The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (6 page)

The Boy Hunters
included marvelous Hogarth-like woodcut illustrations of ferocious cougars and a bear wrestling an alligator, which spiced up the narrative. Lovingly Captain Reid described in credible naturalistic detail tulip trees and the fanlike leaves of palmettos, weird yuccas, and lofty sugar maples. Most ambitiously, however, he anticipated Darwinian theory in anecdotes about the food chain.
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Academics have (accurately) criticized Captain Reid for harboring racist views of Indians and black slaves, but they’ve traditionally overlooked his essentially Marxist analogies about how the rich preyed on the poor in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a radical Republican, and to him the mega-capitalists were “king vultures” who didn’t have a single positive trait and who abused the common vultures
(aura
and
atratus)
without mercy. Later in life, when Roosevelt fought in the Spanish-American War, he borrowed much of Captain Reid’s observations of vultures for color in his own memoir
The Rough Riders
.
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Unlike James Fenimore Cooper or the
Crockett Almanacs
, Reid’s half-fictions awkwardly offered up the proper Latin names for wildlife and plants he encountered. “About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage
(artemisia tridentata)
,” he wrote in
The Boy Hunters
, “a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse
(tetrao uro-phasianus)
, the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.”
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Passages like this occur in dozens of Reid’s books, often with the Latin binomials slowing down the otherwise fast-paced prose. Clearly, Reid wasn’t a local-color writer like Bret Harte or Alfred Henry Lewis recounting desperado hijinks and cowboy yarns from the Wild West. Roosevelt, like many American and English boys, made no bones about their idolatry of Captain Reid and his risky romps throughout the West.

Later in life, when Roosevelt moved to the Dakota Territory for intermittent spells to ranch and research a trilogy of books on the outdoors
and hunting, Reid remained his literary model. Reid’s prose exploits of an American “cibolero” (buffalo hunter) in
The White Chief: A Legend of North Mexico
(1855), for example, motivated Roosevelt to lustily track down a nonwhite bison himself. In following its protagonist on a wild, woolly hunt for trophies in the Rockies, the book celebrated manifest destiny while offering Roosevelt a “manly” lesson in natural history. “To [the cibolero] the open plain or the mountain was alike a home,” Captain Reid wrote. “He needed no roof. The starry canopy was as welcome as the gilded ceiling of a palace.”
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Whenever Roosevelt wrote about the wilderness or birds, even as a boy, traces of Reid’s hyper-romantic style are easily detectable.
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Although other naturalist writers also captivated young Theodore’s imagination—for example, John James Audubon and Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost naturalist of the era
*
—Captain Reid, whom Edgar Allan Poe witheringly described as “a colossal but most picturesque liar,” remained his role model.
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(Captain Reid seldom purposely lied about nature, but he always embellished his own supposed rough-and-ready heroics.) An impressive five times in his
An Autobiography
of 1913, Roosevelt wrote about how “dearly loved” Reid was.
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By contrast, other outdoors books for boys didn’t much appeal to Roosevelt. For example, he dismissed Johann D. Wyss’s
The Swiss Family Robinson
for its clumsy zoology and was bored by its tropical escapism and dragfoot juvenility. According to young T.R., Wyss had assembled a “wholly impossible collection of animals” to pad his plot about survival after a shipwreck.
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One naturalist Roosevelt did enjoy was the British scholar Reverend J. G. Wood, whose
Illustrated Natural History
was published to wide acclaim in 1851. Wood made studying wildlife fun for nonscientific minds as well as specialists, without dumbing it down. Ignoring the complications of Darwinism, he simply took the view that natural history was “far better than a play” and “one gets the fresh air besides.”
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In particular, Roosevelt loved Wood’s
Homes without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, Classed According to Their Principle of Construction
(1866). Roosevelt marveled at passages in this weighty 632-page tome about ant nests and tunnels, deciding on the spot to emulate the author.
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The eight-year-old Roosevelt sat down and wrote a short essay, his first known written work, titled “The Foraging Ant.” There were more than 10,000 ant spe
cies in the world and Roosevelt wanted to understand their differences.
*
Proud of “The Foraging Ant,” which was about the workaholism of ants, Roosevelt read the essay out loud to his parents, who were complimentary about the pseudoscientific earnestness of his naturalist prose.
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More impressive than the essay itself, however, was the mere fact that young T.R. had read
Homes without Hands
. Although the book was replete with engravings of numerous species ranging from ospreys to wasps, the prose was fairly dense. Ostensibly, Wood was describing the varied hearths wild creatures built to live in—moles’ burrows, prairie dogs’ tunnels, rabbits’ warrens, beavers’ dams, spiders’ nests, and so on. But
Homes without Hands
was not aimed at the children’s book marketplace; it was serious adult fare, the kind of comprehensive text required in mid-nineteenth-century university biology or zoology introductory courses. Full of Latin identifications, choking with minutiae about the abdomen colors of bees and conchologistical (conchology is the study of mollusks) insights into
Saxicava
, this book was a far cry from the elegant musings of Thoreau about the shifting light at Walden Pond or a
National Geographic
article on white-water runs down the Shenandoah River. That Roosevelt gravitated to its heft pointed to his future avocation as one of the most astute wildlife observers our country has ever produced. One object from his Twentieth Street home impressed him more than any other: a Swiss wood-carving that showed a hunter stalking up a mountain after a herd of chamois, including a kid. As Roosevelt recalled in
An Autobiography
, he fretted regularly for the tiny chamois, fearful that “the hunter might come on it and kill it.”
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Stifled by city life, Roosevelt educated himself as best he could about zoology on the streets of Manhattan. As if cramming for a final exam, he grew determined to learn the song of every fast-fluttering bird in New York and the nesting habits of every small mammal in Central Park. Studying marine species in the nearby Atlantic Ocean was another interest; he actually enjoyed analyzing the radula (mouthparts) of mollusks. One afternoon he spied a dead seal at a fish stand among the piles of maritime products available for sale on the wharf—scallops, tuna, and other food fish; dried sea horses and pipefishes hawked for their “medicinal” qualities; and much more. Roosevelt fixated on the dead seal’s bulk and whiskers.
³³
The fact that the species had been netted in New York
Harbor, where it is a rare visitor, flabbergasted him. Day after day, as if drawn to a talisman, he kept begging to be brought to the pier to study the seal’s anatomy more closely.
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As a budding naturalist, acquainted with
The Voyage of the Beagle
, the seven- or eight-year-old noted that seals had no external ears and that their back flippers didn’t bend forward to help their bodies when they were on dry land. Zoology books taught him that there were nineteen seal species in the world, most living around Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.

“That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure,” he later recalled in his autobiography. “I had already begun to read some of Mayne Reid’s books and other boys’ books of adventure, and I felt that this seal brought all these adventures in realistic fashion before me. As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal.”
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Eventually, once the seal’s body was sold for blubber, Roosevelt was given the head as a souvenir. With this in hand, the ten-year-old created his “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.” Its purpose was to help train him to become a natural history professional like Darwin. Bookshelf space was made in the upstairs hall at 28 East Twentieth Street for “Tag #1,” and before long he had rows of bird nests, dead insects, and mouse skeletons. He considered himself a “general collector,” with a particular interest in salamanders and squirrels. After a few months, however, he turned his focus primarily to birds. Before long, he had numerous specimens to call his own. There is, in fact, a precious historical document housed at Harvard University, handwritten and five pages long, that illuminates the sheer earnestness with which young Theodore maintained his natural history collection. Titled “Record of the Roosevelt Museum,” it begins with a proclamation of professional accomplishment. “At the commencement of the year 1867 Mr. T. Roosevelt, Jr. started the Museum with 12 specimins
[sic]
: at the close of the same year Mr. J. W. Roosevelt [West Roosevelt, his cousin] joined him but each kept his own specimens, these amounting to hardly 100. During 1868 they accumulated 150 specimens, making a total of 250 specimens.”
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Roosevelt scrambled for new specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects wherever he could. Conch shells, larvae, hollowed eggs, and even a common cockroach were worth inclusion into his grow
ing windowsill and bookshelf collection. In an article titled “My Life as a Naturalist,” written in 1918 when he was an ex-president, Roosevelt recalled that he collected specimens the way other boys collected stamps.
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Jars of tadpoles and minnows were particular favorites in his museum. Heading up Third Avenue toward the Harlem River, Roosevelt would wander the fields looking for rabbit holes and woodcock feathers. Leaves found in Gramercy Park were pressed into books and preserved. Young Theodore prided himself on being able to distinguish a hardwood from a conifer. Sometimes he would study the differences between leaves from the same tree, like a perplexed botanist.

As a boy, Roosevelt developed a keen sense of hearing, perhaps as compensation for his extreme nearsightedness. When he was twelve, his parents finally bought him spectacles, and a whole new world of avian color blossomed in front of him: for example, the bright plumage of indigo buntings and red cardinals shone for the first time as though dipped in Day-Glo. Roosevelt was interrogative about birds, believing they were messengers from prehistoric times. “It was the world of birds—birds, above all—that burst upon him now, upstaging all else in his eyes,” the historian David McCullough explained of the adolescent Roosevelt, “now that he could actually see them in colors and in numbers beyond anything he had ever imagined.”
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As a budding ornithologist Roosevelt also mastered the identification of a bird by the way it flew. If he saw a moderate rise and fall, the bird could be a woodpecker or northern flicker. Other birds, however—like hawks, egrets, herons, and crows—flew in a straight line, flapping their wings in constant rhythm. He learned that studying a bird’s feather shape, color, and pattern was another way to properly identify it. And then, of course, there were the differences in bird’s beaks, which from a utilitarian standpoint were better than Swiss army knives: they caught and held food, preened feathers, and built nests. There were thousands of different types of birds in the world and Roosevelt wanted to identify them all: a lofty goal that became a lifelong pursuit, which he never abandoned. “Roosevelt was part of a generation of men,” the naturalist Jonathan Rosen has explained in
The Life of the Skies
, “who helped mark the transition from the nature-collecting frenzy that followed the Civil War to what we today recognize as birdwatching.”
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II

Roosevelt’s mother greatly encouraged her son’s fascination with birds. Martha Bulloch Roosevelt (or Mittie, as she was usually called) was born
on July 8, 1835, in Connecticut but grew up in Savannah and then Roswell, Georgia, north of Atlanta. She was something of a southern belle, with a gentle air about her; her two brothers had fought for the Confederate army in the Civil War. Even though Mittie married a Yankee—Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., of New York—and moved to Manhattan, she never abandoned her Johnny Rebel sympathies. After the surrender at Appomattox she tended to romanticize the “lost cause,” always championing the Gray over the Blue, furious over the way captured Georgian soldiers had been mistreated in prison camps in Illinois and Maryland. Most of Mittie’s reflections on the South, however, were idyllic. Her yarns about Georgia red clay, black bears, and beige panthers always kept her children wide-eyed. Because of Mittie, in fact, the piney woods of Georgia—the shortleaf, longleaf, loblolly, and slash pine—had an enduring fascination for Theodore. Encouraged by Mittie, Theodore became a die-hard enthusiast of natural history, a collector enraptured by birds. She even allowed into the Roosevelt household exotic live creatures like flying squirrels and newts. “My triumphs,” Roosevelt recalled of his childhood, “consisted in such things as bringing home and raising—by the aid of milk and a syringe—a family of very young gray squirrels, in fruitlessly endeavoring to tame an excessively unamiable woodchuck, and in making friends with a gentle, pretty, trustful white-footed mouse which reared her family in an empty flower pot.”
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