The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (68 page)

Regularly Roosevelt would walk from the White House to Merriam’s home to study his world-class collection of mammal bones and skins.
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He was like a child wandering into F.A.O. Schwartz on Christmas Eve. Mer
riam’s huge library was
the
“zoological salon” of the District of Columbia. “Few people are aware of Roosevelt’s knowledge of mammals and their skulls,” Merriam recalled. “One evening at my house (Where I then had in the neighborhood of five thousand skulls of North American mammals) he astonished every one—including several eminent naturalists—by picking up skull after skull and mentioning the scientific name of the genus to which each belonged.”
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Besides rattling off the genus of skulls, Roosevelt was proud that some of the Biological Survey’s best cougars were courtesy of his prodigious hunting efforts. Two weeks after Roosevelt delivered his Annual Message he wrote to Yellowstone’s acting superintendent, Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, about shooting cougars to control predation. The president wanted to arrive in Yellowstone that June and hunt “varmints” that were “not protected.” A backwoodsman, John B. Goff, would serve as a guide, using his pack of hounds to chase the big cats. If Roosevelt collected ten or twelve cougars from Wyoming he could ship them to Merriam to be compared with the ones from Colorado. Being president shouldn’t mean relinquishing his reputation as the world’s leading expert on cougars. From Major Pitcher’s perspective this was an insane request. The president of the United States, busy with international crises, wanted to summer in the wilds of Yellowstone to “thin out” the cougars? But Major Pitcher—particularly as
acting
superintendent—wasn’t going to tell his boss no. He started making arrangements.

The rumor that Roosevelt was coming to Yellowstone had C. J. “Buffalo” Jones whooping with excitement. Sidestepping Major Pitcher, Jones started to make plans for a hunt in Yellowstone. He was especially anxious for the president to see some of the buffalo he’d raised like cattle. Most Americans in 1901 could see bison only in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or at Bronx Zoo or the Goodnight Ranch in Texas. Jones was determined to change that sad fact. An old buffalo runner, he had reformed and was among the best bison breeders in the American West. Sickened that his own slaughtering of buffalo had almost brought about their extinction, Jones wanted to show his hero, President Roosevelt, how he had made a 180-degree turn. Roosevelt was greatly interested in Buffalo Jones’s claim to have successfully crossbred bison with cattle (producing “catalo”) and even reportedly broken a few of the offspring to harness. Unfortunately, one of Jones’s captive Yellowstone buffalo—named “Lucky Knight”—had trampled a Wyoming resident to death. Refusing to let Lucky Knight be butchered, Buffalo Jones instead trained it to pull his buckboard. He bragged that he had the only killer buffalo in the West.
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Unfortunately,
Roosevelt’s 1902 trip to Yellowstone was postponed for a year owing to an unexpectedly heavy workload. The anthracite coal strike, heightened Russo-Japanese tension, and other serious presidential concerns forced Roosevelt to postpone seeing Buffalo Jones’s bison herd until April 1903.

That Christmas season President Roosevelt grew intrigued by the creation of the new American Scenic and History Preservation Society in New York (it was an outgrowth of Andrew H. Green’s Trustees of Scenic and History Places and Objects, which had helped Roosevelt save Palisades Park back in 1900). Just as Roosevelt wanted the Biological Survey to inventory all of America’s plants, birds, fish, insects, and wildlife, this new nonprofit organization, modeled after Britain’s National Trust, was going to protect both historic sites and scenic places. Roosevelt believed—thanks to Congressman Lacey’s inspection tour—that, for example, the Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado and the Pueblo Chaco Canyon in New Mexico needed protection. The new trust was going to start doing that and more. Among the places the trust saved were Stony Point Battlefield (thirty-five acres on the shore of the Hudson River near West Point), Lake George Battlefield (thirty-five acres on Lake George), and Fort Brewerton (in Hastings at the foot of Oneida Lake). Wishing he could have founded the trust, Roosevelt began scheming to find new ways for the federal government to interface with it. And Roosevelt started lobbying the trust to save Chalmette Battlefield in New Orleans, the site along the Mississippi River where Andrew Jackson gave the British their comeuppance; he sent Green the appropriate chapter of his
Naval War of 1812
, which documented the historical significance of the battle.
*
Contained in the trust fund were the seeds of what would become Roosevelt’s grand preservationist accomplishment—the Antiquities Act of 1906.

Congressman Lacey had truly gotten President Roosevelt to start thinking in earnest about preserving Chacoan heritage sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The cultural blossoming of the Chacoan people had begun in the mid-800s (after Christ), long before Saint Augustine was born and of course even longer before the supposed “oldest city” in North America was named after him in Florida. The Chacoans built a network of fairly sophisticated villages throughout the Southwest.
The huge Four Corners high-desert valley was once a hub of Anasazi life. Tribesmen farmed lowlands and constructed elaborate cliff dwellings. The Chaco Anasazi were extraordinary masons, and their towns were monuments to creative architecture. A burning question in archaeological and ethnological circles in 1901 was: what happened to the Anasazi? The answer seemed to be that a great drought had killed them off. The message to Roosevelt was clear: aridity was the death card in the Southwest. To be sustainable, communities had to develop water reservoirs. In 1901 Europeans considered Aztec and Maya ruins in Mexico and South America grand antiquities. The nationalistic Roosevelt scoffed at such boosterism by the European art world on behalf of Mexico. The United States, he said (thumping his chest, as it were), had just as fine ancient rubble in its own Southwest as existed in Peru or Bolivia. The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado, were our Machu Picchu.

Since his days at Harvard, in fact, Roosevelt had been interested in the mysteries pertaining to the vanished Chacoans. The photographer W. H. Jackson of the U.S. Geological Survey had written extensively about how Chacoan stairways were carved into cliffs at Mesa Verde. Unfortunately, the plates of photography he took weren’t properly developed, so he brought back to New York only diary notes. But in 1888 the Bureau of American Ethnology spent six weeks in the Four Corners region photographing Chacoan sites for a huge project on Pueblo architecture. It also reported that vandals were looting the antiquities. When Roosevelt was the U.S. civil service commissioner he denounced Chacoan “pot hunters” as being as swinish as the poachers at Yellowstone.

Between 1896 and 1900 the great archaeologist and trail guide Richard Wetherill began excavating the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. At the same time the American Museum of Natural History in New York began analyzing Pueblo Bonito. When Roosevelt was governor he inspected crates of artifacts from the Southwest when they arrived at the American Museum of Natural History and were eventually put on permanent display. Therefore, by the time Roosevelt became president in September 1901 the fact that the GLO was promoting the idea of a Chacoan national park was old news to Roosevelt. Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the committed archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett—a quiet, unassuming intellectual enamored of the Chacoan past—was mapping various sites at Four Corners in preparation for preservation, as head of the School of American Research. Hewett made it a personal crusade to save these amazing archaeological sites. There were dozens of legal hurdles to clear (not the least being Wetherill’s claim to the land around Chaco Canyon), but Roosevelt told
Congressman Lacey they’d find a way to preserve Chacoan sites. In 1902 Lacey—hiring Hewett as coconspirator—began working on sensible legislation. It would evolve into the Antiquities Act of 1906.

III

So Roosevelt had started to put the wheels in motion for preservation early in his administration. Polishing up his credentials as a naturalist and one of the four or five popular authorities on North American mammals, Roosevelt also published, on May 7, 1902, a book titled
The Deer Family
. Written while he was vice president,
The Deer Family
was issued as the first volume of the American Sportsman’s Library (edited by Casper Whitney of the Boone and Crockett Club).
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The book was done in collaboration with his fellow naturalists T. S. Van Dyke (on Pacific Coast elk and Columbia black-tailed deer), Daniel G. Elliot (on caribou), and A. J. Stone (on moose), and Roosevelt wrote the first four chapters himself. The publisher of
The Deer Family
—the Macmillan Company—made much of the fact that it constituted, as the
Washington Times
noted, “the first time in the history of the country a book has appeared bearing the name of the President of the United States as that of the author.”
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Collaboration between authors was fairly commonplace in the academic world of 1902, and scientists usually presented scholarly papers at conferences with three or four names attached to their joint research. But Theodore Roosevelt was president: whom he decided to share his title page with was automatically news. And he didn’t mind working with Darwinian eccentrics. The three men Roosevelt chose to be associated with in publishing this historic book were among the very best naturalists in America. All of them held a Darwinian belief in the importance of fossil records and the interconnectedness of environment and life. One of Roosevelt’s major motivations for writing his essays in
The Deer Family,
in fact, was to swing a lantern over the names of these naturalists, big game hunters, and explorers, in gratitude for their decades of largely unsung work. And the Boone and Crockett Club, in a congenial way, was circulating petitions in the Great Plains to promote the notion of big game preserves;
The Deer Family
was an important tool in this wildlife repopulation effort.

President Roosevelt had been in awe of Professor Elliot ever since age nineteen, when Theodore Sr. had introduced them in Italy. Honored all over the world for his bravery and his zoological discoveries, and known especially for his astounding papers on birds, Elliot had been vaguely associated with the American Museum of Natural History since its found
ing. He was also active in the American Ornithological Union. Darwin had detailed the courtship rituals of the Australian bowerbird; Elliot did the same for shorebirds. No fewer than ten nations had decorated Elliot for his first-rate empirical work in the natural sciences. Throughout the 1890s he interacted with Roosevelt socially in New York, swapping stories of bird sightings like a couple of old fuddy-duddies from the British Museum. Playing the eager student, Roosevelt had read Elliot’s monographs, all saturated with facts, including
Family of the Pheasants and Birds of Paradise
. With his large walrus mustache, which stood out more vibrantly than his pointed beard, Elliot was easily distinguishable in a crowd. When the naturalist Dr. Albert Bickmore heard that Elliot had been chosen by the Field Museum of Chicago to be its zoology curator in late 1894, he lamented that New York had lost “one of America’s first scientists.” In 1898, while Roosevelt was in Cuba with the Rough Riders, Elliot was the first serious naturalist to systematically study the Olympic Mountains in the Washington Territory (home range to Roosevelt’s elk). Elliot had initiated a movement to save the state of Washington’s Mount Olympus from the timber conglomerates.

Then there was T. S. Van Dyke, whose book
The Still Hunter
was considered a classic in the sporting genre. Van Dyke was less scientific than Elliot and was blessed with the ability to spin a good yarn about cougars; Roosevelt admired the way he brought wild creatures into the lives of everyday Americans without scientific pretension. He had a tremendous knack for powerful, accurate generalization. Nobody in the United States wrote prose as similar to the president’s as Van Dyke. There was a tradition that was passed down from Reid to Van Dyke to Roosevelt. The president was enthralled by a popular article of Van Dyke’s, “The Hills of San Bernardino,” and recommended it to everyone. “We have left far behind us the mellow flute of the valley quail,” Van Dyke wrote, “but his double-plumed and gay cousin of the mountain well supplies his place. From the lowest valley to the loftiest point where vegetation grows, you often see his mottled waistcoat of white and cinnamon, his bluish coat, and long nodding plumes; may hear the gentle patter of his little feet on the pine-needles as he steals softly away, and hear his ordinary
quit-quit-quit-quit queeah
changed into a dismally-anxious
queeeee-awwk
, as he leads the little brood from danger.”
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Just as Elliot was making his mark studying the Olympics, Van Dyke became the preeminent mountain climber-naturalist of California’s Palomar mountain range. Fancying himself as the Joaquin Miller of any California landscape south of Big Sur, Van Dyke also wrote
The City and County of San Diego
, published by a small local press.
⁵¹
Unlike that of the other authors in
The Deer Family
, however, some of Van Dyke’s work was clearly mediocre. And at times, as when he claimed to have shot four wildcats with one shotgun blast, he defied believability.
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Rounding out
The Deer Family’
s quartet was A. J. Stone, the naturalist wunderkind of the moment. As a corresponding member of the Zoological and Ethnological Museum of Natural History and the New York Zoological Society he spent the years 1897 to 1899 living around the Arctic Circle with only his kayak and sled dogs as companions.
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Taking off from Fort McPherson, the Hudson Bay Company’s northernmost outpost, he trudged up through sea ice to forlorn Herschel Island. During one five-month stint Stone hiked 3,000 miles above the Artic Circle, shattering all previous land travel records. With the bitter wind assaulting him, and temperatures often falling to minus seventy or eighty degrees Fahrenheit, he nevertheless traversed snowdrifts as tall as the White House. Polar bears, northern fur seals, and arctic foxes were all vividly described in his field notes. When the harpooner hero returned to America the
New York Times
saluted his circumnavigation as finishing “one of the most remarkable trips in the history of the North American continent.”
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