The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (12 page)

In
On the Origin of Species
, unlike
Missionary Travels
, there were no lavish illustrations, no photographs of great zebra herds or wallowing hippopotamuses. Just carefully reading the text, however, became something of a personal benediction to Roosevelt. Enhancing Darwin’s allure were profiles of the British explorer-naturalist that appeared in popular boys’ magazines. It was also exciting that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln—young Roosevelt’s two idols—had both been born on February 22, 1803; this is the kind of coincidence children love. Like young Theodore studying under John Bell, Darwin once had a taxidermy apprentice
ship with John Edmonston, an escaped West Indian slave who moved to Scotland. And, just as Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., had helped create the American Museum of Natural History, Darwin’s paternal grandfather had written
Zoonomia
(1794–1796), which dealt with transmutation. It was as if zoology was in the bloodlines of both Roosevelt and Darwin. An admonition Darwin’s father had once shouted at young Charles could very well have been blurted out in the Roosevelt household: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
⁶¹
Maybe someday, Roosevelt hoped, he too would be lucky enough to catch rats on a ship around the world like the
Beagle
, all in the name of natural history.
*

Taxidermist, illustrator, diarist, voracious reader, hunter, ornithologist, mammalogist, animal rights advocate, naturalist, and now Darwinian evolutionist, Roosevelt—all of fourteen years old—was über-precocious. Taken together, all these sides indicated a deep appreciation of wild-life, and an understanding of how little biologists understood about the living world. “When I was young I fell into the usual fashion of those days and collected ‘specimens’ industriously, thereby committing an entirely needless butchery of our ordinary birds,” Roosevelt wrote to his hunting friend Philip Stewart as vice president of the United States in 1901. “I am happy to say that there has been a great change for the better since then in our ways of looking at these things.”
⁶²

When we go through the ruck of evidence about Roosevelt’s childhood, in fact, one document stands out. In whimsical letters written from Dresden to his mother and sister Bamie, T.R. drew charts showing Darwin’s evolutionary theory in terms of the Roosevelt family’s genealogy. Done in a young person’s hand, the illustration resembled what today would be called “outsider art” or a doodle on the back of an envelope. It was presented to mother as “Some illustrations on the Darwinian theory,” broken down into four stages. T.R. demonstrated how, as a close reader of Darwin’s work, he
personally
could have actually evolved from a Dresden stork—the kind that the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen popularized in a fairy tale. Theodore, in fact, was so enamored of these long-legged birds living in the chimneys of Dresden that he imagined his own descent from them. Elliott, on the other hand, came from a bull. And his
cousin Johnny—Darwin would have undoubtedly approved of this—had evolved from a monkey.
⁶³

Indeed, Roosevelt’s illustration most assuredly was modeled after the frontpiece of the eminent naturalist Thomas Huxley’s 1863
Evidence of Man’s Place in Nature
, which showed, in sequence, a gibbon slowly evolving into man. Huxley had worked tirelessly to help decipher the 500-page
On the Origin of Species
for a mass audience, distilling complicated scientific facts for the comprehension of the general public.
⁶⁴

Humorous aspects of the drawing aside, as of 1873 Roosevelt was dead serious about spending his life as a faunal naturalist (or biological explorer). After all, there were naturalist mysteries to be solved on this little-known planet earth. Religious leaders had long argued over the origin and development of life. Now Darwin and Huxley had provided an answer. Bursting with the enthusiasm of a convert, Roosevelt swallowed natural selection hook, line, and sinker. For the rest of his life, in fact, he used evolutionary theory as his guiding light; it illuminated his views on everything from politics to geography to fatherhood.
⁶⁵

I

N
o photographic images exist of the fifteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt with his trunkful of bird booty, on board the S.S.
Russia
and anxious to arrive at New York Harbor. Shortly before sailing home, however, he described in a letter to his mother (who had returned early) how the combination of asthma and mumps had made his face as puffy as “an antiquated woodchuck with his cheeks filled with nuts.”
¹
Besides homesickness for his Roosevelt Museum and his friends, there was another reason the sickly Theodore was eager to return to New York. While the Roosevelts were in the Middle East and Europe, a new family mansion had been constructed at 6 West Fifty-Seventh Street—near Central Park and much closer to the American Museum of Natural History. Young Theodore couldn’t wait to see the new house and unpack his bee-eaters, wagtails, bullfinches, and other specimens in the space especially assigned to his Roosevelt Museum. To Roosevelt the new home meant bigger and better display space for his painstakingly acquired wildlife specimens. His Roosevelt Museum was now three or four times larger than before. Each new bird added was assigned an inventory tag, including its Latin binomial.
²
“My first knowledge of Latin,” Roosevelt later recalled of his childhood, “was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected.”
³

Roosevelt studied Carolus Linnaeus’s
Species Plantarum
and
Systemae Naturae
to help himself learn the binomial system. Naturalists revered Linnaeus as their patron saint because in the mid-eighteenth century he had created this simple, universal two-part Latin nomenclature, which revolutionized taxonomy. Thanks to Linnaeus, botanists and zoologists everywhere could use the same language when discussing species. Rejecting previous assumptions about the “subjective value of perfection of animals,” Linnaeus based his sytem on “objective, observed similarities in anatomical structure.”
⁴
His system of biological classification—still used—was developed with a sense of cataloging God’s creatures. Honoring all life-forms with both a genus and a species name, Linnaeus also placed humans in his binomial system, as
Homo sapiens
(the term for man beginning in the Pleistocene epoch 1.8 million years ago). By the time
Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, scientists and explorers seeking glory ranged far and wide in the remote wilderness, racing to discover organisms that could be named after themselves. “The Linnaean system eliminated the confusion of having, for example, a butterfly called the mourning cloak in the United States, the yellow edge in Canada, and the Camberwell beauty in Britain,” Nancy Pick explains in
The Rarest of the Rare
. “People all over the world, whatever their language, can understand
Nymphalis antiopa
.”
⁵

In considering the Roosevelt Museum it’s important to remember that Theodore was always trying to emulate both Linnaeus and his father. Just as Theodore Sr. had planning meetings, fund-raising drives, and specimen hunts, so too did his son. Ecstatic about the Fifty-Seventh Street house, particularly because it had more room for his collectibles and curiosities—not to mention a modern gymnasium on the top floor with free weights and parallel bars—Theodore decided to hold a spontaneous Roosevelt Museum “directors’ meeting” on December 26, 1873. Playing the adult, he met with his cousins James West Roosevelt and William Emlen Roosevelt behind closed doors. Big issues needed to be decided, now that he had acquired all these strange Old World birds to add to the New World collection. A professionalization process—imitating the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University—was under way. The document that T.R. drafted illustrates just how businesslike he had become about being a naturalist and scientist:

Clearly there was a lot of faux erudition going on here. Although Theodore did keep minutes of the Christmastime meeting, the so-called board didn’t convene again for five months, and then met only to agree on letting Theodore spend $8.50 to purchase new ornithological specimens.
⁷
That modest financial request is the last surviving document pertaining to the Roosevelt Museum. West Roosevelt eventually became chief resident physician at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and Emlen Roosevelt became the senior partner of the Wall Street firm Roosevelt and Son. But Theodore stepped up his naturalist pursuits through a private tutor instead of a board of directors. According to biographer Edmund Morris, acceptance at Harvard “floated ever nearer” and if the “grail eluded his reach, he might not have the strength to grasp it again.”
⁸

Theodore Sr. was elated with his son’s advances toward maturity and with young Theodore’s steady attempt to streamline his naturalist hobby into a serious scientific pursuit. In
An Autobiography
, in fact, Roosevelt reflected on his father’s sage advice that “if I wished to become a scientific man I could do so,” but as a corollary he had to be dead certain “that I really intensely desired to do scientific work.”
⁹
As of the early 1870s biological studies such as botany and zoology had become truly scientific disciplines. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of modern geography—who died when Roosevelt was one year old—had pioneered in studying the interchange between organisms, habitat, and geography.
¹⁰
Then, in the early 1880s, the microscope had been invented to study germs. Theodore enjoyed
On the Origin of Species
, but Theodore Sr. worried that his boy wasn’t going to buckle down in chemistry and physics classes; his son liked bear variations, not cell theory. “I am a belated member of the generation that regarded Audubon with veneration, that accepted [Charles] Waterton—Audubon’s violent critic—as the ideal of the wandering naturalist,” T.R. later reflected, “and that looked upon [Nikolaus] Brahm as a delightful but rather awesomely erudite example of advanced scientific thought.”
¹¹
*
Clearly, Roosevelt was the kind of natural history student who would travel great distances to shoot specimens in forests. But would he sit still and do the semi-stifled indoor laboratory work that came after great hunts? His father had doubts.

Because as an adult T.R. preached the strenuous life, recording his rugged outdoor adventures and battlefield prowess with such dramatic flair, it’s often forgotten that his aptitude for professions other than naturalist or author was minimal. His abysmal health ruled out an appointment to West Point or Annapolis. He had no predilection for the world of commerce. Managing the family’s fortune didn’t interest him—in fact, he brushed off the chance to become a partner in Roosevelt and Sons. He felt antipathy toward bankers, accountants, and financiers. And every time Theodore gazed at a law book, his eyes glazed over in boredom. Even though his uncle Robert B. Roosevelt tried to nudge him toward the law, even a squad of top-notch defense or prosecuting attorneys could never have convinced him that habeas corpus was a more interesting concept than the migratory habits of
Ectopistes migratorius
—the passenger pigeon.

Therefore, Theodore’s career path seemed as plain as day: to become a Harvard-trained biologist or naturalist.
¹²
Someday his specimens could become part of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Collection, Roosevelt hoped, displayed beside the natural history artifacts donated by George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon.
¹³
For most of his life, Theodore had been homeschooled. He was never enrolled in public school, and he attended a private school in Manhattan for only a brief time. Theodore Sr. hired a highly regarded tutor, Arthur Cutler, to help Theodore brush up for Harvard’s notoriously difficult entrance exam. Years later Cutler was asked to recall his former student’s inherent strengths and weaknesses. “[Theodore] never seemed to know what idleness was,” he said. “Every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic, or some abstruse book on Natural History in his hand.”
¹⁴

In 1874, continuing the family tradition of fleeing Manhattan every
summer, Theodore Sr. decided to rent a house in Oyster Bay. A jutting curve of land on the North Shore of Long Island, less than an hour by train from midtown Manhattan, Oyster Bay had been founded in 1653. By the time of the American Revolution, it was a bustling seaport. Although it later boasted that “George Washington slept here,”
¹⁵
Oyster Bay had actually been a hotbed of loyalist sentiment once the port was occupied by British troops after the Battle of Long Island. By the time the Roosevelts started summering in Oyster Bay, wealthy New Yorkers, attracted by the breezes coming off Long Island Sound, had built blocks of Victorian and colonial homes. Just after the Civil War, Oyster Bay had grown into a popular summertime getaway location for New Yorkers desperate to escape the clamor and congestion of urban life. Appropriately, the town seal of Oyster Bay eventually became a seagull in flight.
¹⁶

Theodore’s mother, Mittie, named the waterfront estate her husband leased “Tranquility.” With its columns, attractive veranda, and huge parlor, it was like something out of the antebellum South. The name, however, was a misnomer, for the house constantly sang with activity. As the old adage goes, life begins at the water’s edge. And Oyster Bay was no exception. On the North Shore the quaint meadows, low hills, and dense woodlands were a bird lover’s paradise. Just rocking on Tranquility’s veranda allowed Theodore to see surf scoters, old squaws, herring gulls, red-throated loons, catbirds, and chickadees. The soliloquy of the open bay was conveyed by these preening birds, and all young Theodore had to do when the four o’clock shadows arrived was sit back and watch and listen with pure elation.

By 1874 the bard of Long Island was Walt Whitman, who wrote poetically about the clouds drifting over sand dunes and eagles dallying in the sky. In his old age Whitman, in fact, would claim that he had “incorporated” Long Island into himself.
¹⁷
Now, at every chance possible, Roosevelt would tramp around rural Glen Cove and Lloyd Neck as if he were Whitman on the prowl, jotting down wildlife sightings with scientific exactitude. His ear was always cocked to catch a vireo’s robinlike warble or a pesky gull’s squawk. His notebooks were no longer travel diaries: the two he kept in Oyster Bay between 1874 and 1876 were labeled “Journal of Natural History” and “Remarks on the Zoology of Oyster Bay.”
¹⁸
Inside, amid long lists of birds he observed in Oyster Bay, were symbols used to identify the avians as male or female. Struggling to be a professional, he jotted down sightings of prairie warblers perched in cedars and yellowthroats eating caterpillars. “My contributions to original research were of minimum worth,” Roosevelt recalled of his fieldwork;
“they were limited to occasional records of such birds as the dominica warbler at Oyster Bay, or to seeing a duck hawk work havoc in a loose gang of night herons, or to noting the bloodthirsty conduct of a captive mole shrew.”
¹⁹

Although Oyster Bay appealed to Roosevelt’s fancy for birds, the forested environment of the Adirondacks tugged at him in a more primordial way. Long Island had woods. The Adirondacks had wilderness. What exactly did or didn’t constitute wilderness has long been debated, with no definitive verdict. Certainly, just hearing somebody utter the word “wilderness” conjures up remote landscapes—that is, sparsely populated or untraveled areas undisturbed by too many footprints or other obtrusions of human beings. One imagines wild—not domestic—animals in a wilderness area. Yet, just when you start homing in on a definition, you have to contend with the hard reality that both outer space and oceans are often referred to as wilderness. To many people, in fact, wilderness is nothing more or less than a state of mind. Basically, wilderness is a subjective concept, as the historian Roderick Frazier Nash noted in his landmark study
Wilderness and the American Mind
, first published in 1967. Trying to arrive at a “universally acceptable definition of wilderness,” Nash wrote, is nothing short of impossible. “One man’s wilderness may be another man’s roadside picnic ground,” he believed. “The Yukon trapper would consider a trip to northern Minnesota a return to civilization while for the vacationer from Chicago it is a wilderness adventure indeed.”
²⁰

Given the fact that Roosevelt was a Manhattanite, it’s easy to assume that the Adirondacks, where he headed next, were his idea of a genuine wilderness. The Adirondacks embodied what the ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold would define as “wilderness” in 1921: the ability of a certain geographical terrain to “absorb a two weeks’ pack trip” away from human-centered activities.
²¹
The historian Patricia Nelson Limerick in
Something in the Soil
described the western wilderness as a place where “mass society’s regimentation and standardization” find a “restorative alternative.”
²²
(The Wilderness Act of 1964 officially defined wilderness as being “untrammeled by man and where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
²³
)