The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (113 page)

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That same spring Roosevelt had received the report by the Bureau of Corporations on the unlawful activities of Standard Oil of New Jersey. It infuriated Roosevelt no end: Standard Oil had engaged in price-cutting practices, collusive deals, public misinformation, and so on. How to deal with such abuses? First, Roosevelt increased his calls for much stronger regulation of corporations. This infuriated conservative Republicans, but Roosevelt knew that it was good politics. The banking system and the stock market were going through a severe downturn. Why not make the petroleum industry the scapegoat? The Roosevelt administration issued seven lawsuits against Standard Oil and its subsidiaries (these lawsuits were coupled with numerous antitrust cases that state attorneys general issued). Part of Roosevelt’s motivation was trust-busting as nation-building. Criticism was hurled at Roosevelt by Wall Street financiers who
claimed that he was stifling the stock market with his gloomy pronouncements. By dismembering Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad, Roosevelt was trying to show that the United States was run by the federal government, not by self-interested capitalists with huge bank accounts and no scruples. To Roosevelt, men like Rockefeller and Harriman were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”
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Roosevelt loved Arbor Day because it gave American citizens a chance to do something productive. Every April new trees would be planted across America
.
T.R. at Arbor Day tree planting.
(Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

Even though gasoline automobiles had infiltrated Washington, D.C., in 1907, Roosevelt insisted on either speed-walking or horseback riding around town. Cars didn’t appeal to him—the idea of placing gasoline on top of a hot engine seemed perverse and worrisome, and the rumble of engines scared away the birds. This was the last year before the Model T transformed the American landscape forever—an event which simply bored Roosevelt. Still, he cheered Michigan and Indiana for building better automobiles than anywhere else in the world. As an unapologetic nationalist he liked America to have the automotive edge—or any edge.

Unable to stay idle, Roosevelt began drafting an ornithological report
for AOU on how sparrows were different in Long Island and Virginia owing to climate variations. And he was perplexed by some avian mysteries. Why did wood thrushes flourish at Sagamore Hill whereas they were scarce at Pine Knot? He kept detailed bird lists for Virginia about species he encountered: Baltimore and orchard orioles, flickers, redheaded woodpeckers, purple grackles, bluebirds, all nesting “within a stone’s throw of the rambling attractive house, with its numerous outbuildings, old garden, orchard, and venerable locusts and catalpas.”
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For an Audubonist, this was a real feast. But Roosevelt had an eerie experience that May, which he would talk about for years to come. Keenly observant, he saw a flock of passenger pigeons near Charlottesville. Because Darwin, whose name Roosevelt still uttered with reverence, had begun
On the Origin of Species
with a report about experiments conducted on backyard pigeons from around the world, Roosevelt was interested in their evolutionary characteristics. Darwin had successfully bred pigeons, concluding that they were all descendants of
Columba livia
(the rock dove). He had speculated that if the varied pigeon species mated in the wild, the offspring would eventually lose their unique traits and resemble the rock dove: this was due to a process that Darwin called reversion.
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What Roosevelt also knew that May 18 about the passenger pigeons (a species on the edge of extinction) was that no flock had been sighted in the wild by an ornithologist for more than twenty-five years. In the era before DNA records containing gene analysis and ancestral chromosome fusions, knowledge about birds’s genetic makeup came from detailed field reports in many towns. Roosevelt was thus fulfilling his public duty by reporting on what he saw near Pine Knot. “There were about a dozen, unmistakable with their pointed tails and brown-red breasts, flying in characteristically tight formation to and fro before alighting on a tall, dead pine,” the historian Edmund Morris writes in
Theodore Rex
. “He compared them to some mourning doves in the field beyond; and there was no question of the difference between the two species.”
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Because pigeons were delicious, many species were being driven into extinction by market hunters. For example, in 1904 the Choiseul crested pigeon (
Microgoura meeki
) had vanished; the last one was sighted in the Solomon Islands near New Guinea. In early 1907 two American birds had gone extinct in Hawaii: the Molokai’O’o (
Moho bishopi
) and black mano (
Oreganis funera
). This led Roosevelt to create, in 1909, a huge federal bird reservation in the westernmost Hawaiian islands. But the Molokai’O’o and black mano were rare birds, easily shot by hunters. By contrast, the destruction of the passenger pigeon affected all of North America, where
it was known to be the most abundant bird of all time. Before the Europeans arrived in the New World, nearly half of all the birds there were passenger pigeons. To pioneers, they were an unlimited food supply.

Robert B. Roosevelt had tried to stop this slaughter of passenger pigeons in the 1880s, introducing skeet shooting to sportsmen as an alternative, but to little avail. The last recorded passenger pigeon was shot around 1900—nobody had gotten within sight of a flock since then. William T. Hornaday had already shown passenger pigeons in a tombstone cartoon as being extinct (though he added a hopeful question mark). But now Roosevelt had seen a flock at Pine Knot in 1907. Excitedly, Roosevelt hurried back to the cabin and wrote Oom John an effusive letter, insisting that they were “no doubt” passenger pigeons. Burroughs quickly wrote back an encouraging note, saying that the previous year a flock was said to have been seen around Boston, Massachusetts, although the report was unconfirmed. A few weeks later Burroughs said that a flock was seen in Sullivan County, New York.
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There was no need for Roosevelt to feel diffident: he wasn’t the only observer. Perhaps the passenger pigeon could be saved, like the buffalo.

Realizing that passenger pigeons were on Hornaday’s endangered species list, and being exceedingly sportsmanlike about this matter, Roosevelt refused to shoot one. But he knew visually that this was the passenger pigeon, as described in Audubon’s
Birds of America
(page 25 of Volume 5). All of Albemarle County was abuzz over Roosevelt’s sighting which, if true, was the last official report before extinction. That same year W. B. Mershon had published, as a farewell,
The Passenger Pigeon
—a book of memories of the great flocks that constituted an impressive ornithological eulogy.
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There was also public concern about the impending extinction. As it happened, the last passenger pigeon on earth—named Martha—died in captivity on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Thereafter, coffee shops and bars would freakishly boast about having a stuffed passenger pigeon on display.

Roosevelt took pride in the fact that Burroughs’s eminence had habituated since their first meeting at the Fellowcraft Club. Likewise he was proud that his illustrator of
Ranch Life
, Frederic Remington, had become famous. Somewhat surprisingly, Remington was perhaps the one western artist willing to denounce the staged rescues in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and Owen Wister’s hero in
The Virginian
. Remington called Indians the “aboriginal” Americans, and he was praised by a Crow chief for having white skin but the heart of an Absaroke.
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In articles, short stories, and two novels Remington had treated Native American warriors
as outdoorsmen superior to the “great white hunters” of modernity with their scoped rifles and waterproof sleeping bags. As the
Independent
noted, Remington had been a pioneer in moving away from “mere sentimentality” about Indians to serious ethnography. This intellectual advance in Indian scholarship impressed Roosevelt greatly.33

Over the summer of 1907 Roosevelt composed a series of open letters on the White House stationary, honoring Remington’s artistic achievements. Roosevlt saluted Remington’s painting for the inherent westernness of his broken peaks and purple mountains. Roosevelt was a habitual doodler, but he couldn’t draw his beloved West the way Remington could. However, he had the political power to save natural sites in the rutted wag-ontrail territories. Every Remington rough trapper and graceful Indian radiated a humanity worthy of Rembrandt. “I regard Frederic Remington as one of the Americans who has done real work for this country, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Roosevelt declared on July 17. “He has been granted the very unusual gift of excelling in two entirely distinct types of artistic work; for his bronzes are as noteworthy as his pictures. He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had, and he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet vanishing type of American life. The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”
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To Roosevelt, the very talented Remington had made a “permanent record of certain of the most interesting features of our national life.” He ranked Remington as high as George Catlin for accurately combining Indian ethnography and western landscapes. By 1904 Remington’s bronzes such as
The Bronco Buster, The Buffalo Signal
, and
Coming Through the Rough
were themselves virtually national monuments, cycleproof, as recognizable as Leutze’s painting
George Washington Crossing the Delaware
or Bingham’s
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
. Remington’s bronzes—twenty-one in all, cast at the Henry-Bonnard Company (using the sand-cast method) and the Roman Bronze Work Company (using the latest wax casting method)—were like the Liberty Bell or the Golden Spike of the Transcontinental Railroad: in a word, heirlooms. Lacey had been the legislative genius of the Antiquities Act. Edgar Lee Hewett and other grassroots activists had stirred up preservationist action in the Four Corners region. But it was the spirit of Remington that brought places like Petrified Forest and El Morro out of the bureaucracy at the GLO or the Department of the Interior and animated it with a whiff of the Wild West
for people worldwide. And he did so without succumbing to romanticism—though his work had been treasured as such.

Others were starting to see Roosevelt’s saving of wonders as his gift to America. Praising the Antiquities Act of 1906, the
New York Times
, for example, noted that the national monument movement had created America’s “conservationist consciousness.” The United States stood at the center of a revolution in natural resource management, and Roosevelt was responsible for this positive shift. That was a high compliment to Roosevelt. If the
Times
was correct, then 1907 became the year when Roosevelt’s doctrine of conservationism cohered. The four national monuments Roosevelt had founded in 1906—Devils Tower, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro—could have just been a flash in the pan to please Hewett and Wetherill. But in 1907, inspired by Remington, Roosevelt kicked up a dust storm, declaring antiquities sites with impressive regularity. Following Hewett’s recommendation, Chaco Canyon—which had been a major urban center of the ancestral Pueblo culture—became a national monument through a presidential executive order of March 11. Ruins and hieroglyphics were now folded into the national forestry movement on a permanent basis. As Stanford University’s president David Starr Jordan later wrote in the journal
Natural History
, Roosevelt’s genius was that “he did not care a straw for precedent.”
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In 2009 the National Park Service published a detailed time line of Chaco Canyon’s history from AD 850 to 1902. In vivid detail it recalled when Hewett first stumbled upon ancient stairways carved into cliffs. But when Roosevelt declared Chaco Canyon a national monument in 1907, very little was known about this prehistoric Four Corners site. Regularly, as Hewett reported, the Hopi and Pueblo of New Mexico made pilgrimages to the ruins as if to a temple. Likewise, Richard Wetherill (the brother of “Hosteen John” Wetherill) had homesteaded in the Chaco Canyon area west of Santa Fe, studying Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Del Arroyo, and Chet’o Ketl. For the Roosevelt administration to actually acquire the complex of ruins at Chaco Canyon, the GLO had to ask Wetherill to relinquish the valuable land; he enthusiastically did. In an act of high-minded philanthropy, the great southwestern trail guide and Indian trader Richard Wetherill simply handed Chaco Canyon over. Roosevelt later repaid John Wetherill with a personal visit in 1913 to the Betatakin ruins of a “big village of cliff-dwellers” in what is now Navajo National Monument.
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