The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (59 page)

Not all of Roosevelt’s travels were within New York. In June 1899 he headed by train to Las Vegas, New Mexico, for the first annual Rough Rider’s reunion. Las Vegas was situated along a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico Territory, and Roosevelt had wanted to see the town for years, particularly the Spanish colonial-style plaza where Stephen W. Kearny once delivered a cracker-jack speech on manifest destiny during the Mexican War.
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Western figures like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Mysterious Dave Mather had spent so much time in the decorative adobes of Las Vegas that Roosevelt found every block intriguing. Billy the Kid had even once called the town home. By coming to the Rough Riders’ reunion, Governor Roosevelt was weaving himself into southwestern lore. (In 1940, Las Vegas, New Mexico, was chosen as the Rough Riders’ official reunion headquarters, with a museum dedicated to them.)

Besides making terrific press, Governor Roosevelt was able to see for himself the beauty of the rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains he had heard about so frequently in Cuba from the Rough Riders. This was where the western edge of the Great Plains met with the southern edge of the Rockies. Las Vegas was in the heart of the Central Flyway, one of the four major migration routes in North America—this flyway followed the Great Plains and extended from Central Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Tall ponderosa pines rose along the canyon rims, and some of the finest piñon, pine-juniper, and groves of gambel oak could be easily enjoyed. Over 270 bird species spent time in this ecosystem.
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Just seeing Swainson’s hawks—which often congregated in the short-grass prairie that later became the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge—was enough of an attraction to induce Roosevelt to travel more than 2,000 miles.
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Upon returning home from Las Vegas, as Roosevelt’s train went though Kansas, huge crowds greeted him at depots. “I cannot tell you how much impressed I was by the rugged look of power in Kansas men whom I met along the line of the railroad,” Roosevelt wrote to William Allen White about the famed journalist’s home state. “What a splendid type it is! I can see their faces now. Our country is pretty good after all!”
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Only a portion of Governor Roosevelt’s energy was given to forestry, birds’ rights, and wildlife protection in 1899. For one thing, starting in January, Scribner’s magazine began serializing Roosevelt’s
The Rough Riders
, about his exploits in the Spanish-American War; in May it was published as a book and became a runaway best seller. With a vengeance,
Roosevelt also wanted to start taxing corporations in New York to help finance conservation programs. Many disgruntled Republicans, including Boss Platt, insinuated that he was a traitor to his class. Such insults were music to Roosevelt’s ears. In May 1899, for example, he addressed the City Club of New York and didn’t mince words. “A corporation is simply a collection of men, who may do well or who may do ill,” he said. “The thing to do is to make them understand that if they do well you are with them, but if they do ill you are ever and always against them.”
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Such anticorporation speeches angered some Republican bigwigs, who worried that Roosevelt might paralyze the party. But such rhetoric put independent voters strongly on the side of Roosevelt’s “sock it to the rich” spiels. Throughout the summer of 1899, while Roosevelt worked hard on writing a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector of England from 1653 to 1658), newspaper editorials began to pop up, suggesting that he should become President McKinley’s vice presidential nominee in the coming election of 1900. The word was that Vice President Garret Augustus “Gus” Hobart—who had been raised in luxury in Long Branch, New Jersey—was seriously ill and that Roosevelt would be a logical replacement. Henry Cabot Lodge, always Roosevelt’s sponsor, began promoting the nomination wherever he went. Others thought Roosevelt should become secretary of war or of the interior. Ironically, Boss Platt and the corporate financiers wanted Roosevelt out of Albany, and hope was that they could elevate him to Washington, D.C., to get him out of their hair.
⁵⁵

On November 21, 1899, Vice President Hobart died. His heart had given out. “No one outside of this home,” President McKinley said in Paterson, New Jersey, “feels this loss more deeply than I do.”
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Expectations ran high during the holiday season that Roosevelt would be McKinley’s replacement, at least for the reelection ticket in 1900. (Mark Hanna would serve as an interim number two in the chain of command.) The other names bandied about—for example, John D. Long and Timothy Woodruff—by contrast to Roosevelt, seemed stale. Disregarding all this speculation, Roosevelt unambiguously said forget it; he had no interest in the number two spot. Even though President McKinley had treated Hobart almost as a copresident, bringing the vice presidency up from its low estate, Roosevelt really wanted nothing to do with any kind of candidacy.
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Santa Claus was preparing to visit Oyster Bay, the nineteenth century was coming to a close, and he didn’t have time for guessing games or parlor politics. Much of what Roosevelt had to be grateful for—his colonelcy, his status as a war hero, his governorship—had come his way
within the past two years. His strenuous life was on the upswing. He was considered an icon. Only Buffalo Bill took the oxygen out of a room as easily as Governor Roosevelt. While Roosevelt’s restless urge to make a mark on American politics persisted, he didn’t think riding on President McKinley’s coattails was the proper way for advancement.

Instead of corresponding about Vice President Hobart’s death on November 21, Roosevelt preferred to write about the newest addition to the household menagerie: a baby opossum, which he had requested from his friend Bradley Tyler Johnson. “The opossum arrived all right and Archie received it with such loving admiration that I gave it to him, a little to the jealousy of Ted and Kermit,” the governor wrote. “In spite of your assurance that it is tame, Archie does not venture to pet it, and its only intimate acquaintance with him is when I take it up by the nape of the neck, and on such occasions it always opens its jaws like an alligator. Archie still regards it with unqualified respect. It has utterly unsettled the nerves of the terrier who sits in front of its cage for hours, showing the most eager, but I fear unfriendly desire to get in.”
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About ten to fourteen days later Roosevelt, worried that Ted’s feelings were hurt because the opossum wasn’t his, got Ted a guinea pig to even the score.
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Roosevelt was always a fine correspondent, and that December the letters poured out of him. In many he expressed thanks to his close friends, such as George Bird Grinnell and Henry Cabot Lodge, for always being at his side. In others he reflected on how parochial Albany was compared with Washington, D.C. Already Pinchot was soliciting Roosevelt to side with him in a campaign to transfer the forest reserves from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture.
⁶⁰
But mainly they were a form of cheerleading; he was trying to unite his allies in his reform crusade through graciousness. “Oh Lord!” Roosevelt wrote Elihu Root, “I wish there were more of you. I think I have made a pretty good Governor, but I am quite honest in saying that I think you would have made a better one; for in just such matters as trusts and the like you have the ideas to work out whereas I have to try to work out what I get from you and men like you.”
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IV

Governor Roosevelt’s second annual message to the New York state legislature on January 3, 1900, was the most important speech about conservation ever delivered by a serious American politician up until that time. Everything from illegal hunting to forest fire protection and watersheds
was covered. The governor tried hard to persuade the legislators that forest preservation was of “the utmost importance to the State.” Disposing of land abusers as parasites, Roosevelt stated—insisted, really—that the “Adirondacks and Catskills should be great parks kept in perpetuity for the benefit and enjoyment of our people.”
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His speech led to what
Conservation Biology
later called a “revival of democracy” through the nature movement.
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Like a sentry standing watch, Roosevelt was going to protect New York’s wilderness from despoilers of every stripe. “As railroads tend to encroach on the wilderness,” Roosevelt warned, “the temptation to illegal hunting becomes greater, and the danger of forest fires increases.”
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Although Governor Roosevelt gave a small compliment to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission for the propagation of hatcheries producing valuable food, his address was essentially a litany of woes he wanted corrected. Lumbering in state forests, Roosevelt declared, had to be placed “on strictly scientific principles no less than upon principles of the strictest honesty toward the state.” Both lakes and rivers, he said, needed to be protected from the indiscriminate effects of hyper-industrialization. Game wardens, he claimed, weren’t doing their jobs correctly. He wanted “woodsmen” with a background in science to take over these posts. State forests had to be consistently treated with the utmost respect by lumber companies. “The subject of forest preservation,” he said, “is of the utmost importance to the State.” And then he took up specific issues of birds’ rights:

Never before in U.S. history had a governor championed forest preservation and bird rights with such forthrightness.
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As Roosevelt wrote to Grant La Farge, he had done this without a “particle of popular backing of the effective kind.”
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Pinchot, who had been somewhere out West at the time the speech was delivered, would later memorize passages as if it were the Gettysburg Address. Overnight, the ornithologists praised Roosevelt’s second annual message to the skies; it was a fulfillment of a dream. Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History, for example, considered January 3 one of the greatest days of his life—Roosevelt’s hard-hitting, visionary defense of birds in his second annual message was, Chapman believed, the tipping point for the Audubon Movement, the wave which crashed down on an entire new generation anxious for preservation to triumph over annihilation. A governor of New York, for the first time, took on both the lumber and the cold storage lobbies.

Not that Chapman was surprised. Starting in early 1900, Governor Roosevelt began promoting the virtues of “citizen bird” with a new zeal. Public awareness, the governor and his followers believed, was always the first step in winning a political battle in the United States. The previous year, the magazine
Audubon
had come into existence; its editor, Frank M. Chapman, was hoping to lead an effort to create bird reservations throughout the United States (particularly in New York and Florida). There was a movement afoot, encouraging individual participation in field research projects, surveys, censuses, and polls. The central idea was that every American community could have its own bird sanctuary. People were encouraged to have binoculars or field glasses ready at home. For the first time backyard bird feeders and ceramic birdbaths were erected by everyday citizens hoping to attract crossbills and grosbeaks. Sunflower seed feeders, for example, attracted jays, finches, and chickadees. One company started manufacturing nectar feeders—tubes filled with sugar water—to attract hummingbirds. Vacations were planned around simply spying on a new bird with alert eyes. Hard-core enthusiasts, those rich enough to travel, could be found looking for the greater prairie chicken in the sand hills of Nebraska or sighting the Chihuahuan raven in the borderlands of Texas.
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It is hard for some people to understand what made Roosevelt love
birds so deeply when other influential contemporaries paid them so little mind. Its safe to say, for example, that Roosevelt was the only serious bird-watcher to ever become president of the United States. In the final analysis, virtually all ornithologists—Burroughs, Chapman, and Grinnell included—were people who just started counting the birds they saw and got carried away. Blessed with some sixth sense, birders like Roosevelt believed avians could be key to the biblical drama of Genesis. And the pastime of bird-watching wasn’t exclusively for the rich. Those actively predisposed to birding—27 million strong in the United States by 2009, making this the nation’s single most popular hobby 100 years after Roosevelt’s presidency ended—take joy in seeing the sudden movement of a warbler or in hearing a veery pierce the afternoon silence with its song.
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Despite some differences in temperament, Roosevelt, Burroughs, and other leading naturalists shared a desire to personally witness as many as possible of the nearly 700 species that spent time east of the 100th meridian.

Besides Sagamore Hill, one of Roosevelt’s favorite places to go birding in 1900 was the woodlands in and around the Bronx Zoo. Throughout his life Roosevelt would traverse bogs, prairie potholes, and wetlands just to see a particularly rare bird. He knew that the best birding occurred in transition areas where two or three habitats met—what modern ecologists call ecotones. Just wandering around the Bronx grounds reconfirmed his belief that, as Pinchot held, forests were a necessary precondition for species survival. Waterfowl—with the exception of the African pygmy goose—always nested in high places, usually trees. Roosevelt fretted that New York’s migratory birds faced triple jeopardy: the fragmentations of northern breeding grounds; the disappearance of nesting and feeding areas along migratory routes; and deforestation of the Adirondacks and wintering grounds in Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. He didn’t worry about some adaptable species, such as the northern cardinal (
Cardinalis cardinalis
), whose year-round
purty-purty-purty
was a soothing antidote to the industrial noise of the nearby Bronx. Mourning doves and blue jays were also easily found in backyards. But other species he encountered using the zoo as a refuge—for example, the black-capped chickadee (
Poecile atricapilla
) and northern mockingbird (
Mimus polyglottos
)—might need human rehabilitation efforts to help them survive the impact of industrialization. Too much of the New York City habitat had been cut into pieces for roads and buildings, but Roosevelt’s zoo would be a thickly forested oasis for some bird flocks being decimated by modern conditions.