The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (43 page)

The very announcement that Roosevelt was erecting a frontier cabin at the Chicago Exposition brought him a lot of mail. One was from an old hunting friend and guide on his trip to the Bighorns. In spite of its clearly anti-Indian, illiterate tone Roosevelt relished in the letter’s colorful slang:

Another Rooseveltian scheme for the Chicago World’s Fair was to commission the artist Alexander Proctor to design and erect life-size sculptures of American wildlife on the bridges connecting the fairgrounds and lagoons. At Roosevelt’s behest Proctor, who had been raised in Denver, created life-size polar and grizzly bears, elks, cougars, and moose for public display. To Roosevelt, Proctor’s naturalist work, influenced by Darwin, was the highlight of the entire exposition. Both Roosevelt and Proctor insisted on
exactness
of animal composition. Wanting to honor his sculptor friend for a job well done, Roosevelt held a salutatory dinner for him at the Boone and Crockett cabin display in Chicago. In between toasts declaring Proctor the greatest sculptor of the American West, a man who understood the intersection of nature, wildlife, and science, the wildlife artist was asked to join the club. In coming years Proctor achieved some degree of renown for his bas-relief
Moose Family
, commissioned by the forester Gifford Pinchot in 1907 after Roosevelt became president.
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“For the men of the Boone and Crockett Club,” the historians Jesse Donahue and Erik Trump wrote in
Political Animals
, “Proctor was representative of the vanishing West, both through his work and in his person.”
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Roosevelt also got into the fair’s futuristic spirit by offering advice on the Forestry Building interpretive center, constructed with a rustic wraparound veranda made solely out of indigenous wood. He also found the Idaho pavilion impressive: this three-story western cabin was made of basaltic rock, volcanic lava, and stripped cedar logs; with large chimneys, an arched stone entranceway, and a reception room fitted out like a trapper’s den, it became a prototype to be emulated in future national parks for information centers or lodges.
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What Roosevelt appreciated in the Idaho Pavilion was a new type of western architecture, which easily blended into the natural setting. (Little did Roosevelt know that in 1893, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright constructed Winslow House in
River Forest, Illinois, considered the first of his free-flowing prairie-style homes, which brought the natural world directly into the hearth instead of blocking it out.
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)

Although 27 million people streamed into the exposition between May and October 1893,
the
two biggest attractions in Chicago—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the Ferris wheel—operated outside the gates. It has long been speculated that Roosevelt adopted the name Rough Riders for his Spanish-American War outfit from watching William “Buffalo Bill” Cody perform there, with live buffalo herds and cowboy-and-Indian re-creations.
*
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Most of the
Forest and Stream
crowd disdained Buffalo Bill for his “skinning” career—he slaughtered bison for the railroads—but Roosevelt admired the “steel-thewed and iron-nerved” showman for his “daring progress [to open] the Great West to settlement and civilization. His name, like that of Kit Carson, will always be associated with old adventure and pioneer days of hazard and hardship when the great plains and the Rocky Mountains were won for our race.”
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The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition looked to the future, even as it celebrated the past. In fact, it became a showcase for the revolutionary marvels of harnessed electricity. Everything from the first phosphorus lamps to the first neon lights was on display. Virtual shrines to the wonders of alternating-current power were opened to the public courtesy of Brush, Thomas Edison, Western Electric, and Westinghouse.
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And there, in the shadow of the electrical exhibit, was Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club log cabin, a throwback to a distant era, lit up only on a few chilly autumn nights by a newly trimmed fire. While America was abuzz about the electrical wonders of tomorrow, Roosevelt, with retro satisfaction, busied himself promoting the gospel of rustic renewal. Still, he was extremely proud that American ingenuity—from the log cabin to the electric mansion—was being showcased to the world. “Indeed Chicago
was
worth while,” he wrote in June 1893. “The buildings make, I verily believe, the most beautiful architectural exhibit the world’s ever seen.”
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For the history of U.S. wildlife conservation, something else occurred at the fair—something far more important than electricity on parade,
or an obscure history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison eulogizing the American frontier, or schoolchildren touring log cabins. The National Game, Bird, and Fish Protection Association (NGBFPA) was created that year in Chicago. Going forward, the Boone and Crockett Club, the Audubon Society, and other wildlife preservation organizations would work together, sharing lobbyists and coordinating strategies. By January 1895, the NGBFPA had adopted resolutions to encourage federal propagation of game birds and federal interdiction of interstate game traffic. Even though wildlife didn’t have the economic importance of timber or water, more and more Americans were starting to care about species survival.
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II

As president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt edited
American Big-Game Hunting
, a volume of essays about hunting and conservation, to be published in the fall in time for the fair’s last gasp. As fate would have it, this was not a propitious time for selling an expensive book. The Panic of 1893 had brought hard times to most Americans. Unemployment was high; wages were low; money was tight. Speculative finance and laissez-faire capitalism squeezed the wallets of ordinary Americans, from immigrants to workers in urban sweatshops to Midwesterners desperate to redeem silver notes for gold. Many banks failed, as did railroad companies like the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe. According to the journalist J. Anthony Lukas in
Big Trouble
, in Colorado alone 435 mines and 377 related businesses closed because of the panic.
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Western cities like Denver—known as the Queen City of the Plains—which had relied on the silver mining boom were particularly hard hit. Bitter and broke, many settlers in Pueblo and Durango, Colorado, deemed the uncut Rocky Mountain forests now designated as “federal reserves” a serious insult to their inbred sense of manifest destiny economics.
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As the Panic of 1893 gripped the Midwest and West, there were clamorous demands that the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 be revoked. The only people the reserves benefited, their opponents said, were “nature cranks” and the “athletic rich.”
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In this uncertain financial climate, the high price of
Big-Game Hunting
—ten dollars—meant it would appeal only to the well-off or antiquarians. “We thought,” Grinnell recalled, “that perhaps there were enough big game hunters in the country to make it possible to publish the book without too great a loss.” The idea of the Boone and Crockett Club’s publishing venture had originated with Roosevelt.
Grinnell recalled that Roosevelt financed the first printing of 1,000 copies with a personal check of $1,250. “He never said anything about this,” Grinnell recalled, “and I never asked about it.”
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Personally immune to the Panic of 1893, Roosevelt and Grinnell recruited stories for
American Big Game Hunting
from founding club members. Roosevelt carefully edited and pruned the prose of the submissions, proving to be well suited for the task. Always ready with red pencil, Roosevelt actually asked Grinnell to send an overwritten submission his way so he could “slash it up” by a third.
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This presented a delicate problem in the case of one submission.

Back in 1887, Roosevelt had tapped the famous landscape painter Albert Bierstadt to become a member of the Boone and Crockett. Bierstadt’s sublime paintings of the Rockies and the Mojave Desert, in which settlers were shown (if at all) as dots dwarfed by the vast American West, promoted the inherent value of wilderness. In addition, Bierstadt, whose notebooks are filled with sketches of American wildlife, had killed a huge moose along the New Brunswick–Maine line.
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With a rack sixty-four and a half inches wide, it was determined to be the eighth-largest set of antlers ever recorded.
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Bierstadt had realistically painted this triumph in
Moose Hunter’s Camp
, so Roosevelt was eager to get a first-person account from him for the book. “At the last meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club it was decided, subject to the approval of the rest of the members or of a majority of them, to see if we could not produce a volume to be known by some such title as that of the Boone and Crockett Club, and to consist of various articles on big game hunting, etc. by members of the Club,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt in February. “We intend to issue it annually if we find it reasonably successful. To do this would need some money, probably five or ten dollars annual dues for each member being sufficient. I hope you approve of the scheme and that if we decide to get out the book you
will give us an article on moose hunting. I should greatly like to have in permanent form one or two of your experiences. Have you ever published an account of the way in which you got your big head? If not, do write it out for us at once.”
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Of course, the fact that Bierstadt was an excellent painter didn’t necessarily mean he wrote well. The artist’s mother tongue was German, and his English was only passable. Nevertheless, as requested, Bierstadt wrote an accurate, lively account of his Maine–New Brunswick moose hunt. In reading the essay, Roosevelt discovered a bigger problem than atrocious spelling or awkward syntax: Bierstadt hadn’t actually shot the moose; his Indian guide had. This ran afoul of the Boone and Crockett Club’s eligibility rules—its members had to have killed a big-game animal personally, in a “fair chase.” Worse yet, Bierstadt’s submission expressed his disdain for the violence associated with hunting; he wrote that it was wrenching to pull the trigger on such a lovely North Woods moose: “I took the rifle then and ended his misery; he reeled, staggered, and tried to lean against a smaller tree which bent over as he gently breathed his last. My sketch book was in use at once. I have as you will see one big head; but I have made up my mind that I don’t want to kill any more moose, but to go and see them in their own haunts is a pleasure.”
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The situation seemed clear: either the Boone and Crockett’s constitution would have to be rewritten or the sixty-nine-year-old Bierstadt would have to be expelled from the club. But Roosevelt found a third way to handle the problem. He adeptly edited the story to make it seem as if Bierstadt had, in fact, bagged the animal himself. This “benign deception,” as two scholars later called it in the
New England Quarterly
, was uncharacteristic of the usually up-front Roosevelt. By recasting the death scene in the passive voice—“This bull was killed”—he excised the Indian guide’s marksmanship.
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Initially, Roosevelt’s creative edit achieved his overriding goal of preserving Bierstadt’s integrity by allowing this story to be published in
American Big-Game Hunting
while also adhering to the club’s constitution. However, Bierstadt wouldn’t agree to these artfully truthful but misleading edits. If he accepted Roosevelt’s solution, his article would, in fact, have degenerated from nonfiction to fiction. The painter suggested a compromise—the Boone and Crockett Club could publish his essay
without
using his byline or signature.

Unwilling to compromise any farther, Roosevelt now balked. As civil service commissioner, he was busting lying scoundrels right and left. If the press discovered his cover-up of Bierstadt’s story, it would have a field day at his expense. He wasn’t going to risk what reporters call a blind item
for the sake of somebody else’s problem. “Grinnell and I both feel that it would not do to put in any non-editorial article unsigned, and moreover that when we get a piece of yours it ought to be purely yours, and without emendations from us,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt on June 8 from Washington, D.C., unburdening himself of the whole ordeal. “So I shall have to trust to the hope that for our second volume we may persuade you to write a piece needing no emendation, over your own signature.”
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There were some wonderful pieces in
American Big-Game Hunting
. Grinnell’s one contribution, “In Buffalo Days,” is arguably the most elegant meditation on buffalo ever written. Truly worried that the species was headed toward extinction, Grinnell expressed his love for the animal by describing every twitch and tail flap he had ever noticed as a naturalist. “It was in spring, when its coat was being shed, that the buffalo, odd-looking enough at any time, presented its most grotesque appearance,” he lovingly wrote. “The matted hair and wool of the shoulders and sides began to peel off in great sheets, and these sheets, clinging to the skin and flapping in the wind, gave it the appearance of being clad in rags.”
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