The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (94 page)

This bear “mussing,” as Roosevelt put it, gave him great joy and only a little concern. All of the Boone and Crockett Club’s fights of the 1890s to protect wildlife had paid off at Yellowstone. The bears had rebounded and then some; he looked forward to thinning them out. “Oom John,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs, laughingly, on August 12: “I think that nothing is more amusing and interesting than the development of the changes made in wild beast character by the wholly unprecedented course of things in the Yellowstone Park…. Buffalo Jones was sent with another scout to capture, tie up and cure these bears. He roped two and got the can off of one, but the other tore himself loose, can and all, and escaped, owing, as Jones bitterly insists, to the failure of duty on the part of one of his brother scouts, whom he sneers at as a ‘foreigner.’ Think of the grizzly bear of the early Rocky Mountain hunters and explorers, and then think of the fact that part of the recognized duties of the scouts in the Yellowstone Park at this moment is to catch this same grizzly bear and remove tin cans from the bear’s paws in the bear’s interest!”
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In that same letter to Burroughs, Roosevelt wrote about soldierly-looking redheaded woodpeckers, in black-red-and-white uniforms, seen flitting about the White House lawn. Honored to be active in a few state Audubon societies, dutifully keeping a “count” of birds seen at the White House, Roosevelt began lunching with ornithologists regularly. Merriam had informed the president that Breton Island was becoming “doable” as a refuge; the Department of Agriculture was ready to declare it a federal bird reservation. All technicalities were cleared up. Even the holes of fiddler crabs and bare mudflats could be protected. After speaking with Frank M. Chapman about some additional specifics, on October 4, 1904, Roosevelt created the Breton Island Federal Bird Reservation of the south east coast of Louisiana with another “I So Declare It.” The reservation was the second unit of what became the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Refuge System (whose stated mission was to “work with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitat for the continuing benefit
of the American people”). Because nobody lived on the barrier islands—these islands were isolated sixteen miles from Venice, Louisiana, with treacherous Gulf waters in between—most Americans had never heard of the sandy breeding ground where pelicans and herons in the hundreds populated the beach. But plumers in Mississippi and Louisiana had. Regularly gangs made “hits” on nesting wading birds and seabirds.
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This changed after Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” of October. Within three or four months “Area Closed” signs were posted all over the new federal refuge. A full-time warden was hired. And in October, the police in Saint Louis had discovered a new investigatory method—fingerprinting. Perhaps, Roosevelt pondered, this new technique could be used against plumer gangs, who were then operating like pirates; three or four months of being locked up and smelling the dungeon stone, the president believed, would quickly turn them into preservationists. “Wreckers are no longer respectable, and plume-hunters and eggers are sinking to the same level,” Roosevelt wrote, with regard to Breton Island. “The illegal business of killing breeding birds, of leaving nestlings to starve wholesale, and of general ruthless extermination, more and more tends to attract men of the same moral category as those who sell whiskey to Indians and combine the running of ‘blind pigs’ with highway robbery and murder for hire.”
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There was nothing lush or exotic about Breton Island, which had been created from remnants of the Mississippi River’s Saint Bernard delta. To some sailors the island was just a long sandbar of broken shells, sargasso weed, and wind-twisted pine boles. Sometimes, though, with the sunset in sharp shades of bright red-orange, the island could look more enticing than a beach at Acapulco. A wide variety of birds crossed and recrossed the island, barely flapping a wing but just gliding in rhythm with the gulf waters. It was a soothing spot. The Tropic of Cancer vegetation included black mangrove and wax myrtle, both propagated by sprouting up tubers. To President Roosevelt’s way of thinking, he had created a bird reservation at the “mouth of the Mississippi” where his beloved pelicans could prosper. It was also a prime place where herons and terns built nests, dived for fish, and hunted for purplish shrimp. All said, thirty-three species of birds—wintering waterfowl, wading birds, secretive marsh birds, and various shorebirds—lived on the island. When the birds were in full plumage Breton Island was quite a sight.

Just as Roosevelt had hired Paul Kroegel to be the warden of Pelican Island, along the Mississippi-Louisiana barrier islands he now employed Captain William Sprinkle, with funds from the USDA and the AOU-
Audubon endowment. Born and bred along the Gulf Coast, Sprinkle was a fine fisherman and shrimper and a professional wildlife protector. Later in life Roosevelt met him and declared that he “knows the sea-fowl” and the island where they “breed and dwell.” Sprinkle spent so much time sailing around the Gulf islands that when he returned to the mainland near Biloxi, where he lived, there usually was a quarter inch of dust on the divan. Sprinkle marveled at the iridescence of the Mississippi birds and their musical harmonies. To Roosevelt, “a fearless man” like Sprinkle, who appreciated laughing gulls and skimmers, was worth ten times an Agriculture Department bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., trying to make policy out of paper.

This fisherman-cum-warden with his motorized skiff took to his law enforcement job promptly with a warm feeling for nature in the Gulf. No longer did he eat the green herons’ pale-blue eggs; he was tasked with overseeing their hatching. Plumers, in fact, rued the day that Sprinkle had been given the warden’s badge. “The Biological Survey does its best with its limited means; the Audubon Society adds something extra; but this very efficient and disinterested laborer [Sprinkle] is worth a good deal more than the hire he receives,” Roosevelt wrote. “The government pays many of its servants, usually those with rather easy jobs, too much; but the best men, who do the hardest work, the men in the life-saving and lighthouse service, the forest-rangers, and those who patrol and protect the reserves of wild life, are almost always underpaid.”
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In Louisiana, unlike Florida, Roosevelt received no immediate criticism for his federal reserve. With the presidential election just a month away, the saving of these barrier islands hardly constituted news outside New Orleans and Mobile. (And even in those communities its news value was scant.) Still deeply disliked in the South for having brought Booker T. Washington into the White House, Roosevelt knew that Louisiana’s nine electoral votes would go to the Democrats. Virtually the entire “old Confederacy”—with the exception of West Virginia and Missouri—ended up voting against Roosevelt. Bristling because southern newspapers derided him for not really having fought on San Juan Hill, Roosevelt wrote to a friend that Jefferson Davis was nothing more than an “unhung traitor,” worse than Benedict Arnold. Advocates of states’ rights were the bane of Roosevelt’s political existence. He also got into scrapes with North Carolina’s tobacco lobby and Colorado’s timber industry; they wanted his hide because of his ceaseless attempts as president to interfere with their profits.

Even though Roosevelt was popular nationally, he wasn’t particularly
loved by the Republican Party bosses. They’d have preferred Mark Hanna as their nominee. The advantage of Roosevelt as a presidential candidate in 1904 was that he was unhampered by any quid pro quos. Grumbling against Roosevelt usually had to do with his reformist viewpoint. A tough, tireless, bruising campaigner, Roosevelt wrote in early 1904 that to “use the vernacular of our adopted West, you can bet your bedrock dollar that if I go down it will be with colors flying and drums beating and that I would neither truckle nor trade with any of the opposition if to do so guaranteed me the nomination and election.” While stumping, he often resembled a boxer more than a politician, punching one fist into the other to make a salient point. Full of anticipation, Roosevelt rolled into Chicago that June, dressed like a rancher and boasting of his successes in Panama and Cuba; regarding conservation, however, only the Newlands Act was cited as a chief accomplishment. There was no mention of new national parks, forests, or bird reservations. Choosing the conservative Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana as the vice-presidential nominee, Roosevelt was immediately embraced by the old guard in Chicago. By ensuring support from the Republican conservatives, Roosevelt improved his chances for victory in the fall.

Fairbanks was another Ohio Valley frontier type, who was born in a
log cabin and moved west to Indiana for better farming opportunities. At six feet four inches tall, he towered over Roosevelt; and he always looked dignified in his proper Prince Albert coat even while feeding hogs at the Tarrant County Fair. Roosevelt wasn’t enthusiastic about Fairbanks, considering him an old guard type in the viselike grip of big business. Also, Fairbanks tended to mumble and was something of a bore. But in the vetting process, Roosevelt had learned that Fairbanks had few if any negatives. He proved to be an excellent choice. For all of their differences, Fairbanks was an ardent conservationist, the founder of the Indiana Forestry Association, and an angler of sorts. And Fairbanks brought both ideological and geographical balance to the ticket. While Roosevelt campaigned with fist pounding a palm, Fairbanks spoke in a clipped, un-spontaneous, dullish way. As a team Roosevelt-Fairbanks became known as “the Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle.”
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Roosevelt chose Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana as his running mate in 1904. Although Fairbanks was a conservative, Roosevelt selected him, in part, because he was a fellow conservationist crusader.
T.R. with Charles W. Fairbanks. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

No matter how cold Fairbanks was, he couldn’t compare to the nearly lifeless Judge Alton B. Parker of New York, the Democratic presidential nominee. With the fiery William Jennings Bryan sitting out the 1904 election, Parker had been nominated over William Randolph Hearst. Parker was a decent, fair-minded appeals court judge, but the only real campaign issue he took up was getting the gold standard endorsed in the party’s platform. Also, Parker had what modern-day media consultants call an “image problem.” He always seemed to be overshadowed by rows of law books—not an uplifting quality in a national politician. And Parker didn’t take criticism well: he was thin-skinned. Worse, Parker’s choice for vice president was an eighty-one-year-old millionaire, Henry G. Davis of West Virginia, who helped finance the lackluster campaign with his own funds. All things considered, the famous Roosevelt luck was in play. There couldn’t have been two less inspiring candidates for Roosevelt and Fairbanks to run against than the humdrum Parker and Davis.

During the campaign, with the media covering little else, Roosevelt appointed his “golden trout watcher,” Stewart Edward White, as a special inspector for the California forest reserves. White’s job was to stop illegal tree destruction and clear-cutting. Roosevelt also asked him to write a hunter-naturalist’s book about big game in California; it would be a sorely needed addition to America’s naturalist library. Meanwhile, Theodore’s fatherly letters to Kermit, who was attending Groton in Massachusetts, were full of anecdotes about hiking from the White House to Chain Bridge along the Potomac, and descriptions of the autumn foliage—the rusty leaves of the Virginia creepers and the brilliant saffron tones of the beeches, birches, and hickories. Only in the last paragraphs of the letter
of October 15, as if embarrassed, did Roosevelt mention the fact that the Democratic Party was besmirching his reputation. “In politics things at the moment seem to look quite right,” he told Kermit, “but every form of lie is being circulated by the democrats, and they intend undoubtedly to spring all kinds of sensational untruths at the very end of the campaign.”
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Roosevelt had a lot to boast about on the campaign trail. For starters, nobody doubted that he was the titular head of the Republican Party. If Roosevelt had jotted down on a three- by five-inch card his list of his historic accomplishments since becoming president, he could have listed the Panama Canal, the forming of a Department of Commerce and Labor (in conjunction with the Bureau of Corporations), settling a boundary dispute with Canada over Alaska, avoiding war with Britain over Venezuela (by going through the Hague Commission), siding with mine workers in the anthracite coal strike, launching numerous antitrust suits against monopolies like the Northern Securities Company (these suits were intended to ensure that rich and poor were equal under the law). With regard to racial matters, he had stood up to bigots in the U.S. Senate such as Edward Carmack of Tennessee and Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina. In the area of conservation, Roosevelt had created three national parks, twenty-nine national forests, and two federal bird reservations. His emphasis on irrigating the West was making human settlement in the arid zones of Arizona, Nevada, and California possible. (Although this was not understood at the time, western reclamation led to overconsump-tion of water and fertilizer and in that regard proved extremely harmful to the environment.)