The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (42 page)

So when Roosevelt went elk hunting in western Wyoming in September 1891, for the first time since the Forest Reserve Act of the past spring, he was considered by many locals as a bizarre, land-grabbing preservationist zealot. (And that was even before his blistering open letter in
Forest and Stream
.) Accompanied by his friend Robert B. Ferguson, the
frustrated forty-niner Tazewell Woody, and the campfire cook Elwood Hofer, Roosevelt wanted to see the elk herds of the Tetons, which the Shoshone spoke about with such reverence with his own eyes.
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Two Ocean Pass was a scenic wonder that left Roosevelt breathless. It was located on the Continental Divide (in what became Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1908). All around him were evergreen forests and eternal rock peaks with “grand domes and lofty spires.” Craggy ramparts pierced the sky in this vast mountainous region. Here was a sacred spot for sure. Some streams flowed westward into the Snake River and then the Columbia River, eventually emptying into the Pacific Ocean. Others descended eastward toward the Yellowstone River, which drained into the Missouri River before merging with the Mississippi River at the confluence north of Saint Louis; from there the Mississippi went straight to the Gulf of Mexico.
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To an American outdoors romantic like Roosevelt, the forlorn, wild valley of Two Ocean Pass epitomized the miraculous West. He was walled in by the raw, rugged Teton mountain chains, their flanks blasted and slashed by precipice and chasm. Carefully Roosevelt studied the fork of a stream where one branch headed toward the Oregon coast while the other flowed in the direction of Louisiana’s bayous. Clad in a buckskin tunic with leggings, Roosevelt was living out his fantasy of a voyage of discovery. Everything around him—mountain valleys; fields of goldenrod, purple aster, bluebells, and white immortelles—was unmarred by mankind. There were no surveyors’ stakes, mining shacks, or cattle trails to break the spell. Two Ocean Pass and the Tetons—the Grand Tetons—were becoming known as national treasures as surely as Yellowstone and Yosemite. A poet like Whitman could have written a hymn just by breathing in the crisp Wyoming air. “In the park-country, on the edges of the evergreen forest, were groves of delicate quaking-aspen, the trees often growing to quite a height; their tremulous leaves were already changing to bright green and yellow, occasionally with a reddish blush,” Roosevelt wrote in the essay “An Elk-Hunt at Two-Ocean Pass,” which appeared in
The Wilderness Hunter
. “In the Rocky Mountains the aspens are almost the only deciduous trees, their foliage offering a pleasant relief to the eye after the monotony of the unending pine and spruce woods, which afford so striking a contrast to the hardwood forest east of the Mississippi.”
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I

E
ver since Roosevelt arrived in the Dakota Territory in 1883 to ranch cattle, the very idea of Texas enthralled him. Many of the Badlands cowboys he encountered spoke of the Hill Country as a hunter’s paradise teeming with big-bodied deer. So in the spring of 1892, as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, thirty-three-year-old Roosevelt hatched a plan. Officially, he was going to Texas to investigate the dismissal of a few U.S. postal employees solely for partisan political reasons. But he also arranged for a six-day collared peccary hunt in the South Texas Coastal Plain, which would enliven
The Wilderness Hunter
, the outdoors memoir he was writing. Furthermore Roosevelt was hoping to anchor future installments of
The Winning of the West
on Lone Star history. “The next volumes I take up I hope will be the Texan struggle and the Mexican War,” Roosevelt would write his friend Madison Grant. “I quite agree with your estimate of these conflicts, and am surprised that they have not received more attention.”
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Killing a peccary (or “javelina,” the term preferred in Texas) during the Gilded Age wasn’t easy. In addition to being elusive, peccaries were fierce fighters who traveled in packs, known to slash horses’ legs with their daggerlike tusks and stampede over dogs in dense thickets of chaparral and scrub oak. “They were subject to freaks of stupidity, and were pugnacious to a degree,” Roosevelt wrote. “Not only would they fight if molested, but they would often attack entirely without provocation.”
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Roosevelt had imagined Uvalde, Texas—where his friend John Moore ranched—to be a temperate prairie like North Dakota. But the area’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico meant there was a wide range of varied habitat to study. Three different types of rail—King, Clapper, and Virginia—were found in the brushlands. Around giant cypress trees or pecan groves Roosevelt discovered uncommon species such as greater pewee and Rufous-capped warbler. Bustling insectivorous redbirds and flycatchers, moving together in concert, abounded. Around wild fruit fields were frugivorous birds, including many whose genera Roosevelt was uncertain about.
³

After discovering no peccaries along the Frio River, the Roosevelt
paty headed south along the Nueces River toward the oak-motte prairies of the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. The spring air was mild at Choke Canyon, and Roosevelt was delighted to see so much unexpected greenery. Little brown swifts dashed in front of his horse at regular intervals as they moved seaward avoiding the stinging ants. The horseflies were the biggest he had ever seen. The insects were such a serious problem for Texas settlers that screens covered house windows and smoking coils were lit to ward off the swarms. Those in shacks smoked fern rollups to ward them off. Roosevet copiously noted the lilac-colored flowers and wide bands of purplish wildflowers that carpeted the unobstructed Texas prairie. “Great blue herons,” he wrote, “were stalking beside these pools, and from one we flushed a white ibis.”
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Once Roosevelt had absorbed the Nueces River area in exacting detail, the expedition went onward with trophy-hungry determination. At sunrise the hunt party was greeted by the Texas nightingale (the mockingbird) and at sunset by the howls of coyotes. But no javelinas. Just when the hunting looked bleakest of all, however, Roosevelt suddenly stumbled upon his mark. A sow and a long-tusked boar turned their huge heads toward the Roosevelt party, grinding their teeth so loudly it produced a sound like Mexican castanets. Their needle-sharp eyes had that dark, calmly menacing look of a great white shark as it circles prey. Roosevelt shot them both at point-blank range.
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That evening the hunt party feasted on peccary and Roosevelt shipped his trophy heads back to New York. More than anything else, it seemed, Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed the tough-talk style of his Texas compa-dres. Like a mynah bird, Roosevelt had picked up a lot of sayings and brags which he now constantly repeated back in Washington. He admired, for example, the story of a Texan who carefully studied a tenderfoot’s 32-caliber pistol and said: “Stranger, if you ever shot me with that, and I
know’d it,
I would kick you all over Texas.” As a corollary, Roosevelt decided that when it came to peccary hunting, guns weren’t the armament of choice. “They ought to be killed with a spear,” Roosevelt wrote his British friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice. “The country is so thick, with huge cactus and thorny mesquite trees, that the riding is hard; but they are small and it would be safe to go at them on foot—at any rate for two men.”
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Texas put a ruddy color back in Roosevelt’s cheeks; and his brow, though creased, now showed few traces of stress. The fresh air had once again purged his bureaucratic fatigue, and the open country had given him time to relax and think. The spare campfire meals had thinned him down quite a bit. Once back in Washington, he remained so enchanted
with Texas cowboy lore, in fact, that he made plans to visit Deadwood in August to see with his own eyes where Wild Bill Hickok died. (He went and deemed it “a golden town.”
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)

That journey to the Black Hills of South Dakota, however, had a civil service objective: to investigate graft and inhumane conditions on various Sioux reservations following the massacre at Wounded Knee. Roosevelt rode to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where more than 7,000 Sioux lived, largely in squalor, to investigate what had happened twenty months earlier when the Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull was murdered by U.S. troops while under house arrest.
⁸
That killing had triggered the massacre of December 29, 1890, when 500 cavalrymen surrounded an encampment of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. Four rapid artillery-fire Hotchkiss guns were brought in and—after a sharp disagreement with a deaf tribesman who refused to surrender his rifle—more than 300 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children lay murdered in the bloodied snow. “They gathered up the frozen dead in wagons at Wounded Knee,”
The American Heritage Book of Indians
later lamented, “and buried them all together in a communal pit.”
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Naturally, at the time of Roosevelt’s inspection, tension between the Sioux residents and white guards at Pine Ridge remained high. Complaints that the Sioux were now being given poisoned food had traveled back to Washington, D.C., and landed on Roosevelt’s desk;
¹⁰
he was looking into allegations that U.S. officials were diluting and stealing foodstuffs directed toward the Great Plains reservations. (As president, Roosevelt, after reading Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
, famously took on the Chicago meatpacking industry for selling rancid beef and pork. Now, fourteen years before the Meat Inspection Act was passed, he sided with the discontented tribes who claimed they were being sold poison pork at commissary stores on the reservations.)

As it turned out, Commissioner Roosevelt sided with the Indians on most of the issues. No American, he maintained, should be deliberately served rotting meat and given poor medical attention. Roosevelt’s host, Captain Hugh C. Brown, boldly issued a meat recall at Pine Ridge, defying his military orders. The stealing of U.S. supplies directed for the reservations, Roosevelt thundered, had to stop at once. Breaking with General William T. Sherman’s philosophy that all Native Americans had to “be killed” or else “maintained as a species of paupers,” Roosevelt wanted the tribespeople fully integrated into the fabric of American life.
¹¹
To Roosevelt, the properly maintained reservations were merely a way station to fuller integration, which could be accorded in due time.

At the time of Roosevelt’s reservation tour, the number of Indians in the United States was only 250,000, drastically decreased from estimates of the population in 1492, which were in the millions. The surviving Native Americans had overcome disease, conquest, genocide, and assimilation, but Roosevelt worried that the spoils system could do them in. “The Indian problem is difficult enough, heaven only knows,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1891 to a friend who advocated Indian rights, “and it is cruel to complicate it by having the Indian service administered on patronage principles.”
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From Pine Ridge Roosevelt headed south to meet the humanitarian Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Organized in 1882, the IRA believed in the immediate and direct acculturation of Native Americans into the mainstream of U.S. society. The energetic Welsh knew how to lobby effectively on behalf of Indian welfare (or, at least the IRA’s vision of it).
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The IRA believed serious changes needed to be made in state and federal government to create a pathway to full citizenship for all Native Americans.
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Roosevelt deemed Welsh the most effective advocate fighting on behalf of Indians in America. Together, they toured the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. They also visited George Bird Grinnell’s old stomping grounds in Nebraska (where he had once befriended the Blackfoot and North Cheyenne while working on Buffalo Bill’s ranch near North Platte). In his capacity as civil service commissioner, Roosevelt inspected the Missouri River Indian agencies in South Dakota and Nebraska—Yankton, Santee, Omaha, and Winnebago—pausing at all the old Lewis and Clark campsites for curiosity’s sake. Although he stumped for President Harrison’s reelection along the way, he also denounced the abuses Native Americans were suffering in Nebraska’s reservations at the hands of a delinquent U.S. government. During this inspection trip Roosevelt didn’t keep a South Dakota–Nebraska diary, but he did write an official report as civil service commissioner, one that was considered too inflammatory to be published in family newspapers. It was pure Roosevelt, playing the role of muckraker in the style of Lincoln Steffens or Jacob Riis. Point by point he analyzed why Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribespeople weren’t getting a fair shake. The federal government didn’t disseminate Roosevelt’s final report, but Welsh printed 3,000 copies and distributed them to leading legislators and philanthropists. “By the time of Roosevelt’s departure from the Civil Service Commission in 1895,” the historian William T. Hagan has noted, “he had earned the admiration of many friends of the Indian.”
¹⁵

Although Roosevelt was enough of a social Darwinist to write that the Pawnee and Cherokee were far superior to the Sioux, he was more fair-minded in his assessment of the U.S. government’s failings in its Indian policies than most other leading politicians of the era. Exactly
why
Roosevelt behaved so decently to Indians is paradoxical but simple. Never one to romanticize Sitting Bull or Geronimo (deeming both dangerous rabble-rousers), he had invested so mightily in the U.S. Army’s western triumphs that he wanted to make sure the defeated Indians were not treated badly or as inferiors. This basic moral premise put him in the IRA camp. Just as presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant forgave the Confederates after the Civil War, welcoming them back into the Union fold, Roosevelt believed that now that the West was won, the vanquished Indians should be brought into the constitutional democracy with the same God-given rights as everybody else. Roosevelt’s Americanism—that is, the need for the country to act as one—far outweighed his mistaken interest in armchair eugenics.

Yet there was another factor in play. Tickled to be called the Great White Chief by some Native Americans, Roosevelt truly respected the central role bison continued to play in the culture and religion of the Sioux (and other tribes). Unlike Euro-Americans, the pragmatic Sioux tribes used every part of the buffalo: hides were made into clothing and tepees; horns were eating utensils and cups; and muscles provided glue and bowstrings. After killing a buffalo, the Sioux would first eat the fresh meat and then preserve the rest as sun-dried jerky strips. A positive auxiliary effect of repopulating the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions with buffalo, Roosevelt believed, was to properly honor the folkways of the Plains Indians. George Bird Grinnell was in full agreement on this point. Like the Plains Indians, the Boone and Crockett Club hoped, as an Indian once told Grinnell, that someday the prairie lands would once again be “One Robe.”
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In a kingmaking mood following his successful appearances at the Deadwood Opera House and the Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas reservations, Roosevelt continued to give last-minute speeches back East championing President Harrison’s reelection whenever the Republican National Committee asked. His voice, however, wasn’t persuasive enough. On November 8, 1892, the Democrat Grover Cleveland easily defeated Harrison by 277 electoral votes to 145.
¹⁷
As Cleveland took office on March 4, 1893, Roosevelt offered his resignation from the civil service. The incoming president refused, deciding that having a high-profile Republican reformer like Roosevelt in his administration was a good thing.

His job secure, Roosevelt forged ahead with more outside activity. He wanted the Boone and Crockett Club to have a log cabin exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, opening in May 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America (as well as Chicago’s moment to present itself as a world-class city). There were more than 200 European-designed buildings going up on the fairgrounds alongside Lake Michigan, so Roosevelt had focused on displaying the vernacular frontier home, the log cabin, as a point of national pride. The humble birthplaces of Lincoln and Grant were far more impressive, he believed, than Buckingham Palace or the Vatican. (Both replica presidential cabins were exhibited in Chicago under the slogan that the ingenuous American “cuts his coat according to his cloth.”
¹⁸
) Roosevelt assumed the role of exhibit designer, and his archetypal western log cabin was packed with Davy Crockett relics and old-time hunting and trapping equipment.
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It was situated on a man-made island called the Wooded Island, in a man-made lagoon, and was next to the Japanese pavilion. The “cabin” staff hired a long-haired hunter as host. Schoolchildren could watch him perform public demonstrations that included curing venison jerky and constructing a box trap.
²⁰
Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett cabin had to compete with an exact replica of the Old Times Distillery of Kentucky, which gave out free whiskey samples. A New England cabin was also on the grounds, providing “good old-fashioned” seafood stews for the tasting. Still, owing to the Crockett memorabilia, Roosevelt’s cabin was a popular tourist destination.