The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (16 page)

This anonymity, however, didn’t last forever. A series of admiring articles about Seth Green’s upstate hatchery appeared in New York City newspapers. His discovery resulted overnight in a rush to create trout ponds everywhere. Such fish farms were seen as a highly profitable investment, an easier way to get fish onto the nation’s dinner tables than fishing in streams and lakes with rod and reel or nets. Green was suddenly in high demand as a teacher and demonstrator. In 1867 New England fish commissioners hired Green to start propagating the American shad on the Connecticut River, where stocks had been seriously depleted.
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Although he was subjected to torrents of antiscientific ridicule from disbelieving fishermen, Green carefully erected dams, waste gates, and hatching boxes in four New England states. Fishermen on the Connecticut River, now deeply resentful of Green’s wizardry, vandalized his hatchery equipment and cut holes through all his nets. Undaunted, Green began keeping watch over his homemade boxes, leaping out of bushes in the morning hours with a loaded Winchester to frighten would-be saboteurs away.

For a while, Green had a bigger worry than angry fishermen: it turned out that shad couldn’t be hatched through artificial impregnation the same way trout were. From a way station in Holyoke, Massachusetts, he experimented with burying the eggs in gravel placed in the troughs. Every day he made scientific adjustments to his contraptions, but the shad eggs wouldn’t hatch. Despite the continued harassment of local fishermen, Green’s stoic persistence and surgical repairing eventually paid off. When he checked the boxes one afternoon, the shad had hatched. It was an important moment: he had established that shad eggs could hatch in only thirty-three hours, far less time than trout eggs took. And his success rate was even higher: Green claimed that 999 out of 1,000 shad eggs hatched under his new protocol. By the time he closed his Holyoke shop in 1872, Green had released 40 million shad into the Connecticut River. But the river men weren’t wrong. Before Seth Green arrived on
the scene, shad had been selling at 100 for forty dollars. By the time he finished replenishing the river, the market price per 100 had plummeted to three dollars.

Although Green received excellent press coverage, due in part to his
Trout Culture
, published in 1870,
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New England’s fish commissioners gave him only a measly stipend of $200 for all his innovative hard work. (By contrast, in 1871 the California Fish and Game Commission introduced hatchery shad into the Sacramento River and paid Green handsomely for inspiring the hatcheries
⁸⁵
).Outraged at his shabby treatment by the New Englanders, Green accused the commissioners of not understanding the magnitude of his accomplishment. His goal was to restock America’s lakes, rivers, and streams, but he needed a sponsor for such a huge undertaking.

It was at this point that Green joined forces with Robert B. Roosevelt, the nation’s richest enthusiast for fish culture. Using his political contacts in Albany, R.B.R. had already petitioned the legislature to launch the state fishing commission. When Green was appointed to the commission’s oversight board, the state of New York provided him with a $1,000 grant to inventory the Hudson River shad population and then start a hatchery operation.

At first, the team of Roosevelt and Green made a tactical blunder in initiating public fish hatcheries in New York. The folksy Green went along the banks of the Hudson, telling groups of river men that the hatchery movement was about to make “fish cheap on the open markets.” It was poor public relations, and the New Yorkers were soon acting like their Connecticut neighbors. The fishermen used oars, axes, and sledge hammers to smash shad-hatching boxes, destroying all Green’s initial work.

An infuriated R.B.R. cursed the “inborn cussedness of human nature” and suggested that wardens were needed on the Hudson River to protect state property. Nevertheless, for a few months R.B.R. also sought a rapprochement with the river men. But when Roosevelt heard that Green had been physically harassed by river men for placing hatchery boxes in the Hudson—cigarette butts were flicked at Green and dead shad were thrown in his face—he headed to river towns such as Beacon and Poughkeepsie, threatening to have the saboteurs clapped into prison. “Furious, Roosevelt went in person and harangued the men,” a daughter of R.B.R. wrote in her diary. “Anyone who knew him would realise that this must have been to him not only a relief but a genuine pleasure. He had a surpassing command of irony, sarcasm, and vitriolic incentive com
bined with a powerfully paternal method of appealing to one’s better nature, that would bring a sob to the throat of the most callous and horny-handed son of toil. So long as the latter was unaware that it was merely forensic eloquence…the fishermen had no chance.”
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Over the years a strong friendship developed between R.B.R. and Green. Whenever Roosevelt took his yacht to Newfoundland or Maine, Green went along in search of nature’s secrets. Constantly trying to update the general public on scientific improvements, in 1879 they cowrote
Fish Hatching and Fish Catching
and received solid reviews. Their explorations in 1883 of wild Florida’s “abundance, beauty and fragrance of flowers” resulted in another book,
Florida and the Game Water Birds
. In it, Green was portrayed as a stubborn foil, continually asking unanswerable questions about local diamond-backed terrapins, stingrays, and sharks.
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Taken as a whole, Florida was described by R.B.R. as a “floral El Dorado.”
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Never before had he seen so many ducks and waterfowl. For an educational appendix to
Florida and the Game Water Birds
, R.B.R. provided a brief paragraph about each avian species he encountered in Florida. He was building on the traditions of William Bartram and John James Audubon. “There are no dangerous animals in Florida, only a few of Eve’s old enemies,” R.B.R. wrote, “and the sportsman is safer in the woods at night under the moss-covered trees and on his moss-constructed mattress than in his bed in the family mansion on Fifth Avenue.”
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The pliable Green, however, wasn’t always just a sidekick to R.B.R.’s Huck Finn. He did write Robert B. Roosevelt a letter later that year as his rich friend was fueling speculation about running for mayor of New York City. Green saw that his employer’s pigheadedness would make political compromise impossible. “I know you have a big solid head,” he wrote to Roosevelt. “But the ware and tare of if you was mayor of New York would be more than it would be on the yacht. There you don’t have but a few to conquer & some times you find you are wrong and have to take water…. I know you would be always right if you was mayor but there is so many thieves they would keep you awake nights. I know you would get the best of them but it would take a heap of work.”
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Truth be told, R.B.R. was enjoying rural life on Long Island’s Great South Bay (a lagoon) too much to be mayor of any city. In 1873 he had paid $14,000 for a two-acre estate near Sayville. The
Suffolk County News
described the estate as “a comfortable but unpretentious villa.”91 Living in a dream of bliss, R.B.R. named the house Lotus Lake and enjoyed playing a new role, that of gentleman farmer, yachtsman, hard-clammer, and authority on fish. Sailing around Fire Island, an alarmed R.B.R. de
clared that New York City’s waste was killing off the eelgrass. Whenever free time was available, he read up on pirates like Blackbeard and Captain Redeye. Playing at being a farmer gave him material for an ongoing spoof about the vicissitudes of growing cucumbers and black wax yellow-pod beans. He joined the Suffolk County Agriculture Society and kept diaries about his farming triumphs and woes.
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Regularly, however, while at Lotus Lake, he corresponded with Spencer F. Baird, head of the U.S. Fish and Fisheries Commission, about the need for hatcheries and an Audubon-quality “fish plates” book of all the American species.
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R.B.R.’s voluminous diaries about fish, crabs, frogs, and turtles, kept through the mid-1870s, are even more telling of his daily commitment to studying nature than his cucumber and beanstalk logs. Here is an example of his science-laden style:

V

Robert B. Roosevelt obsessed over a varied group of wildlife species. And, why not, since he was Dr. Doolittle incarnate? Sometimes he would sit in front of Madison Square with George Francis Train, who published his own quirky newsletter, feeding crumbs to sparrows. Tremendously proud that the Roosevelt coat of arms showed ostrich feathers in plumes, R.B.R. said that they were “always borne with their tops curled over.”
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His personal papers are filled with long, well-written observations on oysters, including their alleged aphrodisiac properties. Minnows were another specialty of his, and he pioneered in studying their spring spawn. He took copious notes on eels, which he collected in tanks to scrutinize. By 1876, in fact, he was considered America’s authority on eels, although he admitted to not fully understanding their role in the food chain. Spencer
Fullerton Baird was known to collect snakes in a barrel so R.B.R. decided to one-up him with eels. “Eels—are they kin to snakes?” he once asked in his diary. “We shall leave that question to Darwin and Huxley. You know they are the leaders of modern thought; and it takes a thought leader to find out a thing of that kind. They say eels are a connecting link between the batrachians and the true fishes, and, standing in that position, they are no kin, or, if any, very little, to snakes; though they may be cousin-german to a salamander or mud-puppy. But there is another question: how did the eel get into this position of middle-men? Did he evolute, so to speak, from his cousin catfish? Or did he involute from his cousin mud-puppy? Or did he proceed from that great practical evolutionist, his uncle bull-frog, who used to be a tadpole?”
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Robert B. Roosevelt’s unpublished notes on species are cheeky and he asks the same kind of Darwinian era questions as his precocious nephew Theodore. If Darwin could write entire chapters on orchids and beehives, R.B.R. saw no reason not to do a similar study on oysters and eels. Like most naturalists, R.B.R. valued observation more than reasoning, so his notes on fish—shad, pickerel, bass, bream, and sturgeon, in particular—are fiercely detailed. And few alive knew more about frogs—the animal, he claimed, “easiest victimized”—than Roosevelt. Whereas some naturalists dreamed of climbing Clingmans Dome in the Great Smokies or observing timber wolves at Isle Royale, R.B.R. fantasized about visiting a pond in Illinois where 250,000 frogs were believed to live.

For far too long, environmental history has obscurred R.B.R.’s influence on his nephew’s desire to become a naturalist. You might say the future president was a hybrid—half his father, the other half Uncle Rob. Clearly, Robert B. Roosevelt had taught his nephew that ruinous times would ensue if waterways weren’t properly managed. Later in life, T.R. collected live animals exactly the way R.B.R. did. The conservationist books and articles T.R. wrote about the American West were merely more sophisticated versions of
Superior Fishing
and
Florida and the Game Water Birds
. It’s not a stretch to believe that T.R. inherited his idea of owning a beautiful Long Island estate surrounded by teeming wildlife—what became his beloved Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay in 1887—directly from his parents’ Tranquility and his Uncle Rob’s Lotus Lake. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to visit R.B.R. on Long Island, even Oscar Wilde, who arrived one afternoon with a “wreath of daisies” for a hatband.
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To anybody interested in the angler’s life, R.B.R. was a true celebrity as an author and activist. His motto—“Remember, no man ever caught a trout in a dirty place”—galvanized anglers to support antipollution
laws.
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Everybody, it seemed, wanted to fish with Robert B. Roosevelt. So as Theodore Roosevelt prepared to attend Harvard University in the fall of 1876, his uncle was already an irrepressible crusader for fish and wild-life.
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Certainly every natural history professor T.R. took a course with at Harvard would have known him as R.B.R.’s nephew; R.B.R.’s fame was that widespread in biology circles. Robert’s books, while quirky, were honored at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Robert had earned a place in the history of pioneering conservationists. “Robert B. Roosevelt was among the first to understand that our wild species were being decimated,” Ernest Schwiebert, the renowned author of
Trout
and
Matching the Hatch
, wrote. “Our cities and factories were already spewing their waste into our waters. Timber was cut with a mindless rapacity, and land poorly suited to agriculture was being stripped for farmsteads. Roosevelt worked tirelessly for conservation.”
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I

A
t age thirteen, when Theodore was deemed mature enough, his father sent him on a 500-mile excursion by train and stagecoach from Manhattan Island to Moosehead Lake to convalesce in a serene alpine environment after his bouts of asthma. The lake was the largest in Maine, with more than 400 miles of rugged shoreline, most of it untrampled wilderness in 1871. All was going well for Roosevelt on the unescorted journey to the lake until he arrived at the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad depot and station. As he waited for a stagecoach bound for Moosehead Lake, a couple of local youths began taunting him for being a sissy. A nauseated, demoralized feeling rose up behind Roosevelt’s breastbone. Timidly, he put up his dukes and in return got pummeled. “They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me,” he recalled in
An Autobiography
. “The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”
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From his lakefront lodge, Roosevelt, piqued by the hazing incident, embarrassed by his feebleness, stared zombie-like at the blue water, which swallowed strands of dark green spruces along its shoreline.
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Instead of resenting his tormentors, he envied their hardiness, brawn, and condensed force. Following the humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt made a pact with himself: he was going to become a man of true physical strength. Boxing, weight lifting, calisthenics, hiking—he would do whatever it took. Someday, he promised, those same bullies would treat him with respect. “The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could have taught me,” he recalled. “I made up my mind…that I would not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by training.”
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In a sense, Roosevelt was determined to evolve from prey to predator. He started pumping weights and doing push-ups regularly, and he also
improved his skills as an equestrian and marksman. Meanwhile, his bird collecting in the woodlands of New York continued unabated. Whenever time permitted, Roosevelt had a birder friend accompany him on these tramps. His usual companion was Frederick Osborn, an irresolute ornithologist who, like himself, was in awe of God’s wild creatures; no nest, egg, or bird sighting failed to enthrall Osborn. Memories of their bird-watching times together remained with Roosevelt for the remainder of his life, one more vivid than another.

One winter afternoon in the 1870s near Bear Mountain—a breathtaking rise on the west bank of the Hudson River—Roosevelt and Osborn went on a hunt. Full of anticipation, Roosevelt had journeyed upriver from Manhattan to see Osborn, who lived in nearby Garrison, a ferry and railroad depot directly across the river from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Much of the forest around Bear Mountain was still pristine, but quarrymen had of late been mining toprock (basalt) to provide building material for eastern metropolises. Clomping down a snowy path, they suddenly stopped dead in their tracks. It was a moment of unprecedented excitement. In front of them was a flock of gorgeous red crossbills. Both Theodore and Frederick had long coveted this species to add to their collections. They were determined to be the very best of the new breed of post-Darwinic ornithologists.

In unison Roosevelt and Osborn rapidly fired their shotguns in a succession of blasts, three or four times each. When the dust settled, finch carcasses lay on the stump-filled field. Red crossbills—with different bills from their brethren in the West—could now be added to the bounty bags of pine siskins, common redpolls, and pine grosbeaks. Working without hunting dogs, Roosevelt and Osborn anxiously sprinted to retrieve their prized birds from the ground. But Roosevelt tripped on a concealed rock or tree root, stumbled forward, and barely recovered his balance. He was smacked in the face by a low-hanging branch or twig and his spectacles went flying. Half-blind, squinting, and shaking off disorientation, he quickly recollected himself and scanned the ground. “But dim though my vision was, I could still make out the red birds lying on the snow; and to me they were treasures of such importance,” he wrote years later, “that I abandoned all thought of my glasses and began a nearsighted hunt for my quarry.”
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Once Roosevelt secured the red crossbills he went searching for his glasses, but in vain. From that moment onward he made a pact with himself always to carry a reserve pair of spectacles—with rims made out of steel—in his breast pocket. (When Roosevelt ran for president as the
candidate of the Bull Moose Party in 1912, he was shot in the chest by an anarchist in Milwaukee. The extra bird-watching spectacles absorbed the impact of the bullet and probably saved his life.
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)

Just four months after the day of the red crossbills, Osborn—whose father, William, was president of the Illinois Central—died in a river accident. Roosevelt was emotionally crushed by his friend’s death. His mind held a montage of all the wilderness tramps they had gone on together. Osborn, he loyally believed, was a rising prince, as kindhearted as the day was long, the companion of
belle jeunesse
. His death jarred Roosevelt’s outlook on life. With a contracted brow and grimace on his face it became the day the fun stopped. “He was drowned, in his gallant youth,” Roosevelt mourned decades later. “But he comes as vividly before my eyes now as if he were still alive.”
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Losing his favorite birding side-kick was emotionally tough on Roosevelt, but his naturalist journals continued without a hitch. Whenever he found a flock of sandpipers or a delicate nest of golden-crowned kinglets—to cite just two examples from that spring—he’d dutifully record the observations in notebooks labeled with pseudoscientific titles like “Remarks on the Zoology of Oyster Bay” or “Field Book of Zoology.” Using Elliott Coues’s excellent
Key to North American Birds
—first published in 1872—as his principal classification tool, Roosevelt was determined to carry the ornithological torch for both Osborn and himself. Depression, he decided, simply wasn’t allowed. March, after the snow melted, left the ground parched. April, as poets often wrote, was a fickle month. But in May—the month when Osborn died, in his prime—there was a sense of rehabilitation in the air. As any naturalist knew, death must always precede rebirth. When the May dandelions arrived, everything turned green, the migratory birds returned to New York, and the fields were filled with thistle and thine. “I just begin to realize it,” he wrote to his mother, who was traveling in Georgia, “the birds even are commencing to come back. While in the Park [Central Park] the other day I saw great numbers of robins, uttering their cheery notes from almost every grove. That winter had only just departed was evident from the number of little snowbirds (clad in black with white waist coats) which were about.”
*
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If any American writer caught Roosevelt’s attention in the 1870s it was Coues. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while John Tyler was president, Coues had lived a storybook life as a western man of science. During
the Civil War he served at Fort Whipple, Arizona, as an assistant surgeon. Later he was appointed to Fort Randall, South Dakota, as a naturalist for the U.S. Northern Boundary Commission. Although he was considered one of the few top-rated surgeons west of the Mississippi River, Coues preferred writing wildlife books to performing tonsillectomies and amputations. His
Key to North American Birds
made him the heir apparent to Audubon. Although he served the Geological Survey of the Territories from 1876 to 1880 as a secretary and naturalist (under the supervision of F. V. Hayden), Coues eventually quit and returned to Arizona to document the amazing variety of migratory birds that wintered at such prime grounds as the Chiricahua Mountains and Patagonia Lake.
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Biographers of Theodore Roosevelt have dizzied themselves trying to monitor their subject’s travels between Manhattan Island, Moosehead Lake, the Hudson River valley, the New Jersey Palisades, the Adirondacks, and Oyster Bay from 1874 to 1876, before he went to Harvard. Restless in the extreme, Roosevelt switched locales as regularly as a salesman or trail guide. In the two years before he entered Harvard, he tried to get away from West Fifty-Seventh Street on nature excursions as often as possible, usually alone. Instead of Osborn, Coues’s
Key
was his new companion, and he religiously followed the books’ systematic standards of trinomial nomenclature (taxonomic classification of subspecies).

Often, however, when he was studying foreign languages or arithmetic under the guidance of his tutor, Arthur Cutler, Roosevelt’s mind drifted to the Adirondack timberlands and the Long Island meadows, daydreaming about troops of new birds for his collection. Every time he could escape from Cutler’s apron strings, he made a beeline for Oyster Bay, part of the Eastern Flyway for migratory birds, eager to hear reedy wails and lovely carols. Whenever Cutler—who now prided himself on being headmaster of the Cutler School of New York—tried regimenting Theodore and getting him to focus on French or Greek, his prize student’s attention instead drifted to meditations on plebian robins and exotic waterbirds.
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“The study of Natural History was his chief recreation then as it continued to be,” Cutler recalled later. “He had an unusually large collection of birds and small animals; shot and mounted by himself and ranging in habitat from Egypt to the woods of Pennsylvania. In his excursions outside the city, his rifle [actually a shotgun] was always with him, and the outfit of a taxidermist was in use on every camping trip.”
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That autumn, Roosevelt’s natural history journals document eight visits to the North Shore of Long Island in two months. Even though Roosevelt kept bird counts doggedly, even fiercely, he sometimes pan
icked over his lack of ornithological expertise. When the Oyster Bay fields turned dark and the nighthawks were no longer doing arabesques, Roosevelt would study the frail skeletons of doves and pigeons in his collection. Unlike those of other vertebrates, many of these bird’s bones were hollow tubes. The larger the bird, Roosevelt noticed, the more hollow the bones were. Thanks to Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, Roosevelt understood this to be a result of evolution—the lighter the bird, the easier it was to fly. Staying up late, long past the shifting dusk, though his parents usually retired early, Roosevelt pondered each avian’s aerodynamic design, fascinated that only ostriches and penguins had abandoned flight. Throughout these ritualistic midnight inspections, Roosevelt bore down as a scientist, unemotional and sleepless.

Roosevelt sometimes worked eight or nine hours a day on ornithological pursuits when he was in Oyster Bay, and his descriptions of birds increased in vividness and freshness. Each bird Roosevelt saw in a field or grove attracted his serious attention. Even the coarse materials songbirds used to build nests or the exact number of wing beats it took to defy gravity came under his careful scrutiny, in a way Robert B. Roosevelt would have approved. “It becomes very fat in August and is at all times insectivorous,” Theodore wrote of the white-throated sparrow. “It has a singularly sweet and plaintive song, uttered with clear, whistling notes; it sings all day long especially if the weather be cloudly, and I have frequently heard it at night, but its favorite time is in the morning when it begins long before daybreak; indeed, excepting the thrushes, it sings earlier than any other bird. The song consists generally of two long notes, the second the highest and with a rising inflection, followed by five or six short ones (as duuduu), but there are many variations. A very common one is to have but two short notes (as uu); sometimes the second note is broken into two (as uuu). It sings all through the summer.”
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On July 8, 1874, Roosevelt shot, skinned, and mounted a male passenger pigeon in Oyster Bay. What interested him the most was the pigeon’s esophagus crop, the sac where food was stored to later regurgitate and feed hatchlings. This bird also had a crop to produce a special milk for its hungry babies. Because these pigeons were still plentiful, Roosevelt wasn’t overenthusiastic about them in his journal. During the Jefferson era, there had been millions of these tan-and-burned-orange birds in America, huge flocks migrating regularly from north to south. The ornithologist Alexander Wilson, in fact, once recorded more than 2 million in a single flock flying over Kentucky. Since passenger pigeons were edible and marketable, their slaughter was at full throttle in the middle of the
nineteenth century when Roosevelt shot his specimen at Oyster Bay. One New York man, in fact, boasted of killing 10,000 pigeons in a single day. The growth of cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago hastened their destruction by ruining their natural habitat.

Meanwhile, while birding, Roosevelt had started “seeing” Edith Carow of New York. Edith’s father, Charles Carow, was perhaps Robert B. Roosevelt’s closest fly-fishing friend. “Charles cast the fly simply to perfection,” R.B.R. wrote, “and with whom I have fished many and many a day on the waters of old Long Island and elsewhere as well.”
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At Oyster Bay Theodore and Edith argued over the merits of popular fiction, played board games, and rowed around the Long Island Sound. Everything about Edith—her sharp quick eyes, playful countenance, and air of general smartness—appealed to Theodore.
¹³
Too young to really understand love, Theodore nevertheless knew this much: Edith, who was destined to become his second wife, was
the
girl he wanted to impress. So they dated. Nothing too serious, just occasional hand-holding or good-night hugs. They were very young, and whatever romance existed between them didn’t last long. Once Theodore arrived at Harvard, he quickly found another girlfriend, who came from Chestnut Hill in Boston.
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