The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (64 page)

Fame has an ugly dark side in America: the sniping by the tabloid press. Because Roosevelt was the vice president–elect while he was in Colorado, hunting cougars, he was a particularly tempting target for irresponsible journalism. A story was propagated by Senator Thomas MacDonald Patterson of Colorado—the Democratic, free-silver populist editor of the
Rocky Mountain News
—that Roosevelt had been drunk on
a train with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and a few others. It was pure rubbish. The Associated Press also went after Roosevelt for “grossly dissipated conduct.” In defense, Roosevelt claimed that the wire service was “controlled” by Bryan, who wanted him bruised.
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A barrage of belittling stories appeared in the Colorado press about Roosevelt’s White River hunts, alleging that he was afraid of bears and that he shot treed cougars chased down by other men. For the first time ever, Roosevelt had journalists turn on him in packs. “To go mountain lion hunting sounds much more ferocious, but it really is not,” Roosevelt wrote to Winthrop Chanler of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The only danger I run is from the infuriated yellow press, and this is moral, not physical. It is very exasperating to have humiliating adventures which never occurred attributed to me in connection with bears and wolves (neither of which animals did I so much as see) and then to have the very same papers that have invented the lies state that they were sent out by my press agent with a view to my own glorification. However, I suppose it is all in a day’s work of a public man in our free and enlightened country.”
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That March Vice President Roosevelt—after reading a draft of “The Merriam Report” from the Harriman expedition—had become obsessed with protecting Alaskan wildlife. A member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Casper Whitney, had been quoted in
Outing
as suggesting that Alaska adopt a single commissioner for forests, fish, and game—an idea that Roosevelt had promoted in New York. Roosevelt agreed that this was the “ideal” solution to stop the slaughter of caribou, elks, and seals. What Alaska needed, Roosevelt believed, was one first-rate advocate of protecting wildlife and forests (like the Boone and Crockett Club’s president, W. A. Wadsworth), who would be in charge of managing the territory’s natural resources. Any time three, four, or five men were on a playing board, Roosevelt told Whitney, game laws tended to be watered down. “I wish to Heaven it were possible to get Congress to act about Alaska,” Roosevelt wrote. “As far as I know they simply provide for free rum, by voting to prohibit the sale of liquor there, and I do not know that they know anything about the game laws. Well, things are a little discouraging at times.”
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Being back at Oyster Bay gave Roosevelt time to read. Two of his favorite new titles were Thomas Huxley’s
Autobiography
and Graham Balfour’s
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
.
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The novelist Hamlin Garland had sent Roosevelt his recent collection of outdoors stories,
Her Mountain Lover
, and found a truly receptive audience in the vice president. “Your account of the Alaskan trail appealed to me very strongly,” Roosevelt
wrote to Garland on April 4. “I suppose I am utterly illogical, but it always gives me a pang to think of the fate that befalls the pack horses under such conditions. I am very glad you brought your pony home and rode it. I find it just as you say—that is, about three days restores me to my case in the saddle; though I am sorry to say I have grown both fat and stiff so I should now hate most bitterly to try to manage what we used to call on the range a ‘mean horse.’”

Then, changing the subject Roosevelt told Garland about his recent hunt for cougars, noting that he hadn’t shot deer or elk. His tone was that of a hunting addict, pleased that he had found a cure, able to restrain from shooting even when big game was smack in front of him. As a fellow writer Roosevelt knew that Garland had singular gifts, and considered his novel
A Son of the Middle Border
a masterpiece. “As I grow older I find myself uncomfortable in killing things without a complete justification,” Roosevelt continued to Garland, “and it was a real relief this year to kill only ‘varmits,’ and to be able to enjoy myself in looking at the deer, of which I saw scores of hundreds every day and never molested them.”
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There was also a loose end to take care of—getting Merriam the cougar and lynx skulls and skins, which were still being prepared at C. G. Gunther’s Sons; an impatient Roosevelt resented their taking so much time. He also compiled with great exactitude the relevant naturalist data collected in Colorado. Unfortunately, Roosevelt got a blast of bad publicity because the owners of C. G. Gunther’s Sons invited the press into their Manhattan shop to see Roosevelt’s kills. Jokes were already widespread about Roosevelt disappearing into the wilds of Colorado before his inauguration as vice president, and being more interested in cougars than foreign policy. “Gentlemen,” Roosevelt began his curt note to C. G. Gunther’s Sons. “I am exceedingly sorry you have written to the press asking them to visit the collection. I had no objection to anyone seeing it who wanted to; but the one thing I was especially anxious to avoid was advertising, or seeming to advertise, it in any shape or way. It is most annoying to have had papers like
Life
, the
Journal
etc. notified. Will you please send on the skulls at once to Dr. Hart Merriam, together with the two largest lynx skins? & begin to make up the other skins; and show them to no one from this time on, unless he had my written authority.”
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When Merriam received the specimens, from C. G. Gunther’s Sons, he sent a congratulatory message to Roosevelt, saying that “your series of skulls from Colorado is incomparably the largest, most complete, and most valuable series ever brought together from any single locality, and
will be of inestimable value in determining the amount of individual variation.”
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Two cougars, however, stayed with Roosevelt, serving as rugs for his Sagamore Hill library.

Because Roosevelt kept the cougar heads on these rugs, visitors to Sagamore Hill could be forgiven for thinking that he was showing off his hunting skills. Roosevelt even acquired two Alexander Proctor sculptures of cougars, which he used as props to stimulate conversation about his Colorado hunts. Essentially, he had fallen into the same trap as all persona manipulators. For years he promoted himself as a big game hunter extraordinaire—for example, having photographs taken of himself in buckskin holding a rifle. Although he clearly was the leading light of the wildlife protection movement, many average Americans knew him merely as a hunter. After the bad publicity Roosevelt received over the Colorado hunt, in the future he had naturalist-inclined friends at his side to offer testimonials that he was a scientifically-minded hunter, not a bloodthirsty rogue. Confusion over this issue caused Roosevelt deep anguish throughout his years as vice president, president, and ex-president. The sad reality was that most newspaper readers preferred hearing the details of Roosevelt’s hunts, not the biological minutiae about the variation of rings on a lynx’s tail. Roosevelt could be a grave, serious man when it came to studying wildlife genera, but hardly anybody knew it.

V

Shortly after Roosevelt became vice president, he began casting a wide net in hopes of bringing first-class men into the Forest Service and the Biological and Geological Survey. Writing to Gifford Pinchot, for example, Roosevelt tried to get Jacob Riis’s eighteen-year-old son Edward attached to an “outdoor government trip.”
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He also lobbied to get his old friend from Maine, Bill Sewall, a job as postmaster of Island Falls. “He is a true American type of the best sort,” Roosevelt wrote in his letter of recommendation, “as strong as a bull moose, fearless, shrewd, honest and kindly.”
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Worried that animals weren’t being properly represented with biological facts in various popular books—especially the short stories of Ernest Seton Thompson—Roosevelt started promoting true animal experts like William Temple Hornaday, not literary imposters.
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As for hunting, Roosevelt wrote a series of letters touting the use of knives rather than guns; a knife at least improved the odds for the animal being pursued. Roosevelt and William Wells of
Forest and Stream
believed they could, once and for all, get cougars written about in a truthful, detailed, zoological fashion. “That cougar of yours which measured eight feet four
inches is the longest of which I have any authentic record,” Roosevelt wrote to Wells. “My biggest one measured eight feet and weighed two hundred and twenty-seven pounds. I sent its skull on to Dr. Hart Merriam, the naturalist, at Washington and he writes me that it is the biggest skull that he has ever seen. From this it is easy to see what perfect nonsense is written by those who speak of ten and eleven-foot cougars.”
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That June the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club appointed a special committee to propose ideas for establishing big game refuges throughout America. All of Roosevelt’s closest conservationist allies were on the committee, including Caspar Whitney, Gifford Pinchot, George Bird Grinnell, Archibald Rogers, and D. M. Baringer. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in the case of
Geer v. Connecticut
, held that the state owned the wildlife even in a national forest—a verdict Boone and Crockett didn’t like. The club found a convenient way around the impasse in
United States v. Blassingame
, in which the court ruled that forest reserves were the private property of the federal government and that it could protect acreage from trespassers in the same manner as any private landowner. The ruling made it legal to create refuges in the national forests—the objective of the club.
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Alden Sampson served as chairman of the committee and issued the following mission statement. “The general idea of the proposed plan for the creation of Game refuges is that the President shall be empowered to designate certain tracts wherein there shall be no hunting at all, to be set aside as refuges and breeding grounds, and the Biological Survey is accumulating information to be a service in selecting such areas, when the time for creating them shall arrive.”
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Furthermore, that June Roosevelt started grappling with the whole Darwinian concept of man as descended from apes in a serious way. With the enthusiasm of a cheerleader, he hoped Arthur Erwin Brown, vice president and curator of the Academy of National Sciences of Philadelphia, would put all his anthropological articles and pamphlets on the subject of human evolution into a book. What could be more exciting work, Roosevelt thought, than tracing the
real
origins of man? Not for a minute, however, did he suggest that natural selection determined human advancement. He leaned toward eugenics but never accepted it. The species with the greatest fecundity—such as rats and mice—had hardly advanced up the biological pecking order. “It has always seemed to me that we should ultimately have to put the branching off of man’s direct ancestors from the mass of the other primates to a remote tertiary period,” Roosevelt wrote to Brown, “and I am interested in your view
that the parent stem branched off directly from the early lemuroid forms, instead of from some monkeylike form after the latter had itself branched off. As I understand it, the belief now is that the existing species even of the sharply defined and small rhinoceros family represent three stems which have remained wholly distinct since eocene times.”
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Besides birds and books at Sagamore Hill there were, of course, trips to be taken. Determined to get road dust on his shoes, he escorted Edith that May to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and went back to Colorado on his own to deliver a speech and gather more information about cougars for Merriam. There was also a side trip to give a lecture in Minnesota, where he sneaked some Mississippi River bird-watching into the itinerary. Basically, Roosevelt was trying to stay out of President McKinley’s way, avoiding the front page, presenting himself as a loyal lieutenant, not a usurper. He was cognizant that he might be able to run for president in 1904, and it was extremely important that he didn’t appear hungry for power. Roosevelt’s muse throughout these months was the always blunt Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted him to cool down the cougar-hunting heroics; they had the deleterious potential of making President McKinley think he was grandstanding in the Rockies for future western votes.

Roosevelt spent some of the summer writing essays on deer, cougar, and other North American big game. And then, time permitting, there would even be a Minnesota-Wisconsin series on wood animals like wolverines or badgers with sharp claws and flesh-eaters’ teeth that were difficult to tame. Having time on his hands, Roosevelt made arrangements to study law after the Senate reconvened in the fall, and he started collecting walking sticks as a hobby. “I have very ugly feelings now and then,” Roosevelt wrote to William Howard Taft that April, with a straight face, “that I am leading a life of unwarrantable idleness.”
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That summer Roosevelt also started boning up on Vermont’s enlightened conservationist laws. Although President McKinley was only moderately interested in conservation, Roosevelt—with the loyal Secretary Bliss at his side—believed he could increase America’s forest reserve acreage at the rate of something like three Delawares a year. Reserves aside, Roosevelt also wanted America to have the same strict game laws as Vermont. In early September, just when the apple orchards were bearing fruit, Roosevelt went up to the Green Mountains of Vermont on a fact-finding trip. He had never before visited Vermont in an official capacity. Basically he wanted to get places like Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and
Wyoming to adopt Vermont’s admirable standards of natural resource management. Ostensibly speaking for his dinners, Roosevelt was also on a fact-finding mission.

Much of Roosevelt’s first day in Vermont was consumed with making speeches on topics ranging from the Civil War to naval policy. On September 6, however, Roosevelt attended a big-tent luncheon of the Vermont Fish and Game League on Isle LaMotte in Lake Champlain.
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The league had been highly successful in reintroducing Adirondack white-tailed deer to the state, issuing fishing licenses (as a kind of taxation), and opening game reserves.
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Pleased that as governor of New York Roosevelt had adopted various of Vermont’s conservation ideas for his own state, the conservation league had elected him an honorary member.
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His primary host in Vermont was Frank Lester Greene, an ardent champion of forestry science who had served valiantly in the Spanish-American War. Harvard may have been America’s Darwinian laboratory and Yale the institution where forestry science took hold, but Vermont, owing to George Perkins Marsh’s legacy, was the birthplace of early conservationist thinking. There was a down-to-earth pragmatism about the way Vermonters like Greene were wise stewards of the lands. Dairy farmers and town merchants in Vermont understood that mangling woodlands was injurious to every aspect of good living. Roosevelt wanted to learn how Vermonters applied conservation and then implement it on a large scale.