The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (13 page)

So when young Theodore arrived in the Adirondacks in August 1874, he wasn’t looking for the silken comfort of Paul Smith’s hotel, perched on a bank of the Lower Saint Regis Lake. Only by “roughing it” in the backcountry could he encounter bears, deer, and raccoons up close in a wilderness setting. Rhapsodically and steadfastly, he began keeping a
diary called “Journal of a Trip to the Adirondacks” about the millions of acres west of Lake Champlain and north of the Mohawk River. Hiring a rugged Canadian backwoods guide, Mose Sawyer (from Keese’s Mill, New York), as his hiking companion, Roosevelt intended to hike the highest mountains—Algonquin, Marcy, and Whiteface. (Even with Sawyer, he only got about halfway up them.) These were summits his parents had previously prohibited him from climbing, worried about his health and well-being. Roosevelt and Sawyer set up a camp along the south branch of the Saint Regis River near McDonald’s Pond. Occasionally visitors from New York City would accompany them on day outings in the wooded ranges.

Sawyer claimed that Roosevelt—who preferred venison to brook trout for dinner—had no interest in hunting deer or fishing. It was all birds, birds, birds. Once, in fact, Theodore quietly glided past fifty grazing deer, not lifting his rifle. Arm in arm through the beech woods, Sawyer and Roosevelt traveled; a lifelong bond was forged. As partial payment for taking him into the remote hardwood and softwood forests of the Adirondacks, Roosevelt presented Sawyer with four of the birds he had mounted in Oyster Bay (unfortunately, Sawyer’s cat ate them and died of arsenic poisoning). “He was a queer looker,” Sawyer recalled of Roosevelt in a newspaper,
The Adirondack Experience
, decades later, “but smart.” According to Sawyer, the oddest aspect of Roosevelt was that he didn’t “smoke, drink or swear.” Sawyer testified that Roosevelt had a puritanical streak lurking in everything he did and said. For example, two prominent New York City doctors—Dr. Wright and Dr. Loomis—spent an evening with Roosevelt and Sawyer at Blue Mountain Lake. After listening to the budding ornithologist pontificate, one of them concluded that Roosevelt was “the smartest idiot I ever saw.”
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What jumps out from “Journal of a Trip to the Adirondacks” is the way Roosevelt was now injecting the botanical history of trees and fauna into his wildlife narrative. No longer was it enough to record seeing a purple finch or a barn swallow from his canoe; now he also described the geographical surroundings in which he observed a blue jay or common sparrow, specifying whether the tree it was perched in was a white pine, balsam fir, or red spruce. Roosevelt enjoyed having the sweat shine on his face as he hiked the alpine terrain to see hapland, rosebay, diaspen-sia, mountain sandwort, and other vegetation native to the Adirondacks. His hope, as he took topographical notes about Saint Regis Lake that August and on follow-up visits in 1875 and 1877, was to write a booklet about the birds of the Adirondacks.
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But since Dr. C. Hart Merriam and
other top-notch naturalists had written seriously on Adirondacks wild-life, Roosevelt pragmatically realized that it was hard to add much to “the sum of human knowledge.”
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On each of these trips Roosevelt’s irreplaceable guide was Sawyer: a real outdoorsman, what loggers called a seven-sided son of a bitch, who knew every bit of the Adirondacks’ mid-mountain and cloud forests like the back of his hand. “The region more particularly dealt with is at an elevation of over 2000 feet, is strongly hilly, or one might almost say mountainous, and is thickly studded with small lakes and ponds whose outlets are narrow and very crooked streams,” Roosevelt recorded in his diary. “It is densely wooded; the few open places being the clearing around houses and the ‘slashes’ where the woods have been burned. The forests are chiefly evergreen (largely intermixed with birches, beeches, and maples, however); the bulk being composed of pines, balsams and spruces, with numbers of hemlocks on the ridges. In the low level lands there are frequently extensive tamarack swamps…. The characteristic features of the fauna of the region are, among mammals, the presence in small numbers of the larger carnivora and furbearing spieces; among birds the abundance of woodpeckers, the breeding of numerous warblers, and the presence of a number of northern species, as
Picoides arctus
[black-backed woodpecker],
Parus hudsonicus
[boreal chickadee],
Perisoreus canadensis
[gray jay],
Contopus borealis
[olive-sided flycatcher] and
Falcipen-nis canadensis
[spruce grouse].”
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Unable to find a black bear and uninterested in shooting white-tailed deer (which had been almost wiped out in upstate New York), Roosevelt instead ended up hunting muskrats and squirrels. Each specimen he bagged was studied for coloration and markings back at what Sawyer called the “Great Camp” Darwin would have approved of the young man’s detailed approach to his wildlife studies. Minor revelations about mammalogy were plentiful for Roosevelt. For the first time he understood why farmers considered chipmunks such a menace; he pulled eighteen wild peas out of a single pouch of one he shot. A highlight that first summer was Roosevelt’s hearing the far-off howl of an eastern timber wolf. (According to a study by the University of Toronto, wolves howl more frequently in August than any other month; Roosevelt was the beneficiary of this zoological fact
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). After hearing the wolf’s lonesome contact and reunion call, Roosevelt kept a special eye on underground burrows and rock caves where he knew
Canis lupus
packs lived in dens. He wanted to see one of the lupines with his own eyes—a feat he never accomplished.

But that was about it. Roosevelt’s most detailed, lively, and interesting
passages from the Adirondacks journals were his bird entries. Noting that there was a plethora of woodpeckers, Roosevelt successfully collected five species for his Roosevelt Museum. To Roosevelt, woodpeckers were an evolutionary link to a prehistoric era when giganotosauruses and stegosauruses roamed the prairies of North America. Each hammer of their beaks was interconnected to the world of trees and insects, and to time immemorial. The Adirondacks without an echo of a woodpecker sharpening its beak, he reasoned, would be deafening in their silence. “There is a grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin had written to end
On the Origin of Species
, “that, whilst this planet had gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
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Many of the birds Roosevelt collected and observed in the Adirondacks later became much less common and were placed on the National Audubon Society’s “Watch List.”
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There was, for example, the rare Bicknell’s thrush, a shy, buff-breasted, long-distance migrant whose call—“vee-ah”—Roosevelt enjoyed immensely. Even the wood thrush, common in the 1870s, found itself on the watch lists by late 2008, a casualty of the disappearance of extensive deciduous tracts of woodlands in upstate New York. To Roosevelt the wood thrush’s song at twilight—a rising and falling “ee-o-lee, ee-o-lay” as heard in the Adirondacks—was more beautiful than any other sound on earth.
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The world of the Adirondacks as presented by Sawyer and as heard with his own finely tuned ears caused Roosevelt to dream about heading out to Hawk’s Ridge in Duluth, to see great flocks of raptors in their autumnal glory. Like Audubon and Darwin, he would refuse to become an indoor naturalist. From Minnesota he could bundle up in fur and sheepskin like Zebulon Pike and go southward to rendezvous with the headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers. The West was tugging on Roosevelt’s imagination like a mighty altar. “A naturalist can find employment any where—can gather both instruction and amusement where others would die of
ennui
and idleness,” Captain Mayne Reid had said in
The Boy Hunters
. “Remember! There are ‘sermons in stones, and books in running brooks.’”
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II

When young Theodore was growing up, the interior American West was still a raw wilderness of snow-choked mountains, pristine forest, black lava rock, unknown canyons, and a buffalo-trodden prairie larger than Europe. Because Roosevelt had never traveled west of the Erie Canal,
his understanding of the American West in the 1870s derived primarily from newspaper accounts and photographs (with the invention of the portable wet-plate camera, images of Pikes Peak, Old Faithful, and the Three Sisters of the Tetons were now regularly appearing). Although the westward expansion of the 1870s had no artist to equal Mathew Brady during the Civil War, the photographer W. H. Jackson beautifully documented Yellowstone. Also, Timothy O’Sullivan did a fantastic job of capturing the raw natural essence of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. Snow squalls, scorching desert sun, hailstorms, dense fog, and steep cliffs were among the many natural obstacles these photographers faced. Emulating the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran with his camera, Jackson took sweeping panoramic portraits of the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, Colorado; O’Sullivan did the same with ancient ruins at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Both places were later saved as national sites by President Theodore Roosevelt.
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But something else exciting was occurring in western photography that elated the young Roosevelt. Photographs started to appear in periodicals celebrating the explorers of the late 1860s and 1870s. There was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer standing over his first hunted grizzly bear (taken by Wild Illingworth), and Major John Wesley Powell on horseback talking to an Apache guide (courtesy of Jack Hillers). Like many other teenage boys, Roosevelt swooned over these photographic images of the frontier, as he had over Audubon’s birds and Catlin’s Indians. The Cascades and the Bitterroots had now been opened up to him as stunning visual experiences. Certainly many of these post–Civil War explorers—Custer and Powell leap first to mind—used photography as self-advertisements for their loftiest exploits. Young Theodore, however, saw them through rose-tinted glasses, in a blur of romance, as explorers braver than brave.

At the end of the Civil War new geographical revelations were appearing almost daily in the public press, along with pictures, because the U.S. Congress was eager to inventory the mineral wealth west of the Mississippi River.
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The U.S. government held title to more than 1.2 billion acres—mostly west of Kansas City—but had surveyed only about one-sixth of this land. In March 1867 Congress approved sweeping geological studies of the western lands by the General Land Office and Corps of Engineers. Suddenly, engineers educated at West Point were the new trailblazers in the Rocky Mountains and beyond. Every square yard of foothills, badlands, thin forests, or drainage ditches would be mapped. On March 3, 1879, Congress created the U.S. Geological Survey to inven
tory the national domain acreage that President Jefferson had acquired from the Louisiana Purchase, and much more.
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With so much mineral-rich land open for the taking, speculators were scheming to grab stakes, mine gold, discover oil, dig coal, control wheat markets, fish out rivers, and clear-cut virgin forests. This entrepreneurial fever also provided a commercial opening for trained civil engineers, geologists, and biologists (to a limited degree). Railroad workers and miners were greatly in demand, as were cartographers and surveyors. Clarence King, first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, noted that 1867 marked a pivotal point when “science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”
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The historian William H. Goetzmann, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
Exploration and Empire
, broke down the nineteenth-century exploration of the American West into three distinct phases: (1) the Lewis and Clark era (1803 to 1840), when the desire was to gather practical information and discover likely trade routes; (2) the manifest destiny years (1840 to 1865), when families (and railroad companies) headed west looking for fertile land, natural resources, and big bonanzas; and (3) the post–Civil War “frontier laboratory” phase (1860 to 1900), when botanists, paleontologists, ethnographers, and engineers sought scientific information. This third period was the time of the “Great Surveys,” when a wave of scientists headed west for reconnaissance and inventories. “It was also a time for sober second thoughts as to the proper nature, purpose, and future directions of Western Settlement,” Goetzmann wrote. “Incipient conservation and planning in the national interest became in vogue, signifying the way that the West had come of age and its future had become securely wedded to the fortunes of the nation.”
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But it wasn’t until March 3, 1885 that a Biological Survey—a U.S. Department of Agriculture unit within the Division of Entomology that Roosevelt championed like a fight promoter—was established.
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When Roosevelt was growing up, the federal government did show tiny signs of a burgeoning new awareness that protecting wildlife and animals mattered. On June 30, 1864, for example, when Roosevelt was
only five years old, in what is widely considered the initial federal intervention on behalf of wildlife resources, Congress transferred the Yosemite Valley from the public domain to the state of California. Even though Sacramento would eventually return the Yosemite Valley to the U.S. government, in 1906, an important precedent was established, for in the transfer agreement California agreed to “provide against the wanton destruction of fish and game found within said park, and against their capture or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit.”
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A timeless hero to Roosevelt was President Ulysses S. Grant, particularly for his strategic skill in securing a Union victory in the Civil War. Just as T.R. turned fourteen in 1872, and was taking an interest in the American West, President Grant signed the bill creating, at least on paper, Yellowstone National Park. Enthralled by stories of grizzly bears, time-clock geysers, petrified logs, and massive elk herds—all of which appeared in his favorite boys’ magazine
Our Young Folks
—Roosevelt vowed to visit the new national park someday. Two great interests—General Grant and American wildlife—had come together in the Yellowstone story. Unfortunately, President Grant didn’t fully comprehend the thuggishness of western poachers. The 2.2-million-acre park had no uniformed police force (wardens) to enforce the law, and wildlife was killed there indiscriminately until 1894, when the Yellowstone Park Protection Act clamped down on the criminals.
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