The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (63 page)

The primary purpose of this trip was to collect cougars (and to a lesser extent lynx) from the White River area for Merriam. His job, in fact, was to shoot as many of the predators as possible for the Biological Survey to analyze. This was the new arrangement between Roosevelt and Merriam. Somehow, perhaps as a payback for Roosevelt’s Cosmos Club challenge, Merriam now had Roosevelt collecting specimens for him in the Rocky Mountains, a pretty nifty trick. For six weeks Roosevelt hunted north of the White River on horseback—mainly between Coyote Basin and Col-orow Mountain—enjoying the high, dry country with the cutting air full of shimmering frost particles. These pearly peaks were a fine diversion from politics. The heavily wooded slopes were wilder than he had imagined, untouched by axes. Meeker, named after a U.S. government Indian agent who had been killed by a band of Utes in 1878, had become a regional center for hunting. The White River Plateau Timberland Reserve (the precursor of what became White River National Forest) had been the favorite hunting grounds of many members of the Boone and Crockett Club.

Roosevelt had written (with some nostalgia for his days in the Badlands around 1886), that he had “no more hesitation in sleeping out in a woods where there were cougars, or walking through it after nightfall, than I should have if the cougars were tomcats.”
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Nevertheless, he spent most nights sleeping in a forest hut or a rancher’s house chosen at random, or at the Hotel Meeker across from the local courthouse. (It was hypothermia he was worried about, not cougars.) As at every hotel in the American West where Roosevelt ever slept—that is, among those surviving the wrecking ball—a bronze plaque would soon be erected at the Meeker Hotel on Main Street bragging that he had once stayed there. Over the years Roosevelt would tell people that the Meeker Hotel was better than any lodge in the Swiss Alps. The rock-hewn splendor of Colorado, he’d
say, was by his estimate a world-class attraction. The tourist board of Colorado loved him for that, even though the timber barons and mining companies wanted him buried in an avalanche of snow. “The sage-brush grows everywhere upon the flats and hillsides,” he wrote in what would become a chapter in
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
. “Large open groves of pinyon and cedar are scattered over the peaks, ridges and tablelands. Tall spruces cluster in the cold ravines.”
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Having adopted Josephine the cougar as the mascot of the Rough Riders, feeding her milk from a bottle and watching her grow, Roosevelt had become extremely interested in mountain lions (or cougars, as he preferred to call the species). Only Merriam and Winthrop Chanler, he believed, had written proficiently about cougars. (And he even doubted a few of their scientific claims.) False reports about how cougars seized prey and about their size variation annoyed him no end. Some zoologists actually believed bobcats were small cougars, a proposition that T.R. knew was hokum. Even though Roosevelt was a fan of the famous hunter Richard Irving Dodge’s
The Plains of the Great West
, he believed that Dodge had misidentified cougars as two separate species. Roosevelt—sounding a bit like Merriam—believed there were also five subspecies such as the Florida panther. “No American beast has been the subject of so much loose writing or of such wild fables as the cougar,” Roosevelt complained. “Even its name is unsettled.”
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While tramping about the Maroon Bells, a gorgeous group of Paleozoic sandstone and mudstone peaks near Aspen, Roosevelt recognized the wisdom of the Harrison administration in having protected this piece of the Colorado wilderness for all time. On every scientific “relief map” of the continental states that Roosevelt had ever seen, those which reproduced nature exactly, showing the peaks and valleys and other geographic details on a small scale, Colorado was the most intriguing, with its hilly ribs and mountain ranges. This was an ancestral elk range, a place where the Ute once hunted the great herds, a wild evergreen country which, thanks to federal intervention, would stay wild.
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The elemental and the fundamental were honored in the Rockies. Far away from the thunder of applause and prodigious fame, Roosevelt, advocate of the strenuous life, found peace shaving stubble from his face in a nearly frozen stream. In
Colorado he dreamed. He plotted. He slept and breathed well. He found his scattered wits by cupping his hands, then shouting
Hello
, and not getting a reply. “Some thirty miles to the east and north the mountains rise higher, the evergreen forest becomes continuous, the snow lies deep all through the winter, and such Northern animals as the wolverene, lucivee, and snow-shoe rabbit are found,” Roosevelt wrote. “This high country is the summer home of the Colorado elk, now woefully diminished in numbers, and of the Colorado blacktail deer, which are still very plentiful, but which, unless better protected, will follow the elk in the next few decades.”
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Not that he didn’t work hard throughout the six weeks. Daily he visited Colorado homesteads to record reports of cougar sightings, as if he were collecting census data for the federal government. Replaying his days collecting grizzly bear stories in Montana in 1889, he now performed the same oral history task in the winter loneliness of Colorado. What could be better than dusk on horseback in the Rockies looking for cougars and hearing lore from old-timers in the snow? Or watching every night as a crescent moon hung over the mountain peaks. Black-tailed deer abounded, but Roosevelt conscientiously refused to shoot one. He took his Biological Survey job too seriously for that. After all, deer weren’t predators. Also, Stewart—who took photographs of the Colorado wilderness with his new Kodak camera—didn’t want to take down a deer.
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“The bucks had not lost their antlers, and were generally, but not always, found in small troops by themselves,” Roosevelt wrote, “the does, yearlings, and fawns—now almost yearlings themselves—went in bands. They seemed tame, and we often passed close to them before they took alarm. Of course at that season it was against the law to kill them; and even had this not been so none of our party would have dreamed of molesting them.”
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In Roosevelt’s “With the Cougar Hounds”—which appeared in his 1905 book
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
—Roosevelt mentions Merriam by name three or four times, with interesting elaborations.
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Clearly, Roosevelt was determined to make readers understand that his hunt wasn’t just for sport; it was a scientific expedition. Fourteen cougars both male and female were shot between January 19 and February 14, and Roosevelt recorded detailed data about each one. The largest was eight feet long, and the shortest was under five feet. Zoological tables were compiled by Roosevelt to help Merriam and others at the survey understand the precise circumstances in which the cougars were killed. His field reports from Colorado were the work of a professional, recording
whether the cougars’ coats were tawny golden or gray-brown. “The fourteen cougar we killed showed the widest variation not only in size but in color, as shown by the following table,” Roosevelt wrote. “Some were as slaty-gray as deer when in the so-called ‘blue’ others, rufous, almost as bright as deer in the ‘red.’ I use these two terms to describe the color phases; though in some instances the tint was very undecided. The color phase evidently has nothing to do with age, sex, season, or locality.”
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Roosevelt’s relationship with cougars was complex. In
The Wilderness Hunter
, as a western rancher, he portrayed them as “bloodthirsty” killers attacking cattle with vicious abandon.
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There was even an overdramatized illustration by J. Carter Beard of a rabid-looking cougar Roosevelt had shot in September 1889. But Roosevelt’s respect for the cougar had grown over the years. He liked the fact that a male cougar would defend between 50 and 400 square miles on its own. But he worried that the cougars’ prey were elk and deer. Cougars were obligate carnivores that depended on deer and elk as part of their primary diet. If the cougars weren’t controlled in the Rockies, then the big game couldn’t come back. So Roosevelt saw himself on a four-pronged mission in Colorado: helping the Biological Survey better understand
Puma concolor;
working to eradicate the cougar from the White River region to enhance the elk and deer populations; claiming his place as the North American authority on these big cats; and selling a couple of articles (illustrated with Stewart’s photographs) for the October and November issues for the
Scribner’s Magazine
. For a sportsman, cougars, blessed with diurnal and nocturnal vision, were extremely difficult to hunt. In the days before radio telemetry devices it took a truly gifted outdoorsman to track them at all.

Accompanying Roosevelt, Stewart, and Webb on the hunt was John B. Goff, considered the finest tracker of the “ghost cats” in Colorado. This was always Roosevelt’s secret as an outdoorsman; he had a genius (and the money) for finding the best hunt guides available for every expedition. Roosevelt’s deft writing about the hunt—when published in 1905—contained the most anatomically correct descriptions of Colorado cougars, from their white muzzles to their huge paws, ever written up until that time. Carefully crating his kills in Denver, Roosevelt had shipped his cougars’ heads, paws, and skins directly to C. G. Gunther’s Sons on Fifth Avenue in New York City for preparing.

The trip to Colorado whetted Roosevelt’s appetite for more cougar collecting. Word from Yellowstone National Park was that cougars were wreaking havoc on the elk herds. Encouraged by Merriam, Roosevelt planned on heading up to the park within the year to find more speci
mens for the Biological Survey and help out the bands of elk. “Many conservationists of the day, including Roosevelt, believed limiting predation would increase ungulate populations,” the historian Jeremy M. Johnston explained in
Yellowstone Science
, “allowing them to recover from the results of the intensive market hunting that occurred in the park before the ban on hunting.”
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IV

Roosevelt returned to Washington tremendously improved in appearance. In Colorado, he had written a dozen letters detailing his hunt for the cougar (and lynx). What he seemed to admire most about cougars was that they ate meat only fresh and clean—and, of course, the way they mastered topography; they were able to live in isolated cliffs or remote alpine valleys far removed from civilization. Armed with all his detailed measurements and field notes regarding cougars and lynx, Roosevelt denounced William Henry Hudson, best known in history as the author of
Green Mansions
, for his “preposterous fables” about cougars in his recent book
The Naturalist on the Plateau
.
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Roosevelt kept score on those whom he considered “nature fakers,” preparing for a frontal assault in the near future. Unlike bears—which were omnivores with meal alternatives like berries, roots, shoots, and pine nuts—cougars were able to eat only meat; Roosevelt believed this was the reason they were overdramatized as bloodthirsty killers.

Famously, Mark Hanna once quipped that Roosevelt was a “damn cowboy,” now only “one heart beat away from the presidency.” But the word “cowboy” would imply that Roosevelt was a rubber stamp for the stockmen’s associations of the Rocky Mountains, which he clearly wasn’t. The reality, in fact, was far worse than Hanna contemplated. Roosevelt was a pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist who had been trained at Harvard as a Darwinian-Huxleyite zoologist and now believed that the moral implications of
On the Origin of Species
needed to be embraced by public policy. The GOP was in trouble.

While Roosevelt had been in Colorado a great oil boom was under way. It was big enough to have befuddled John D. Rockefeller himself. Roosevelt didn’t know whether it was a cause for celebration or woe. Near Beaumont, Texas, at a place known as Spindletop, black gold spouted 200 feet in the air. The western plains of Texas and Oklahoma, he knew, would never be the same now that oil had been found. Somehow or other Roosevelt found a way to be at war with the Standard Oil Company for his entire life. Meanwhile, on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration as vice
president J. P. Morgan and Company announced the formation of a humongous corporation, U.S. Steel, with a capitalization of $1.4 billion. That development didn’t much impress Roosevelt’s usually outsized curiosity. Talk of automobiles replacing horses—which R.B.R. envisioned as the wave of the future—irritated him further. The mere thought of Duryeas in Yellowstone or Wintons in Yosemite was anathema to Roosevelt. Society didn’t let Studebakers drive into cathedrals or art museums, did it? A “stern moral code” dictated all aspects of his life, causing him to reject what the Blum called in
The Republican Roosevelt
“the amorality of business.”
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For all of his cutting-edge talk of science, Roosevelt was really an old-fashioned camper type, a rustic, enamored with the very notion of log cabins or hunters’ and naturalists’ shacks. As he took his oath of office his primary concern wasn’t Spindletop or J. P. Morgan; it was conservation. As for foreign policy, Roosevelt promised he would backstop President McKinley’s policies. When it came to building a new great naval fleet and administering the Philippines, Roosevelt believed, President McKinley, to his credit, was an expansionist. Roosevelt’s only real complaint (and it was a big one) was that McKinley was a slow-moving, incremental expansionist. As an admirer of Mahan, Roosevelt wanted the United States to make permanent naval bases in Cuba, Panama, Guam, and Puerto Rico. In February 1900 he had written a sharp protest letter to Secretary of State John Hay over the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty; he felt U.S. rights to build an isthmus canal across Panama or Nicaragua hadn’t been properly protected under the terms.
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The challenge for Vice President Roosevelt—particularly when it came to conservation—was to be a team player in the McKinley administration. The Senate session Roosevelt presided over lasted for only five days—March 4 to 8—and then adjourned until the late fall. Roosevelt’s big accomplishment as vice president was, as the historian H. W. Brands succinctly put it, having “gaveled the session open and closed.”
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Roosevelt was forced to console himself by considering that his real work took place during the campaign, so it didn’t now matter whether he fell into a life of “unwarrantable idleness.”
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