The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (38 page)

Although Roosevelt was impressed with the Hay-Adams crowd, wanted their airy approval, and admired them as perspicacious people who had personally known Lincoln, his
respect
went more to scientists. In the presence of biologists, naturalists, and surveyors like Grinnell, Baird, Coues, or Merriam, for example, Roosevelt was much more modest, soft-spoken, and open to criticism. He listened as much as he spoke. It was as if he had determined that politicians were corrupt and intellectuals fey, whereas U.S. government scientists (that is, those who knew how to write well) and members of the army or navy were the true pillars of American integrity. As for the pioneers themselves, Roosevelt proudly characterized them as “grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion.”
⁴²

In July 1889 the first two volumes of
The Winning of the West
were published to another round of critical acclaim. Best read as a
bildungsroman
about how “Young America,” as the country was called by Great Britain, had succeeded in its westward expansion,
The Winning of the West
was Roosevelt at his nationalistic apogee. “His Americanism,” Burroughs wrote, “charged the very marrow of his bone.”
⁴³
Frederick Jackson Turner, still a relatively obscure historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, praised the volumes in
The Dial
, saying that Roosevelt had dealt “impartially and sensibly with the relations of the pioneers and Indians whom they disposed.”
⁴⁴
The
Atlantic Monthly
commended Roosevelt for his “natural, simple, picturesque” style.
⁴⁵
According to the
New York Times
, the volumes were admirable in their “thoroughness” and written by a “man who knew the subject.”
⁴⁶
Great Britain’s finest review publications—including the
Saturday Review
and the
Spectator
—all gave thumbs up.
⁴⁷
What none of these glowing reviews pointed out was that Roosevelt had pioneered in writing a new kind of popular scientific history, melding Parkmanism with Darwinian thinking and a full jigger of Mayne Reid to boot. Some passages directly echoed
The Oregon Trail
and
On the Origin of Species
, and even
The Scalp-Hunter
.
⁴⁸
The consensus was clear: the historian Roosevelt had a knack for not putting the reader to sleep.

For his own part, Roosevelt was proud that
The Winning of the West
was more in the tradition of Francis Parkman than Henry Adams’s
History of the United States in America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison
, whose first volume also appeared that year. Besides writing about westward expansion as Parkman had done, Roosevelt had infused his narrative history with scientific explanations. “Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature,” Roosevelt wrote; “and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable.”
⁴⁹

Yet, as Roosevelt was apt to do, he felt the sting of criticism more than the high-minded accolades. Accusations abounded that the
The Winning of the West
had been a rush job. Typos and minor mistakes could be found. The
Atlantic Monthly
, for example, pointed out that Roosevelt had misidentified John Randolph of Roanoke, and the
New York Sun
charged him with unethically paraphrasing a book by the scholar James R. Gilmore.
⁵⁰
An exclamation of anger broke from Roosevelt’s pen, for he knew his public reputation was under assault. Roosevelt dealt with each charge differently: he befriended the
Atlantic Monthly
’s editor but put the kibosh on the envious Gilmore in a very public rebuttal to the charge of quasi-plagiarism. By confronting his tormentors, Roosevelt escaped the turbulent waters of bad publicity unscathed. By emulating Parkman, Roosevelt prided himself in having written the “history of the American forest.”
⁵¹

Basking in the sunshine of literary fame, Roosevelt wrote to Francis Parkman himself—who the previous year had written an important conservation-oriented article, “The Forests of the White Mountains,” for
Garden and Forest
⁵²
—and told Parkman about his future plans as an author. Although not an environmentalist in the modern sense of the term, Parkman was a premier naturalist and horticulturist of his day, running a nursery in Massachusetts to supplement his career as a historian. Clearly Roosevelt wanted to show Parkman that, he too, used wilderness and fauna as his background for historical events.
⁵³
“I am pleased that you like the book,” he wrote on July 13, 1889. “I have always had a special admiration for you as the only one—and I may very sincerely say, the greatest—of our two or three first class historians who devoted himself to American history; and made a classic work…. I have always intended to devote myself to essential American work; and literature must be my mistress perforce, for though I really enjoy politics I appreciate the exceedingly short nature of my tenure.”
⁵⁴

IV

In the fall of 1889, Edith moved the three Roosevelt children—Alice, Ted, and Kermit—from Sagamore Hill to a rented house at 1820 Jefferson Street in Washington. (The house, just off Connecticut Avenue, was one-tenth the size of Sagamore Hill.) Theodore, who called his children “bunnies,” hoped his family would grow even more.
⁵⁵
(He would soon get his wish: Edith gave birth to Ethel in 1891 and to Archibald in 1894.) Considering the constraints on his time, Roosevelt was a good, loving father to all five children. Enjoying the hurly-burly of the household, he instructed his brood at a young age how to identify songbirds and insects. In the nation’s capital, Theodore was usually more mannered, acting like his own father, determined to teach his children the Ten Commandments, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare. At Sagamore Hill, however, he encouraged mayhem, coaxing them to swim in the bay and play in the Long Island woods. Dull moments were frowned upon.
⁵⁶
“Every evening I have a wild romp with them,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother-in-law, Gertrude Elizabeth Carow, “usually assuming the role of ‘a very big bear’ while they are either little bears or a ‘racoon and a badger, papa.’”
⁵⁷

Over Thanksgiving 1889 Roosevelt began planning a “grand holiday” during which he would bring Edith, Bamie, Robert Munro Ferguson, Corinne (and her husband, Douglas Robinson), and Henry Cabot Lodge’s sixteen-year-old son George (nicknamed Bay) to the Badlands and Yellowstone. They would travel by pack train to pristine parts of the upper Rocky Mountains. Because Theodore talked incessantly about the Elkhorn Ranch, it made sense for his wife to see the Medora magic firsthand and then head to Yellowstone. Over the next nine months, as he prepared for this expedition, he devoured every aged calf-bound book ever written about exploration in Yellowstone. Theodore was thrilled to learn that all the Rocky Mountain big game he loved, except the mountain goat and caribou, were to be found in Yellowstone National Park. According to Arnold Hague, a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, deer—both mule and white-tailed—populated the Gallatin Range valleys in high numbers, dashing up hillsides and grazing in meadows. An impatient Roosevelt could barely wait to see the enchanted herds for himself.
⁵⁸

And he was likewise eager to show off his scientific knowledge to his family—to explain why some owls nested in prairie dog holes and to describe the mating rituals of elk. Playing geologist, he could explain to Edith the significance of the 2-million-year-old lava on Huckleberry Ridge tuff and how Specimen Ridge had one of the world’s largest petrified forests.
More and more, he saw himself as an interpreter of both American triumphalism and Darwinian species variation as they related to western U.S. history. In fact, after delivering an address on westward expansion at the American Historical Association’s year-end meeting, Roosevelt was acclaimed by his colleagues as the leading proponent of the “new school” of western historians.
⁵⁹
“I know of no one in the East, besides yourself, who has any conception of Western history,” William Frederick Poole, the association’s president, wrote to Roosevelt. “You have entered a fresh and most interesting field of research, and I predict you great success.”
⁶⁰

In January 1890, encouraged by the positive response from the American Historical Association, Roosevelt once again fantasized about quitting the U.S. government so he could be a full-time western historian. He wondered how best to blend his historical research with his conservationist beliefs. Realizing that the myth of American abundance was a national curse, Roosevelt set about to change attitudes about saving wildlife and preserving habitat. There was in America what his friend William T. Hornaday, chief taxidermist of the National Museum (the Smithsonian), called an “army of destruction” that had to be stopped.
⁶¹
Roosevelt intended the family trip to Yellowstone, now slated for September, to be a fact-finding mission as well; it would help him better understand the poaching and plundering before he started testifying, as he hoped, before congressional committees on the sanctity of the park.

Perhaps there was another motivation for visiting Yellowstone in 1890. Roosevelt might have felt embarrassed that both President Harrison and George Bird Grinnell—his superiors in national politics and North American big game conservation, respectively—had already toured the national park whereas he had seen Old Faithful and the Tetons only in picture books. He would now be able to even the score. Polishing up his Civil Service badge, Roosevelt would probe into why Wyoming poachers and Montana lumbermen and railway-tie cutters were being permitted in what the law of 1872 deemed a “public park of pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
⁶²
Why weren’t these intrusive criminals being collared by local law enforcement or the U.S. Army? How could the U.S. government make sure Yellowstone wasn’t “shot out” by horn and hide hunters? His “grand holiday,” doubling as a fact-finding mission on behalf of the Boone and Crockett Club, he believed, was an integral part of this journey to the park that the novelist Thomas Wolfe later called “the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”
⁶³

Even before leaving for the West in late summer, Roosevelt chafed
at the loopholes in the original Yellowstone Act, which didn’t properly preserve big game. He wanted protective amendments, and fast. In 1872 there had been only a single transcontinental railroad spanning the Rocky Mountains—the Union and Central Pacific, which rumbled across Wyoming far to the south of Yellowstone. Roosevelt was fine with that. But in 1890, influenced by Grinnell, Roosevelt, after deep consideration of the issue, opposed a proposed new Montana Mineral Railroad line aimed at “segregating” the park. Under the sway of the
Forest and Stream
crowd, Roosevelt now fancied himself as the conservationist point man in upbraiding Montana Mineral on the Yellowstone issue. “I am glad to hear that Roosevelt is going to stand back on the question of railways in the Park,” Grinnell wrote to a fellow member of Boone and Crockett, “and not to work against us.”
⁶⁴

The “grand holiday” started out splendidly—a first-class train ride from New York through Chicago and Saint Paul, until the steaming locomotive eventually rolled into the western edge of the Dakotas on September 2. For seven or eight days they mixed it up with the sharp-faced Ferris brothers and T.R.’s hardy Elkhorn ranchhands, such as Bill Merrifield, who lived among the abrupt escarpments like nonconformist characters in a Bret Harte story. Roosevelt’s elation with Medora was evident as he pointed out Custer’s 1876 campsite, the Marquis de Mores’s defunct meatpacking plant, and the innumerable rock formations that gave the Badlands its peculiar charm. One afternoon, coping with washouts and quicksand, they forded the Little Missouri River twenty-three times. Absent-eyed antelope could be seen grazing along a ridge, with muscles suddenly tensed upon the realization of human encroachment. At dusk they watched timid white-tails in bushy gullies and big-eared mules on sage-spangled buttes. “Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint glow of the red sun filled the west,” Roosevelt wrote about these rock landmarks in a publication of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The rolling prairie, sweeping in endless waves to the feet of the great hills, grew purple as the evening darkened, and the buttes looned into vague, mysterious beauty as their sharp outlines softened in the twilight.”
⁶⁵

Corinne marveled at how Theodore spoke of Dakota cowboys as if they were heroic knights on horseback and their low-lying cabins splendid castles. Despite the fact that she looked like a Dresden china figurine, Corinne proved to be the real trouper of the holiday, not complaining while trudging across mud holes and half-high streams, smeared with
pine pitch and achy from saddle sores. Just watching Theodore use an iron brand and rope steer yearlings like the other cowboys, in fact, made her proud. “We lunched at midday with round-up wagon,” she recalled in her memoir
My Brother Theodore Roosevelt
, “rough life, indeed, but wonderfully invigorating, and as we returned in the evening, galloping over the grassy plateaus of the high buttes, I realized fully that the bridle-path would never again have for me the charm it once had had.”
⁶⁶