with whom to prowl his favorite hunting grounds come summer break. Now, as a Harvard freshman, he found such a friend in Henry “Hal” Davis Minot of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Hal, a lanky young man with piercing blue-gray eyes and a thin brown
beard, had already written a booklet:
The Land and Game Birds of New England
would be published the following spring. Together Theodore and Hal hatched plans to spend the next summer collecting warblers and thrushes. “Our lessons will be over by the twentieth of June,” Roosevelt excitedly wrote to his parents from Harvard, “and then Henry Minot and I intend leaving immediately for the Adirondacks, so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible, and in two or three weeks we will get down to Oyster Bay, where I should like to have him spend a few days with us. He is a very quiet fellow, and would not be the least trouble.”
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Haunted by his humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt—to improve his physique—boxed regularly during his freshman year. He learned how to throw a pretty good one-two punch, but his eyesight was terrible and he was never light on his feet. What made him quite remarkable in the ring, however, was his godawful ability to take a thrashing, to be pummeled unmercifully but still come back for more. This wasn’t a recipe for winning matches, but it did win the respect of his classmates. Clearly, Roosevelt had a genius for pushing the limits. Instead of hopping onto a streetcar to downtown Boston as most of his classmates would do, Roosevelt often chose to walk the three or four miles. As an oarsman, Roosevelt preferred rowing when a heavy nor’easter kicked up, seeking the challenge of advancing forward in rivers and lakes when the wind was least favorable.

As planned, during the summer of 1877—between his freshman and sophomore years—Roosevelt spent weeks camping in the Adirondacks with Minot. Because Edith had been excited about spending time with Theodore at Oyster Bay, the news that birds came first may have bruised her feelings. As the historian Edmund Morris joked in
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
, Edith “could compete with the belles of Boston, but what were her charms compared with those of the Orange-Throated Warbler, the Red-Bellied Nuthatch, and the Hairy Woodpecker?”
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As soon as classes ended at Harvard on June 21, Roosevelt and Minot headed straight to Saint Regis Lake “so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible.”
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Once again Moses Sawyer served as the trusted guide through the rugged Adirondack forests, on what turned out to be the most serious bird collecting trip of Roosevelt’s life. Spurred on by his classmate, he made careful notes and pulled together his own first publication on birds: it was modeled on Minot’s
The Land and Game Birds of New England
, which had just been published by Estes and Lauriat (in cooperation with the Naturalist Agency of Salem, Massachusetts) to fine peer reviews. In fact,
Harper’s New Monthly
, which had just been launched, commended
The Land and Game Birds
to “all who care for out-door sights and sounds.”
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The resulting booklet by Roosevelt,
The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks
, not much more than a broadside, was instantly the finest list on the subject in print. Although Minot was credited as coauthor,
The Summer Birds
was clearly Roosevelt’s accomplishment, the end product of four collecting trips to the Adirondacks. Roosevelt’s ample descriptions of nearly 100 species were based on firsthand outdoors observations.
The Summer Birds
, in fact, was impressive in its thoroughness. With an exacting eye, Roosevelt delineated everything from the sprightliness of juncos to the “strikingly” common on least flycatchers. With brevity he analyzed the nests of the Swainson’s thrush and Wilson’s warbler. It was clearly a work aimed at specialists—only a true-blue bird enthusiast would want such a detailed local key.

Sticking to straightforward scientific observation, Roosevelt, perhaps fearful of being trivialized as a populizer, edited his most poetic journal writing out of
The Summer Birds
. Here, for example, was a journal passage from June 23, 1877, that he apparently deemed too fanciful to include in his booklet. The “we” in the following journal entry refers to Minot, Sawyer, and himself:

Theodore spent the rest of his summer rowing around Long Island, discussing birds with his father, and preparing his little book for publication. Roosevelt considered it his highest intellectual achievement to date, proof that he had learned “how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”
⁴¹
By the time Roosevelt returned to Harvard in September 1877 for his sophomore year, he was ruddy-cheeked, bronzed, hardened,
and strangely handsome, and his asthma was in remission. In October a few hundred copies of
The Summer Birds
were printed. He received accolades from scholars—an important development in enhancing his self-confidence as a naturalist. At the time bird lists for specific locations were considered very important, as national data were just starting to be collected seriously.

No less a personage than Dr. C. Hart Merriam, in fact, a graduate of Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School, embraced Roosevelt with open arms in the April 1878
Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club
(the house organ for the first organization in North America devoted to ornithology). It was the list’s accuracy that impressed Dr. Merriam, who had just published his own
Birds of Connecticut
. “By far the best of these recent [bird] lists which I have seen is that of
The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y
.., by Theodore Roosevelt and H. D. Minot,” Dr. Merriam wrote. “Though not redundant with information and mentioning but 97 species, it bears prima facie evidence of reliability—which seems to be a great desideratum in birds lists nowadays.”
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Although the down-to-earth Merriam was only three years older than Roosevelt, he was already a legend among naturalists. Born in Locust Grove, New York, on December 5, 1855, Merriam spent much of his childhood exploring the Adirondacks and hunting mammals with bow and arrow. Like Roosevelt, Merriam had put together his own wildlife museum as a boy. Hart’s mother, objecting to the stench of dead rabbits and squirrels, hired an old army surgeon to teach him taxidermy. Using corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid as his preservatives, young Merriam became something of a prodigy at his craft. In 1871 Hart’s father, a U.S. congressman from New York, playing the role of promoter and coach, took his son to meet Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Once Baird saw the boy’s work he was awestruck; every specimen of bird or mammal was perfectly embalmed. Even the mounted butterflies and grasshoppers were first-rate. That same year Merriam struck up a correspondence with John Muir regarding glaciation in Yosemite Valley.

Worried that he couldn’t make a living at ornithology, Merriam, whose expertise on the subject of small mammals and fauna led to an assignment by the Hayden Survey classifying animal populations in Yellowstone National Park, was a prodigy who at age seventeen collected 313 bird skins and sixty-seven nests. His resulting fifty-page report was published in 1873 to high praise from zoological circles. Merriam went on to study at Yale University’s Sheffield Science School, and then in the medical school
at Columbia University. He practiced medicine in Locust Grove from 1879 to 1885, delivering many babies. Nevertheless, if you wanted to understand elk, deer, or grizzly bears, Merriam was the man to turn to.
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With Merriam’s glowing review in the
Bulletin
, Roosevelt was anointed an up-and-coming naturalist of the Ivy League and was listed in the 1877
Naturalists’ Directory
. He had been accepted by the fraternity of scientists as one of their own.
⁴⁴
The Nuttall Ornithology Club—founded as recently as 1873—had said so. That was good enough for Roosevelt. Although Merriam hadn’t yet reached fame as perhaps the top U.S. government biologist of his generation, the fact that he saluted the Harvard sophomore in such a high-minded fashion won Roosevelt over. Thereafter, he would always hold Merriam in high regard. Nobody working in the Darwinian specimen collecting circuit, Roosevelt believed, knew more about North American wildlife than Merriam. Building on Roosevelt’s
Summer Birds
, Merriam, in fact, in 1881 published a better “Preliminary Life of the Birds of the Adirondacks.” It was his last foray with birds before his focus shifted to mammals.

Roosevelt followed up on the success of
The Summer Birds
with a set of profiles, drawn from his Oyster Bay notebooks, of the seventeen rarest birds he had encountered on the North Shore. Privately published in March 1879, while Roosevelt was backpacking in Maine,
Notes on Some Birds of Oyster Bay, Long Island
featured an unusual range of shorebirds, all listed with their Latin names. Some of his observations were new. Others were coeval with findings of Spencer F. Baird. Dive-bombing mockingbirds had a southern range, for example, but Roosevelt found one, imitating the vocalizations of half a dozen other species near the family’s country home, Tranquility. Four different species of warblers—prairie, golden-winged, pine, and Connecticut—were matter-of-factly included in
Notes
. But he was most clearly proud of having shot and collected two unusual species: a fish-crow, which constantly harassed gulls to relinquish their prey; and an Ipswich sparrow, which had been discovered by a farmer in 1872. “I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice-rimmed beach,” he later wrote, “where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums, and stunted pines.”
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Meanwhile, all of the rowing in Oyster Bay and hiking in the Adirondacks was starting to pay off for Roosevelt. He no longer looked like the weakling who’d been harassed by the youths of Moosehead Lake. Physical exertion was now part of his daily routine. He rowed on the Charles River, he did sit-ups and jumping-jacks, and he crammed as much activity into each and every hour as possible.

But all wasn’t well in the Roosevelt family. Theodore Sr. had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, which the
New York Times
then called a “Hopeless Disease.”
⁴⁶
Carefully, Theodore and his brothers and sisters monitored their father’s failing health, concerned about every chill and cough. He was clearly in deep pain, and his prognosis wasn’t good. During the Christmas season, Theodore was cautiously optimistic, elated that his father’s high temperature had returned to normal. Yet, as Corinne noted, all the “fearful suffering” was turning Theodore Sr. gray when he had “not a white hair before.”
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On Christmas day, Roosevelt listed all the birds and mammals he’d collected for his museum in 1877. For the first time, he included fish (fifty-two brook trout and 120 Atlantic mackerel). Many bird species were also inventoried; it was a strong year for snipes and herons. As for big game, he’d killed his first deer with a rifle. And he felt that much similar success lay ahead because his sick father had given him a double-barreled shotgun as a Christmas present. Just holding it, feeling its lead weight, made Roosevelt anticipate future hunts.
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