The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (117 page)

On November 16, for example, Roosevelt declared the Gila Cliff Dwellings a national monument. Located in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, the monument had only 553 acres, yet it contained the cave dwellings of the Mogollan people between AD 1257 and 1300. When visitors leaned against the stone there and soaked up the warm sun, they were transported back in time. Reality seemed like an illusion. Pottery pieces…knives…a cracked crib…a doll…rattles…a slingshot…cooking utensils—you could see where babies had been born and elders laid to rest. You didn’t need to read Adolph F. Bardelier’s
Ancient Society
to be intrigued by the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The Gila wilderness was a place of both concealment and abandonment. And every inch for miles needed to be card-cataloged by the Bureau of American Ethnology. Roosevelt wanted to save not only the cliff houses but also Gila Hot Springs. By 1910
Harper’s Weekly
was promoting the Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument as a tourist site on a par with the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt had applied his promotional magic once again.
⁶⁹

Besides the ruins, the national forest along the Gila River was spectacular in its diversity. Wildlife was—and remains—thick around the Gila Cliff Dwellings, which are constructed at an elevation of about 5,700 to 6,000 feet. Even in 1907 the Mexican gray wolf (
Canis lupus bailey
) was associated with this national monument. According to U.S. Fish and Wild-life, it was the most genetically distinct subspecies of the gray wolf. In 1911, disappointed that the Tensas River game had vanished, Ben Lilly moved to the Gila mountains, where for twenty years he lived in the wild, as indigenous as a mule deer.
⁷⁰
And it was near Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument that the conservationist Aldo Leopold had an epiphany about wolves, dramatically rendered in
A Sand County Almanac
. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes. Something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain argued with such a view.”
⁷¹

And on December 19, as if giving America a Christmas gift, Roosevelt created Tonto National Monument to preserve both cliff dwellings and
more than 160 species of birds. No more rifling of antiquities would be permitted at Tonto. A land of sandstone formations and rugged wilderness, the Tonto region was carved by wind, sand, and humans. Hidden about the site were caves pocketed into the red rock. Lacey considered the Tonto—situated at the northeastern boundary of the Sonoran desert—the most rugged terrain in Arizona. Unintentionally, saguaro cactus were now saved by the federal government for the first time, for the sake of Hohokam and ancestral Pueblo ruins. (An intermixing of the tribes had probably occurred between the late thirteenth century and the middle part of the fifteenth century when, as the National Park Service put it, the Tonto Basin was
depopulated
.)

Mark Twain—unlike the archaeologists—never appreciated Tonto National Monument. But the archaeologists knew that Roosevelt’s monuments in New Mexico and Arizona were important. The late prehistoric pottery found in the upper and lower cliff dwellings of Tonto, in fact, was named “Roosevelt red ware” by archaeologists trained at Harvard and Yale. It was their way of saluting Roosevelt’s foresight in the Southwest. Roosevelt red ware was part of a Salado ceramic tradition begun in AD 1280 to 1450 and based on use of red, white, and black paint in geometrically interesting configurations. Most of the gorgeous pottery bowls were found around Roosevelt Lake at Tonto National Monument. These exquisite bowls, now on display at museums in the Southwest, had both interior and exterior decorations. Petrographic analysis of the Salado pottery continues. Each year newfound fragments yield fresh anthropological revelations. Pottery, along with bones, remains our best clue to our ancient past.

Tonto National Monument became part of the U.S. National Park Service in 1933. And the name of Theodore Roosevelt—attached to both the lake and the pottery—remained a major part of the monument’s appeal.

I

W
hen Roosevelt received an advance copy of Reverend Herbert K. Job’s
Wild Wings
from Houghton Mifflin in 1905, illustrated with winsome photographs, it immediately served as an Auduboner-action impetus. Everything always seemed conditional on offshore bird rookeries but Job’s black-and-white photos of wild Florida—now housed at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut—had the permanence of fine art.
¹
To Roosevelt, Job’s photograph of man-o-wars wheeling through the air was worthy of the Louvre. With admirable precision, Job captured the biological traits of feisty terns and turbulent skimmers in all sorts of intriguing positions (both on the wing and at rest). Although Job was an amateur photographer, his birds nevertheless seemed alive with joy, and some almost seemed to have human traits. Because the young birds Job spied at Cape Sable and the Florida Keys were vulnerable to predators, he clicked and then scrammed to avoid disturbing their nest incubators.
²

But photography was not Job’s only talent. Accompanying the pictures in
Wild Wings
was painstakingly accurate ornithological prose. (The excellent chapters “Following Audubon among the Florida Keys” and “The Great Cuthbert Rookery” had been previously published in
Outing Magazine
.) All of Job’s ornithological observations—whether written or presented as photographs—also offered topographical detail about pathless jungles of red and black mangrove; sea rocks teeming with chattering birds; and sandy white beaches with nesting burrows. This, of course, endeared Job to Roosevelt, who found him the real thing. Job wasn’t a fraud like the Reverend John Long, who claimed that egrets built casts for their broken legs and that robins chirped in Morse Code. Furthermore, in
Wild Wings
, Job promoted a sensible idea: “Every American Should Be a Game Warden” (a worthwhile precept for the “Citizen Bird” movement to follow). To Job, birds were windows into the soul of God; killing them for women’s hats was akin to blasphemy. Small birds, in particular, Job said, needed protection and love—people should feed them suet and seeds in winter to help survive zero weather.

Job was born in Boston during the Civil War. As a boy he used to take a skiff along Cape Cod, Block Island, and the Connecticut coast to study seabird colonies. The spots where they congregated mesmerized him. Before long he became a dedicated wildlife photographer. After earning an A.B. degree at Harvard in 1888, Job trained at the illustrious Hartford Theological Seminary to become a Congregationalist minister.
³
His first pulpit was in North Middleboro, Massachusetts, before he relocated to Kent, Connecticut. Job was married and had a daughter. He shared with his family an unshakable enthusiasm for birds. Slowly but surely, he started bringing birds into his sermons. To him, birds’ nests were sacred incubators (“castles”) that needed to be designated “a safe refuge.”
⁴
According to Job, citizens had a “holy obligation” to protect God’s little flight machines. Starting in the 1890s, armed with his trusty camera, Job photographed flocks along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, on the headlands of Nova Scotia, on the wet prairies of North Dakota, and along the banks of the Saskatchewan. Taking a factual approach to ornithology, he promoted the creation of federal bird reservations. He was something of an ornithological writing machine, and no bird was beneath his scrutiny;
Outing Magazine
called him America’s “humane sportsman” and a “gentle naturalist” in Burroughs’s tradition. “You are one of the Americans I feel particularly proud of as an American,” Roosevelt wrote to Job, “because of the excellent work you have done.”
⁵

By the time Roosevelt was president, Job had established himself as a popular ornithologist of note. This would prove propitious for both men. Job’s stock in trade—combining wildlife photographs with outdoorsman-like prose—was indebted to the sportsman style Roosevelt promoted in the Dakota trilogy. Not only had Job written a few poignant articles for
Outing Magazine
but he was an energizing force for the Connecticut Audubon Society. Still, as a writer, Job was only slightly above average: say, seven on a scale of one to ten. So when
Wild Wings
was published, naturalists rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Job had written a minor classic; wherever egrets, herons, and laughing gulls covered every inch of ground, he was in his element. As he wrote in
Wild Wings
, he would set up a pup tent and live with birds on islets for weeks on end. There were, for example, ten amazing shots of Florida pelicans—those Roosevelt favorites—in their black and red mangrove habitat, many taken at close range. For sheer exaltation, Job outdid even Frank M. Chapman. Some of the photos in Chapter 1 (“Cities of the Brown Pelicans”) actually came directly from the Pelican Island Federal Bird Reservation. Because Florida was bleached by sunlight, these photos had an impressive clarity. To Roosevelt, Chap
ters 2 and 3—“Following Audubon among the Florida Keys” and “In the Cape Sable Wilderness” were revelatory. Even Job’s photo of guano-whitened branches of mangrove interested him.

Cleverly, Job argued that saving the Florida Keys would be the most fitting memorial to the life and legacy of John James Audubon. Here Job found “rare and beautiful water-birds in amazing numbers, tropical islets with their dark mangroves, waving palms, and coral shores, waters prolific in fish and huge sea-turtles, with the soft southern zephyrs playing all over.” Job was as slender as a whip. He usually had field glasses at the ready. He wore a cropped mustache. His connection to the great Audubon wasn’t accidental. As a hook for
Wild Wings
, he had retraced Audubon’s Florida excursion of 1832 and provided a highly accurate bioregional update. The central difference was that Audubon had used a gun (and painted eighteen birds in Key West) whereas Job (with a camera) shot hundreds of photos. Audubon’s paintings are enduring classics. Many of Job’s photographs were only memorable: spoonbills wary of intruders, snowy egret just hatched, a young ibis nesting, and cormorants leaving a rookery. But Job pulled out all the stops in
Wild Wings
, even excerpting poetry verse from Byron, Bryant, Lanier, and Longfellow to further enhance the reader’s emotions. There were also meditations on the secrets of owls, instructions for the new sport of “hawking,” and descriptions of shore-patrolling against plumers killing golden plovers. And he championed government protection of rookeries. Like the AOU and the Audubon Society, Job pleaded with fashionable women to stop being induced by vendors to purchase hat and bonnet feathers.

“Here I felt I had reached the high-watermark of spectacular sights in the bird-world,” Job wrote after documenting Key West with his camera. “Wherever I may penetrate in future wanderings, I never hope to see anything to surpass, or perhaps to equal, that upon which I then grazed. Years ago such sights could be found all over Florida and other Southern States. This is the last pitiful remnant of hosts of innocent, exquisite creatures slaughtered for a brutal, senseless, yes criminal, millinery folly, decreed by Parisian butterflies, which many supposed free Americans slavishly follow. Florida has awakened to her loss, and imposes a very heavy fine for every one of these birds killed. Sincerely do I wish that every one who slaughters, or causes to be slaughtered these animated bits of winged poetry, may feel the full weight of penalty of the statute and of conscience.”
⁶

To Roosevelt,
Wild Wings
was filled with fascinating bird lore. It was irresistible to read what an authentic bird-watcher and bird saver—not
the faker Long—had presented. But Job could never have been a member of the Boone and Crockett Club. The systematic brutality of hunting—all that bubbling blood—never appealed to his Christian sensibility. Leaving his shotgun at home in Connecticut, Job had gone to Florida with a camera which registered in one-thousandth of a second (it had a long-focused four-by-five-inch plate).
⁷
He was an Auduboner on a mission, and his church, according to the
Congregationalist and Christian World
newsletter, actually paid for his trips to Florida. They were a fine investment.
⁸
He was going to prove that Floridians were terribly shortsighted for allowing vandals, eggers, developers, and plumers to massacre herons, egrets, pelicans, and other birds. As a leader in Connecticut’s Audubon movement, he had an obligation to lead this crusade.

Roosevelt was enthralled by the ornithologist Herbert K. Job’s
Wild Wings.
Job’s photographs—like these of baby pelicans and handsome cormorants on sea rocks—were used by Roosevelt to promote the “citizen bird” movement. Roosevelt declared that to kill one of these Florida birds indiscriminately was akin to murder.
Herbert K. Job photos. (
Courtesy of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
)

Roosevelt sent Job a heartfelt congratulatory letter on White House stationery. He had admired Job’s earlier book
Among the Water-Fowl
(1902) and now thanked his “fellow Harvard Man” for the “exceedingly interesting” book. Not only was Roosevelt inspired to save more of subtropical Florida by creating federal bird reservations, but he also admitted the folly of using guns rather than cameras when engaging in outdoor adventures. “I have been delighted with it,” Roosevelt wrote to
Job about
Among the Water-Fowl
, “and I desire to express to you my sense of the good which comes from such books as yours and from the substitution of the camera for the gun. The older I grow the less I care to shoot anything except ‘varmints.’ I do not think it at all advisable that the gun should be given up, nor does it seem to me that shooting wild game under proper restrictions can be legitimately opposed by any who are willing that domestic animals shall be kept for food; but there is altogether too much shooting, and if we can only get the camera in place of the gun and have the sportsman sunk somewhat in the naturalist and lover of wild things, the next generation will see an immense change for the better in the life of our woods and waters.” In a handwritten postscript Roosevelt confessed that he was “still something of a hunter, although a lover of wild nature first!”
⁹

An ecstatic Job persuaded his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to print Roosevelt’s letter about
Among the Water-Fowl
as the introduction to
Wild Wings
. The first-edition book cover was an elegant green-turquoise with golden seabirds in flight embossed on the front, back, and spine; its now a presidential collector’s item.

The influence of
Among the Water-Fowl
and
Wild Wings
went far beyond the ornithological community. With the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the National Forest Decree of 1907 as the newest weapons in the his preservationist-conservationist arsenal, Roosevelt once again turned hard to wildlife protection by means of federal bird reservations. Spurred on by the Job books, Roosevelt vowed to stop the precipitous decline in avian species such as man-o-wars, albatrosses, and loons. It didn’t hurt to have a noted clergyman cheering his efforts on from the sidelines. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune,” Roosevelt said in
Outlook
, “as the lack of power to take joy in books.”
¹⁰

From August 8, 1907, to October 26, 1908, in fact, there were eighteen new “I So Declare It” federal bird sanctuaries. There were no stentorian speeches about these reserves from the president, or from Dr. Merriam or Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson. There was only direct action. In the last five months of 1907 the president—concerned about the Central Flyway from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico—created no fewer than three federal bird reservations in the semitropical waters of Louisiana alone: Tern Islands, mud flats east of the Mississippi River mouth; Shell Keys, seventy-eight unsurveyed acres of low-lying sand-and-shell islets in the Gulf of Mexico south of historic New Iberia; and East Timbalier Island, small marshy islets and sandbars due south of the mainland. All the new reservations were east of the mouths of the Mississippi. If you included windswept Breton Island (established in 1904), Roosevelt had saved much
of the biologically diverse Louisiana–Mississippi Gulf Coast island chains from stumpage and slashing.

The remoteness of these Gulf locations greatly intrigued Roosevelt. When there was free time on his calendar, he hoped to inspect the totality of the small Gulf islands and sandy keys thickly covered with seabirds’ nests. Roosevelt particularly liked black skimmers (called razorbills in the south Gulf) and wanted to visit these outer islands in June when the great flocks deposited eggs. The heavy surf and heavy onshore wind sounded like a pick-me-up to him. The woolly clouds in the Gulf moved, at dusk, with a galvanic speed that drove up rain. He hoped that Job would soon accompany him on the south Gulf excursion. Roosevelt joked that the only thing better than a clergyman in your corner, covering your action, was a physician. Bird-watching in the Gulf of Mexico with Warden William Sprinkle of Biloxi, Mississippi, and Reverend Herbert K. Job of Kent, Connecticut, as his guides on the outer islands of Louisiana was his latest idea of a splendid open-air holiday on the edge.