The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (35 page)

The club had awakened a national conscience pertaining to the wanton destruction of America’s limited natural resources. Like cavalry officers on a mad charge, Roosevelt and Grinnell often went to Washington, D.C., to demand congressional action on behalf of wildlife. Their message was as clear as a bell. Shame fell upon senators who tried to cross words with Roosevelt and company. “Those who used to boast of their slaughter are now ashamed of it,” a triumphant Grinnell declared in 1889, referring to the club’s success, during its first year, in convincing Americans about the need for regulated hunting and for federal parks; “and it is becoming
recognized fact that a man who wastefully destroys big game, whether for the market, or only for heads, has nothing of the true sportsman about him.”
¹⁶

II

While Grinnell used
Forest and Stream
to promote the Boone and Crockett Club during 1888, Roosevelt subtly did the same in
Century
magazine.
¹⁷
The six long articles T.R. wrote for
Century
about conservation, ranching, and hunting were expertly illustrated by Frederic Remington, who recalled the landscape of the Badlands from a trip there in 1881. If Custer could take his own photographer along with him to the Black Hills in 1874, Roosevelt saw no reason not to have Remington illustrate his Dakota exploits for posterity. Roosevelt wanted his likeness to exude dignity, stoicism, and righteousness. Despite all his frenetic activity and the difficulty he faced daily, pouring out words as quickly as ideas came to him, Roosevelt preferred being portrayed by Remington (and later by others) as coolheaded and manly—a modern fictional counterpart would be Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit
. Reporters enjoyed covering Roosevelt’s bombastic side, but he himself felt that his most impressive quality was fundamental decency.

Remington would soon become nearly as famous Roosevelt. By the time Roosevelt had recruited him, Remington, a native of Canton, New York, had sketched cavalrymen, bronco busters, mountain trappers, desert rats, cowboys, and Indians. (In fact, he had just finished illustrating Elizabeth Custer’s
Tenting of the Plains
, to modest acclaim.
¹⁸
) Like Roosevelt—and Buffalo Bill, who in 1887 was performing in Great Britain to capacity crowds—Remington knew how to strike a mythic note when portraying the settlement of the American West.
¹⁹
Yet, to his credit, Remington, not a particularly talkative man, wasn’t interested in the bogus myths of the West such as El Dorado or the Northwest Passage. Like Roosevelt, he wanted to present the Rockies, the Great Plains, and Southwest in a factually accurate way, sketching with enterprise and precision whatever he saw. Belief in Darwin and the science surrounding that belief—humans evolving from apes, natural selection, and survival of the fittest—were also an important component of Remington’s artistry.

Although they collaborated brilliantly on the articles for
Century
, Remington didn’t personally care for Roosevelt, who was known to mock sheep farmers (Remington had once herded sheep in Kansas). “No man,” Roosevelt claimed, “can associate with sheep and maintain his self-
respect.”
*
²⁰
This rift over sheep was rather silly, for on the face of it, the two men had much in common: an Ivy League education (Remington had gone to Yale); a belief in the strenuous life and Darwin’s and Huxley’s biology; and, of course, a shared interest in wildlife, ranching, cowboys, and the American West in general. Neither of them enjoyed fake western stories about jackelopes, bigfoots, or ring-tailed roarers. But Roosevelt’s blue blood rankled the scrappy, middle-class Remington, who was often stone broke and begging for freelance assignments.
²¹

Frederic Remington’s
Buffalo Hunter Spitting a Bullet into a Gun
(ink wash and watercolor on paper, 1892) was a Roosevelt favorite. This illustration was created for an edition of Francis Parkman’s
The Oregon Trail.
Frederic Remington’s
Buffalo Hunter Spitting a Bullet into a Gun. (Courtesy of the Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, New York)

Inherited privilege, in fact, annoyed Remington no end. And to Roosevelt, Remington was just a gun for hire, a talented illustrator from whom he had commissioned sixty-four illustrations (plus another nineteen for
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
). Not for a second, however, did either man regret their collaboration. Sheep or no sheep, Remington’s illustrations couldn’t have been finer. But Roosevelt blanched at the idea
of Remington as an equal and never once considered him worthy of membership in the Boone and Crockett Club. To Roosevelt, at least before the Spanish-American War, Remington was a plebian, not fit to share a private club’s dais with high-caliber naturalists like Grinnell and Parkman.

III

In the late summer of 1888, having finished
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
, Roosevelt once again went on a big game hunt. His destination was the dense coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest and his prey was the woodland caribou (
Rangifer tarandus caribou
). As a Harvard student, Roosevelt had tried to hunt caribou in the North Woods of Maine and failed miserably. Now, with his library walls at Sagamore Hill filled with North American big game trophies, the lack of a caribou head was palpable. According to Grinnell, Roosevelt’s best chance of finding a herd was in the Idaho Territory, high in the Selkirk Mountains along the border of the Washington Territory. So off Roosevelt went on the Northern Pacific Railroad for a stopover in Medora and then on to the Idaho village of Kootenai on the north side of Lake Pend Oreille. Along the way, whenever possible, Roosevelt worked on the first volumes of
The Winning of the West
. No time was ever wasted when Roosevelt was in a railway car, for he always turned his compartment into a rolling library.

Never before, not even in the Bighorns, had Roosevelt encountered mountains such as the Selkirks. At one point he could see the Columbia River bending and twisting through gorges lined with towering pines. Much of the brush-choked forest had never been explored.
*
It was delightful to feel like a naturalist explorer again. “The frowning and rugged Selkirks came down sheer to the water’s edge,” Roosevelt recalled. “So straight were the rock walls that it was difficult for us to land with our batteau, save at the places where the rapid mountain torrents entered the lake. As these streams of swift water broke from their narrow gorges they made little deltas of level ground, with beaches of fine white sand; and the streambanks were edged with cottonwood and poplar, their shimmering foliage relieving the sombre coloring of the evergreen forest.”
²²

The village of Kootenai was the head of the famous Wild Horse Trail, a pack path that led to mineral-rich mines near Fort Steele, British Columbia. Roosevelt—with old John Willis (who wasn’t attentive to hygiene) and a Kootenai Indian named Ammál (who was built like a heavyweight
boxer) as guides—traveled up the swift Pack River on the Wild Horse Trail and over the Continental Divide to the Kootenai River. From there they floated down the bone-chilling river in a pirogue, eventually making camp alongside Kootenai Lake. This sheet of crystal-clear water was considered the heart of caribou country. Situated in a long valley between the Selkirk and Purcell mountains, the glassy lake was approximately seventy miles in length.
²³
Naturally, they set up camp at a level-place. Roosevelt was so anxious for caribou that he bathed his first morning in Idaho before the sun broke.

Idaho was God’s country to Roosevelt, even though the hunting started out slowly. One afternoon, while eating frying-pan bread by a brook, Roosevelt spied an ouzel feeding. Suddenly a water shrew swam into a shallow eddy nearby. Roosevelt had read about this rare little mammal—
Sorex palustris
—in zoology books over the years, but this was his first real-life encounter with it. The water shrew’s habitat was northern forest streams surrounded by fallen logs and lichen-covered rocks. Roosevelt’s first thoughts were of Spencer Fullerton Baird at the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. C. Hart Merriam at the Department of Agriculture. He knew that they would have “coveted it greatly” for their collections.
²⁴
Forgetting about caribou for the moment, Roosevelt captured the feisty little shrew and studied it carefully. The Kootenai guide, Ammál, who had taken to calling Roosevelt “Boston Man,” shook his head in disbelief at the glee his client felt about a rodent.
²⁵
“It was a soft, pretty creature,” Roosevelt wrote, “dark above, snow-white below, with a very long tail.” After inspecting it alive, Roosevelt killed the shrew, turning the skin inside and letting it dry. Throughout his days in Idaho, he treated the specimen as a prized possession. Too much handling of the skin, Roosevelt believed, owing to chemicals on one’s hands, would lead to discoloration. When Roosevelt returned to New York he sent the shrew to Baird in Washington, D.C., where it became part of the Smithsonian’s natural history collection.
²⁶

But Roosevelt hadn’t traveled all the way to Idaho so that a solitary water shrew could be put on display at the Smithsonian. Eventually he killed a black bear, one with “two curious brown streaks down its back,” and fried its meat for dinner. The caribou, however, remained elusive. Hiking up steep mountain crests and the faces of cliffs, a frustrated Roosevelt couldn’t even find a caribou trail. Willis often ran ahead to reconnoiter, but without luck. At dusk Roosevelt’s party felt removed from even the back of civilization. “Indeed the night sounds of these great stretches of mountain woodlands were very weird and strange,”
Roosevelt wrote. “Though I have often and for long periods dwelt and hunted in the wilderness, yet I never before so well understood why the people who live in lonely forest regions are prone to believe in elves, wood spirits, and other beings of an unseen world.”
²⁷

Back in New York, Roosevelt raved about the unsurpassed beauty of Idaho—and it was also pretty good for the hunter’s pot. While Grinnell promoted Montana’s Flathead Range as the most gorgeous part of the Rocky Mountains, Roosevelt championed the stupendous ranges of Idaho. Perhaps because he had so fully documented wildlife in the Dakota Territory, he was proud to add the topmost peaks of the Idaho Territory to his area of expertise. Before long he was writing about Idaho’s “hoary woodchucks [marmots],” “timid conies [pikas],” and “troops of noisy, parti-colored Clark’s crows.”
²⁸

When Roosevelt became president thirteen years after the caribou hunt, saving wild Idaho—which had become a state in 1889—ranked high on his agenda. On January 15, 1907, he created Caribou National Forest, about 200 miles east of Boise. The following year, on July 1, he virtually turned the state into one vast wildlife preserve, setting aside millions of acres in seventeen new national forests with his presidential pen: Pocatello, Cache, Challis, Salmon, Clearwater, Coeur d’Alene, Pend Orielle, Kaniksu, Weiser, Nez Perce, Idaho, Payette, Boise, Sawtooth, Lemhi, Targhee, and Bitterroot.
²⁹
Seldom, if ever, had a hunt resulted in such a momentous conservationist gesture on behalf of wild creatures.

IV

That fall, Roosevelt agreed to campaign for the Republican presidential nominee, Benjamin Harrison. Huge crowds came out to hear Theodore as he and Edith traversed Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Perhaps because of the fame he’d achieved through his connections with the West, the farmers and ranchers of the upper Midwest and Great Plains loved him. And he was just as popular all the way south to the Rio Grande and Rio Colorado. To Roosevelt the “hurly-burly of a political campaign,”
³⁰
as he once put it, was an enthralling blood sport, the supreme test of personal combat for a genuine warrior.
³¹
While Harrison ran a “front porch” campaign, delivering speeches from his home in Indianapolis and avoiding perspiration, Roosevelt hit the trail with a vengeance, orating at every crossroads town and village junction. The whole experience, he wrote in a letter to Lodge, was “immense fun.”
³²

As Election Day neared, Roosevelt celebrated his thirtieth birthday. It was a rare time for self-reflection. Despite all his exciting work with
the Boone and Crockett Club and as a writer, his political career had stagnated. After all, it was hard to build momentum after losing the mayoralty. He hoped that stumping for Harrison, giving the Republican Party his everything as a surrogate, would earn him a major (or even minor) government post in the administration. Tactically, Roosevelt was on track. On November 6, Harrison defeated the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, by 233 electoral votes to 168. “I am as happy as a king,” Roosevelt wrote to his British diplomat friend Cecil Spring-Rice, “—to use a Republican simile.”
³³
And sure enough, Roosevelt was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. civil service commissioner starting on May 7, 1889. It was a post he would hold for almost six years.
³⁴
His primary task would be to clean up corruption in the federal government.