The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (37 page)

Perhaps somewhat embarrassed, Burroughs feigned mild disbelief at the anecdote, certain that his musings about plovers and blackbirds couldn’t uplift ghetto boys who panhandled for stale bread and rotten fruit in the Bowery. But he was pleased that the nephew of Robert B. Roosevelt thought so highly of his work. Totally uncynical, seldom if ever putting anybody down with a jolt of criticism, Burroughs decided that he liked the cut of Roosevelt’s jib. (Essentially, Burroughs felt about Roosevelt as he did about a Catskills neighbor: “That man hasn’t a lazy bone in his body. But I have lots of ’em”—lots of ’em”
²²
). After lunch, on the train ride back to the Hudson River valley, as Burroughs passed stops in Tarrytown, Cold Spring, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, and Hyde Park,
*
he
wrote about his luncheon with Roosevelt, musing on how much luckier rural children like his own son, Julian, were than the urban poor. “How different is the life of Julian,” he wrote, “in the country with fresh air, good books, and parents with a measure of leisure—from that of the boys that Chapman and Roosevelt want so much to help.”
²³

While Burroughs simply thought of the lunch as enjoyable, Roosevelt had been deeply impressed. Burroughs, he was now certain, was the Thoreau of his time, perhaps the finest literary naturalist America had ever produced. Frequently when fans meet a writer or artist they admire, encountering the celebrity in person is a terrible disappointment. The exact opposite occurred at the Fellowcraft Club; the upshot of the lunch was that Roosevelt was now indissolubly linked to Burroughs. Not since his father died, in fact, had Roosevelt seen such Homeric dimensions in anyone as in John Burroughs. When Roosevelt started writing the last book of his North Dakota trilogy,
The Wilderness Hunter
, his style became infused with Burroughs’s naturalist writing. Unlike his previous two Dakota volumes,
The Wilderness Hunter
would emphasize the wildlife-sportsman ethos over even the best-honed hunting yarns.

II

Another factor that contributed to this change of emphasis in Roosevelt’s writings was his move to Washington, D.C., to assume his new duties as a member of the Civil Service Commission. Theodore and Edith had decided that she and the children (a second son, Kermit, was born in October 1889) would at first remain at Sagamore Hill while he lived rent-free at Cabot and Nannie Lodge’s residence in Washington.
²⁴
An insomniac Roosevelt usually slept only four or five hours a night, so he figured that, after his desk job, there would be plenty of spare time to continue writing
The Wilderness Hunter
and start in earnest to write
The Winning of the West
(his history as mural). Everything was either handwritten or dictated to a stenographer—typing never appealed to him. Every waking hour was a whirlwind of activity. “He was a live wire,” Burroughs noted about T.R. in his journal, “if there ever was one in human form.”
²⁵
(On another occasion Burroughs said Roosevelt was “a many-sided man and every side was like an electric battery.”
²⁶
) Roosevelt himself wrote in
Ranch Life
, “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough”—a fitting observation that David McCullough used as the epigraph of
Mornings on Horseback
.27

Certainly overworking was preferable to behaving like his brother Elliott. Following a riding accident, the restless, ill-adjusted, but charming
Nell turned to alcohol and opiates to deal with a broken leg and with inner anguish that modern psychiatrists would have probably diagnosed as a form of dehabilitating depression. A chronic misery had fallen over him. He drifted across the Atlantic, fumbled about London and Rome, occasionally sneaked in some serious hunting, but mostly just squandered opportunities to succeed at anything. For a while he sought rehabilitation in Illinois and worked in Virginia. But spiritual destitution followed him every step of the way. Despite being married to a wonderful wife, Anna Hall, Elliott was nevertheless a serial adulterer, like Uncle Rob. By including Elliott as a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, Theodore hoped to get his brother refocused on the outdoors life—hunting being the one activity that stabilized Elliott’s tormented spirit.
²⁸
However, once Elliott became embroiled in a paternity suit, Theodore lost all patience with his brother.
²⁹
Bringing shame upon the family name, he believed, was never acceptable. “He is evidently a maniac,” an agitated Theodore wrote Bamie about Elliott, “morally no less than mentally.”
³⁰

In early 1889, besides worrying about Elliott, Roosevelt wondered whether the Boone and Crockett Club had a staunch ally in Benjamin Harrison. Because Harrison was a Republican—as were most early conservationists—Roosevelt was hopeful. Would the new president fight for forest reserves, fish hatcheries, and big game preservation? The stoop-shouldered Harrison, in fact, was an “aesthetic conservationist” who loved the outdoors almost as much as Roosevelt did.
³¹
Growing up on a farm along the banks of the Ohio River (near Cincinnati), Harrison hunted duck, fished for smallmouth bass, and hiked around the North Bend woods looking for arrowheads. He had a sharp eye for birds. Harrison appreciated the redemptive quality of wild places and their contribution to building character. Twice before being elected president, he visited Yellowstone National Park. While serving as a U.S. senator from Indiana, Harrison had been instrumental in halting commercial development in Yellowstone, pushing for prohibitive legislation that allowed only ten park acres to be leased for hotel use. Harrison had also introduced a bill in early 1882 that would have set aside land along the Colorado River of Arizona for government preservation. (The legislation failed, but T.R. eventually saved the Grand Canyon under an executive order known as the Antiquities Act of 1906.)

Despite these legislative setbacks, Harrison’s conservationist convictions grew. His new secretary of the interior, John W. Noble, was a college friend of his at Yale who’d risen through the Third Iowa Cavalry to become a brigadier general during the Civil War. Following Lee’s sur
render, Noble moved to Saint Louis, practiced law, and was eventually made a U.S. district attorney.
³²
Perhaps because he had seen so much killing in the Civil War, Noble didn’t cotton to the slaughtering of bison by market hunters, which had become widespread owing to the demand for the hides. And he worried about a timber famine in the Missouri Ozarks and elsewhere, seeing it as an impending national danger. In 1910 George Bird Grinnell, reflecting on the early history of the conservation movement in his partially unpublished “Brief History of the Boone and Crockett Club,” praised Noble in no uncertain terms, writing that he was “a man of the loftiest and broadest views and heartily in sympathy with the efforts to protect the forests.”
³³

As an intellectual, Roosevelt spent much of the 1890s competing with Edward Coues for preeminence as the top frontier historian. Each man, in particular, was vying to be considered most knowledgeable about the American West. While Roosevelt was writing
The Winning of the West
, Coues was editing an impressive string of journals and frontier reports about western exploration. The years Coues spent as an army surgeon in forlorn outposts along the Mexican border had allowed him to gather valuable insights for his books. Coues’s firsthand knowledge of the West clearly informed his reliable annotations of the classic accounts of exploration he edited in the 1890s:
History of the Expedition of Lewis and Clark
(1893),
Expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike
(1895),
Journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson
(1897),
Journal of Major Jacob Fowler
(1898),
Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri by Charles Larpenteur
(1898), and
Diary of Francisco Garces
(1900).

Coues’s major books were edited, but even so, only Roosevelt himself (and perhaps a few others) could publish at that book-a-year pace. Roosevelt felt Coues, along with Burroughs, was doing the most important work of any U.S. writer or intellectual in the 1890s by editing these six treasured classics of western expansion for future generations to appreciate. When Coues died in 1899 at age fifty-seven, Roosevelt considered it a terrible loss to ornithology, zoology, and frontier history. Coues, he believed, had awakened the popular consciousness to the epic of American exploration.
³⁴
(And then there were Coues’s ornithological works.) For the remainder of his life Roosevelt used Coues’s
Key to North American Birds
(which went through six editions) as his central reference work regarding classification.

At the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt continued his war against the entrenched spoils system, a war he’d been waging since he joined the New York state assembly in 1883. Now he had a national platform from which to preach against the epidemic of corruption. Almost as much as
“Bad Lands Cowboy,” the label “Civil Service Reformer” soon became attached to Roosevelt in the minds of the American people. Over the next six years, serving both presidents Harrison and Cleveland (the latter won the 1892 presidential election, returning to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term), Roosevelt prosecuted dishonest government officials from coast to coast. Fraud at the U.S. Post Office was his particular focus. He also tried to help the nongovernmental Indian Rights Association (IRA) improve living conditions on territorial reservations in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
³⁵
“The spoils system was more fruitful of degradation in our political life than any other that could have possibly been invented,” he would write late in his tenure. “The spoil monger, the man who peddled patronage, inevitably breeds the vote-buyer, the vote-seller, and the man guilty of malfeasance in office.”
³⁶

No nook or cranny was off-limits when it came to Roosevelt’s determination to eradicate illegal profiteering from the federal government. Fellow Republicans were aghast that Roosevelt doggedly investigated his own party’s members, but he believed both parties were unacceptably full of money skimmers. His targets included not only customs officials in New York City but even William Henry Harrison Miller (President Harrison’s former law partner in Indianapolis). From that moment, the taciturn president disliked the flamboyant Roosevelt, barely listening when his commissioner pontificated about crooked Wyoming developers determined to carve up poor Yellowstone National Park, or about a new investigation of the U.S. Post Office, or about graft in the Indian Agency. The old general—the grandson of America’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison—would tap his finger, bite his lip, and stare straight ahead with a marble face. Roosevelt wasn’t oblivious of the icy treatment, writing to his daughter Alice that the five-foot-six-inch Harrison was a “little runt of a President.”
³⁷
Often, Roosevelt called the president “Little Ben” behind his back.

Although Roosevelt used Sagamore Hill as his home base that summer of 1889, he often traveled to historic U.S. sites of western expansionism. Greatly encouraged by G.P. Putnam’s positive reaction to the first two volumes of
The Winning of the West
, Roosevelt pressed on, doing research in archives in Canada (Ontario), Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. To Roosevelt entering each archive was like entering a mine—he never knew what gem or nugget it might contain.
³⁸
“If nothing else,
The Winning of the West
stands as another monument to Roosevelt’s preternatural energy and powers of concentration,” the historian John Milton Cooper, Jr., observed. “No other active statesman in the English-speaking world,
not even Winston Churchill, produced such a solidly scholarly work of history while he was, as the Romans said,
in medias res
.”
³⁹

III

Whether Roosevelt was hunting bears or attacking spoilsmen, his level of activity wasn’t without critics. Ironically, he now got along splendidly with toothless trappers and cattle ropers, but was no longer as comfortable with the refined intelligentsia of the East Coast. Critics like John Hay and Henry Adams, to name the most prominent, belittled his talk of the “strenuous life” as counterfeit and self-aggrandizing (though they both liked his wife, Edith, tremendously). Whenever Roosevelt spoke about humans needing to have “healthy animalism” instilled into their lives, patricians rolled their eyes. Hadn’t he learned anything in Porcellian? Whenever he claimed that great knowledge could be gleaned from backwoods types like Hell Roaring Bill Jones or Yellowstone Kelly, they rebuked him for being a literary nationalist at best and folk-obsessed and jingoistic at worse. Hadn’t he traveled extensively through Europe and understood the great art of Leonardo and Michelangelo? Equating the beauty of Pike’s Peak with
The Last Supper
, they believed, was Wild Wolf macho nonsense.

With his trademark teeth and eyeglasses moving in unison as he spoke, Roosevelt countered that his critics were part of a stifled class, deaf to the clarion call of nation-building, unable to see that the United States’ frontier values made the nation vastly superior to Europe’s effete culture. His opponents could die in their Washington parlors, but he preferred to go out like a wild animal shot at dusk in an untrampled forest. The whole Hay-Adams circle viewed Roosevelt, in the words of Kathleen Dalton, as “an entertaining but dangerous man to have in a drawing room: he had spilled coffee all over the dress of one governor’s wife and bumptiously ripped another woman’s hem with a clumsy step.”
⁴⁰

The poet James Russell Lowell notably bucked this patrician crowd assessment, praising T.R. in the 1890s for being “so energetic, so full of zeal, and, still more, so full of fight.”
⁴¹
(It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had quoted from Lowell’s poem “A Fable for Critics” to open the first volume of
The Winning of the West
.) As a conversationalist, Lowell would say, Roosevelt was in a league of his own. Clearly Roosevelt was a force of nature, a rare phenomenon, a well-rounded intellectual unafraid to enter the fray of national politics, conservation, military affairs, and academic scholarship. With the exception of Henry Cabot Lodge, however, Roosevelt was no longer fully comfortable with the Brahmins of mannered society. He
consciously cultivated the manners of a background different from his own, eating with his fingers, reading books at the dinner table, waving off blessings, and carrying a loaded pistol for its shock value. Essentially five generations of etiquette had been abandoned in favor of the half-primitive insolence.