The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (51 page)

VI

As Roosevelt put together the Boone and Crockett Club’s third volume,
Trail and Camp-Fire
, he retained a bias toward preservation and the kind of songbirds that the Audubon societies had lobbied to protect, as opposed to the plight of milkweed bugs or the angular-winged katydid.
*
“The geology and the beetles will remain unchanged for ages,” he wrote George Bird Grinnell, his co-editor once more, when going over a manuscript about Africa, “but the big game will vanish, and only the pioneer hunters can tell about it. Hunting books of the best type are often of more permanent value than scientific pamphlets; & I think the B&C should differentiate sharply between worthless hunting stories, & those that are of value.” Perhaps not wanting to war with his co-editor as well as Dr. Merriam, Roosevelt ended his letter praising Grinnell’s recent article on buffalo as “worth more than any but the very best scientific monographs about the beast.”
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In Roosevelt’s correspondence of 1897, four interrelated conservation issues—increased national park protection, more forest reserves, western water reservoirs, and the diminution of buffalo—concern him above all others. He truly believed that the Boone and Crockett Club had made great inroads in raising public consciousness of buffalo’s plight. Hoofed game were on the rebound in North America, and the Bronx Zoo would soon get the word out even more throughout the East Coast. Citizens had started warming up to the idea of game and forest wardens being trained in biology. As Roosevelt told Grinnell,
Trail and Camp-Fire
must hit the same urgent notes: “We have made such a point of Yellowstone Park in our two previous volumes,” he noted, “that I think we ought to dwell on it in this one.”
⁷⁸

By September, with
Trail and Camp-Fire
delivered to its publisher, Roosevelt took a rare three deep breaths, sheepishly worried that he had been too roughshod in his exchanges with Merriam both in
Science
and
at the Cosmos Club. His defiant mood had tapered off. “I almost broke the heart of my beloved friend Merriam,” Roosevelt confided to Henry Fairfield Osborn. “He felt as though he had been betrayed in the house of his friends; but he really goes too far. He just sent me a pamphlet announcing the discovery of two species of mountain lion from Nevada. If he is right I will guarantee to produce fifty-seven new species of red fox from Long Island.”
⁷⁹

Apparently Merriam harbored his own regrets about the dustup, declaring that Roosevelt was “a writer of the best accounts we have ever had of the habits of our larger mammals.”
⁸⁰
Furthermore, while he was in the Olympic Mountains of far western Washington, a stunning Pacific slope cluster of low-lying peaks surrounded by rain forests and considered the wettest spot in the continental United States, Merriam discovered that the elks there had coloration and antler size different from those found in Yellowstone. Appealing to Roosevelt’s ego (and perhaps his own wicked sense of humor), Merriam named this new subspecies
Cervus roosevelti
.
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These huge elk were magnificent creatures. “It is fitting that the noblest deer of America should perpetuate the name of one who, in the midst of a busy public career,” Merriam wrote in the December 17, 1897, issue of the
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
“has found time to study our larger mammals in their native haunts and has written the best accounts we have ever had of their habits and chase.”
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What could Roosevelt do? There was hardly an honor in the world he would have preferred more than having a species of elk found in the dusky coastal and Cascade ranges of the Pacific Northwest named after him. However, if he embraced
Cervus roosevelti
, other naturalists would dismiss him as a hypocrite bought off by flattery. Nevertheless, here was a heaven-sent opportunity for Roosevelt to make everything right again with Merriam, and he seized it. There is no record of Roosevelt’s thought process, but in any event he accepted the new honor, informing Merriam, “No compliment could be paid me that I would appreciate as much as this—in the first place, because of the fact itself, and in the next place because it comes from you. To have the noblest game animal in America named after me by the foremost of living mammalogists is something that really makes me prouder than I can well say. I deeply appreciate the compliment and I am only sorry that I will never be in my power to do anything except to just merely appreciate it.”
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The deeply touched Roosevelt now felt he had a debt to repay. He began reading everything he could on the Olympic Mountains and sought photographs of
Cervus roosevelti
. The 800-pound “Roosevelt elk” was brown or
dark beige with very dark underparts and a yellowish-brown tail. Much like their namesake, these elk were crepuscular, extremely active at dawn and dusk. Focusing on Washington state wildlife for the first time, he learned that the Olympics contained five distinct landscapes: temperate rain forest, rugged mountain terrain, large lowland lakes, cascading rivers, and saltwater beaches. As an ornithologist, Roosevelt hoped to soon see the black oystercatchers, with their long reddish beaks, crack open mollusks along the rugged Pacific shore. The mere thought of aromatic Sitka spruce and western hemlock appealed to Roosevelt just as much as seeing his namesake elk in their natural habitat.

Starting in 1897, Mount Olympus became Roosevelt’s new Matterhorn, another peak he wanted to conquer. The highest point in the Olympics chain, not even until 1907, it had eight tumbling glaciers and some of the finest strands of Pacific silver fir in North America. Mount Olympus—the very name enthralled Roosevelt—wasn’t going to elude him. The Pacific Ocean here was a sea of boulders, many larger than houses. For a marine biologist there were new universes to explore. While Muir championed the Yosemite Valley, Merriam studied northern Arizona, and Grinnell focused on northwestern Montana, Roosevelt developed an abiding fascination for the Olympics of Washington state and the forest reserves of Colorado; they were two unexplored western places (not counting Alaska) on his future itinerary. Fascinated to learn about Washington state’s big-leaf maples in rain forests adorned with epiphytic mosses and ferns, he became determined to save them—a feat he accomplished six years later as president. The only other rain forests as temperate as those stretching from Alaska to Oregon along the Pacific Coast were in Chile, New Zealand, and South Australia. Europe had nothing like them, so Roosevelt, as he educated himself about the Olympics, swelled like a toad with pride.

When
Encyclopaedia of Sport
, a British reference guide, asked Roosevelt to contribute an article on elk that year, he turned his focus to the herds he’d been studying with unremitting interest. “There are several aberrant forms of wapiti, including one that dwells in the great Tule swamps of California,” Roosevelt wrote. “There is also an entirely distinct species with its centre of abundance in the Olympic mountains of Washington and in Vancouver Island. This species, which Dr. Hart Merriam has recently done the present writer the honour of naming after him (
Cervus roosevelti
).”
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Ironically, in the long run, Roosevelt’s position, that Merriam was creating too many species of mammals, triumphed.
Cervus roosevelti
would lose its species status in 1899, becoming a subspecies called
Cervus
canadensis roosevelti
.
⁸⁵
Hearing the news of his demotion, Roosevelt asked Merriam, “By the way, is ‘Roosevelti’ merely a synonym of ‘occidentalis,’ for the Olympic Wapiti? My only glory gone!”
⁸⁶
Regardless of its designation, however, “Roosevelt elk” remains the common name for these gorgeous creatures that ranged throughout the dense redwood and rainforest country of the Pacific Northwest. The combination of
his
elk wandering among 2,000-year-old sequoias became—in his dotage—one of Roosevelt’s Edenic fantasies.

Roosevelt also worked side by side with Merriam on abolishing the unsportsmanlike practice of chasing deer to the water’s edge with packs of hounds in the Adirondack Park. This was a conservationist project in which they could be brothers in arms. The two men also wanted to ban the new practice of jacklighting (shining a spotlight into flocks of ducks which stunned so they could not fly off, and then firing away). As noted, in 1884 Merriam had written
The Mammals of the Adirondacks Region of Northeastern New York
, a careful examination of that area’s fauna. The Boone and Crockett Club recommended the book for sportsmen; and Roosevelt praised it in
Trail and Camp-Fire
. Offering an olive branch to Merriam in the public sphere, throwing out grand praise, Roosevelt called the federal biologist a “field naturalist in the highest sense of the term; the model of what we ought to have for the entire American continent.”
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But Roosevelt’s interest in Adirondack deer wasn’t simply a matter of rebonding with Merriam. The declining deer population in those home-state woodlands troubled him. Like Uncle Rob, Theodore wanted to protect the Hudson River watershed by not cutting down too many trees—at times it seemed that most of the topsoil of upstate New York was ending up in Manhattan’s harbor. In 1897, after a concerted lobbying effort, the New York legislature enacted a law to protect deer. Proper wildlife management, Roosevelt boasted, truly got extraordinary results. “We set to work ridding the Adirondacks of the [hunting] dogs,” the New York conservationist John Burnham recalled of Roosevelt and Merriam’s push, “and it was a thrilling, dangerous job.”
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A year after the bans on dogs and jacklighting went into affect, the Adirondack deer and ducks started to rebound. In an early experiment in wildlife relocation, trapped deer from Maine were taken to upstate New York and let loose. The repopulation commenced as hoped for. (A similar reintroduction with buffalo, moose, and elks, however, failed). Still, Roosevelt was thrilled that his Adirondacks deer were being revived through a combination of wildlife and forestry law. Former presi
dent Benjamin Harrison, in fact, had just built a sporting home in the Adirondacks called Berkeley Lodge. Along with Roosevelt and Merriam, Harrison was a high-level proponent of the “Forever Wild” movement to save the Adirondacks from destruction. And he spoke up on behalf of deer, too. Starting in 1897 Roosevelt once again began exploring the region for bird sightings in hopes of updating his nearly twenty-year-old
Summer Birds of the Adirondacks
; he never, however, found the time.

Extraordinarily fine essays on hunting in Africa and Newfoundland were included in
Trail and Camp-Fire
when it was published in late 1897. On the book’s cover was a moose head with record-size antlers; the title page had an amateurish illustration of a mountain goat standing on a rock ledge. The volume’s scope was ambitious. On the conservationist front, the editors—Roosevelt and Grinnell—took up the cudgels for saving Adirondack deer by championing many new laws. There was also a self-congratulatory essay on the founding of the Bronx Zoo. Finally, Roosevelt once again provided a list of the essential natural history books all true-blue hunters and serious explorers needed to read. Four essays in this fat book—including Roosevelt’s “The Bear’s Disposition”—dealt with bear hunting and protection issues.

Grinnell’s own contribution, the long essay “Wolves and Wolf Nature,” was simply brilliant. It could have been published as a monograph instead of in an anthology. “In discussing wild animals, we are all very disposed to consider the species as a whole, and to deal in general terms, jumping to the conclusion that all the individuals of a kind are exactly alike, and not taking into account the marked variation between different individuals, for we consider only their physical aspect,” Grinnell wrote. “We forget that to each individual of the species there is a psychological side; that these animals have intelligence, reason, mind, and that at different times they are governed by varying motives and emotions, which differ in degree only from those which influence us.”
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Later, when Roosevelt became president, he lashed out at the novelist Jack London for not writing accurately about wolves in
Call of the Wild
. Roosevelt’s expertise on this matter stemmed largely from firsthand observation and from reading “Wolves and Wolf Nature.” Somewhat incongruously, Grinnell’s essay also served as an impetus for Roosevelt to go wolf coursing in Oklahoma a few years later with Captain Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy. However, Roosevelt took issue with Grinnell’s depiction of how gray wolves brought down prey, insisting in his essay “On the Little Missouri” that they attack prey at the hindquarters, feasting first on the flanks. “It will be noticed that in some points my observa
tions about wolves are in seeming conflict with those of Mr. Grinnell,” Roosevelt wrote, “but I think the conflict is more seeming than real; and in any event I have concluded to let the article stand just as it is. The great book of Nature contains many passages which are hard to read, and at times conscientious students may well draw up different interpretations of the obscurer and least known texts. It may not be that either observer is at fault; but what is true of an animal in one locality may not be true of the same animal in another, and even in the same locality two individuals of a species may widely differ in their habits.”
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Roosevelt was now embracing the very criticism Grinnell made of T.R.’s first book,
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
, as his own clear-headed scientific statement of purpose. Just why Roosevelt felt compelled to have these frays with Merriam and Grinnell is open to speculation; but one can probably attribute it to a mixture of egotism and his belief that he was correct. As a target of Roosevelt’s attacks, Grinnell, unlike Merriam, never let the jabs bother him. Supremely self-confident, Grinnell had, in fact, learned how to
use
Roosevelt for his own conservation cause in
Forest and Stream
, unleashing the feisty reformer’s combative personality at his own will.
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