The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (8 page)

At other times during his European tour, Roosevelt sketched animals in the zoos he visited. This practice may have been inspired by his meeting Professor Daniel G. Elliot, one of the world’s foremost naturalists, in Florence on March 1. Well-to-do, Elliot came from New York but had been embraced in European scientific circles as an ornithologist and mammalogist of rare talent. Some claimed, in fact, that Elliot had been put on earth to study a wide range of species including Californian salmon and American bison. Writing and often illustrating numerous books, Elliot was considered the leading expert on cats, both wild and domestic. But what most captivated Roosevelt was that Professor Elliot had undertaken to produce two volumes on North American birds in 1869, covering the numerous species that the great Audubon had missed.
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An easy touch, the critic Roosevelt deemed Elliot’s
The New and Heretofore Unfigured Species of the Birds of North America
a “beautiful” accomplishment of lasting integrity.”
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Warmed by the glow of spending time with Elliot, T.R. sought out more books by naturalists. He started carrying around illustrated volumes by Alexander Wilson and Thomas Nuttall. At the zoological garden in Florence, he got to feed the bears and sketch them in a notebook. Even when Roosevelt toured the drafty stone museums of Europe, he would try to find a link to animals, noting, for example, that an ornate sleigh resembled a “crouching leopard.” The last entry in young Theodore’s European diary was made on their westbound ship before the family disembarked in New York. After complaining that he hadn’t seen any birds or fish, his luck turned. “In the afternoon we saw some young whales,” he wrote, “one of whom came so near the boat that when it spouted some of its water came on me.”
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IV

Upon returning from Europe, fatigued from touring Catholic cathedrals and German dance halls, Roosevelt was flushed with the ambition of seeing the American West with his own eyes. Smitten with the whole idea of “Go West, young man!” once promulgated by Horace Greeley, he wanted to straddle the Continental Divide clad in buckskin, riding off into the wild Rockies. Roosevelt’s parents, however, preferred the thick woodlands of northernmost New York and Vermont instead of places with names like Dead Man Gulch or Hellville. Proximity, one supposes, played a large role in his parents’ decision about the itinerary. All T.R. could do was nod in acquiescence; at least the Hudson River valley was better than being seasick on another voyage to Europe. During the summers of 1870, 1871, and 1872 the Roosevelt family rented country houses along the Hudson River valley—in Dobbs Ferry (George Washington’s headquarters before the march to Yorktown in 1781) and Spuyten Duyvil (near Riverdale).
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The Hudson enchanted Roosevelt, even though the constant houseboat traffic and train whistles in these commuter towns not far from the city meant he wasn’t having the kind of wilderness experience his imagination craved.

Conscious that he hadn’t toured his homeland west of the Atlantic coast, Roosevelt titled his post-Europe diary “Now My Journal in the United States” (May 25 to September 10, 1870). Spending much of that summer in Spuyten Duyvil, Roosevelt quaintly dated his diary with “country” at the top of each entry. Sounding like a modern-day summer camper, he wrote of swimming, hiking, and shooting a bow and arrow. “We began to build a hut,” he wrote on June 6, “and had a nice time and found a bird’s nest with 3 eggs (but we did not take them).”
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When that particular diary ends abruptly, in September, there is a gap for the next eleven months. In August 1871, when the next journal begins, the awesome natural sites in the Adirondack Park—Mount Marcy, Blake Peak, and Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds (the source of the Hudson River)—animate his writing. Bursting with excitement about the Adirondacks (and the White Mountains), he tramped around, imagining himself in the footsteps of frontiersmen like Ethan Allen and George Rogers Clark. The Adirondacks at this time were very much in vogue. Two years prior to the Roosevelt family’s visit, the Congregationalist minister W. H. H. Murray had published the best-selling
Adventures in the Wilderness; Or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks
, in which he claimed that the upstate New York “wilderness” helped cure consumption and other lung ailments.
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Owing to the unexpected success of Murray’s book, tourists and health seekers alike came pouring into the Adirondacks, fishing in Lake Placid, hiking up Whiteface Mountain, and simply inhaling the air along the Ma-cIntyre Range.
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Young Theodore counted himself in the front line of the new enthusiasts for the Adirondacks. Like Thomas Jefferson—who in 1791 deemed the thirty-two-mile-long Lake George “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw”
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—Roosevelt wanted to explore the shoreline and islands of this natural wonder. In fact, the “Queen of American Lakes” always held a special place in Roosevelt’s heart. “We started on the Minnehaha up Lake George,” he wrote. “We passed innumerable islands on the way up it. At the head or rather
tail
of this lake, where it is connected with Lake Champlain the mountains were very abrupt and the lake very narrow. The scenery at this point is so wild that you would think that no man had ever set foot there.”
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In these diary entries from the Adirondacks Roosevelt uses a vivid exactness in describing the the piney woods and incomparable lakes he played in. Satisfied and comfortable, he watched a blue-gray bird with a shaggy crest dive into the lake and quickly identified it as a kingfisher. Careful distinctions were made between
coveys
of quail and
runs
of common loons. Strange as it seems, Roosevelt spent an hour just observing a little blue heron with a daggerlike bill that sat on the lake edge sunning itself; the sight was worth 100 Lord’s Prayers. Sometimes it almost seemed that when Roosevelt saw a bird he became the bird for a short spell.

In the Adirondack Park and the White Mountains, Roosevelt also discovered the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. His father felt that reading a novel like
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) while staying in the area where the French and Indian War took place would enrich the literary experience. Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo (also called Leatherstocking or Hawkeye) was a bold white scout, paddling across Lake Champlain, climbing lofty summits, and wearing a bearskin to gain entrance to a Huron village. Later in life Roosevelt remembered that he read all five of
The Leatherstocking Tales
in the order in which Cooper had written them. This means that in addition to absorbing
The Last of the Mohicans
, he read what in retrospect are the two most important American conservationist novels of the nineteenth century, narratives that dealt, in part, with imperative calls to create forest reserves through visionary natural resource management:
The Pioneers
(1823) and
The Prairie
(1827). “I put Cooper higher than you do,” Roosevelt would write to the novelist Josephine Dodge Daskam when he was vice president of the United States. “I do not
care very much for his Indians, but Leatherstocking and Long Tom Coffin are, as Thackery somewhere said, among the great men in fiction.”
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Before Cooper, forests were viewed as dark, satanic thickets, a regrettable natural obstacle to homesteaders and frontiersmen, something to be clear-cut; streams, were similarly considered dangerous, unpredictable torrents. Cooper overturned this concept of the “haunted” wilderness. To him trees were “jewels” and fishes “treasures.” In
The Pioneers
, for example, he railed against despoilers of nature for their “wasteful extravagance.” Cooper’s alter ego, Natty Bumppo, firmly believed that the unnecessary slaughter of wildlife was a crime against God. Cooper even anticipated the extermination of the ubiquitous passenger pigeon. “It’s wicked to be shooting into flocks in this wastey manner,” Cooper wrote in
The Pioneers
. “If a body has a craving for pigeon’s flesh, why, it’s made the same as all other creaturs, for man’s eating; but not to kill twenty and eat one. When I want such a thing, I go into the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot him off the branches without touching the feather of another, though there might be a hundred on the same tree.”
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On that summer’s holiday, stimulated by his evening campfire readings in
The Last of the Mohicans
, young Theodore did. He had turned explorer, stalking chipmunks burrowed in fallen trees, and spying on woodpeckers making a racket with their beaks like plier claws. Pretending to be Natty Bumppo, he carefully studied salamander markings, finding them hidden under water-soaked logs. To the bafflement of his parents he gathered more than 100 different species of lichens and fungi under rocks and in dense undergrowth. He brought out from caves unusual samplings of moss to scrutinize back home under a magnifying glass. And, of course, there was daily talk of bears. “There is a tame bear here who eats cake like a Christian,” he recorded at White River Junction, “and appears very anxious to come to close quarters with us.”
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V

As these diaries attest, the future president’s father encouraged T.R.’s love of nature. Straitlaced, slightly pious, and a dutiful husband, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., preferred philanthropy over business and was always ready to aid the poor and needy. An abolitionist before the Civil War, he now—during the Reconstruction era—had an “emancipationist memory” (as the historian David W. Blight called the belief that the federal government should intervene to help the poor and disenfranchised), and a determination to be part of the progressive movements of his day.
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Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., worried that in the thirst for post–Civil War reconcilia
tion, African-Americans were going to be discriminated against. But the main thrust of his philanthropy was to extol natural history and animal protection. Promoting the humane treatment of horses, making sure they weren’t abused, became one of his civic concerns. In
An Autobiography
, T.R., in fact, goes on for a couple of pages about his father’s prowess with horse reins, bragging that he was a fine four-in-hand carriage driver. A man of medium height, Theodore Sr. was so well proportioned and carried himself with such perfect posture that he seemed much larger. “He was a big, powerful man, with a leonine face, and his heart filled with gentleness for those who needed help or protection,” Roosevelt recalled, “and with the possibility of much wrath against a bully or an oppressor.”
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Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. (
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History
)

Driven to succeed, Theodore Sr. usually dressed in a white neckcloth and a dark suit, forgoing the broad-brimmed high hats favored by his fellow aristocrats. He gave the impression of a groomed man on top of his life’s game. His nephew Emlen Roosevelt, in fact, claimed that he personified “abundant strength and power” in every pursuit he decided to tackle.
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The wellspring of Theodore Sr.’s enthusiasm for living creatures—both wild and domestic—came from his father, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt (T.R.’s grandfather), who was born in 1794. Cornelius dropped out of Columbia College and devoted his full attention to Roosevelt and Son hardware. Before long he had a near-monopoly on American plate glass imports. With money to invest, Cornelius founded Chemical Bank of New York. Basically, the Roosevelt family business, as befitting the urban gentry, was now financial investment.

The son of the exceedingly rich Cornelius Roosevelt, Theodore Sr., a
leisured gentleman, born into the Dutch aristocracy of New York, never experienced poverty. Still, he had compassion for the underprivileged. (So did his son Theodore Jr., the future president.) Theodore Sr. mixed easily with both rich and poor. Among his many civic-minded good deeds was his cofounding of the Newsboys’ Lodging Home and New York’s Children’s Aid Society. Calm, cheerful, deeply thoughtful, and a devoted Dutch Reform Protestant, Roosevelt was determined that his children—Anna (nicknamed Bamie), Theodore Jr. (Teedie), Elliott (Nell or Ellie), and Corinne (Conie)—would have an ideal childhood. Studying the natural world, he insisted, would be a big part of their education. Summers spent in the fresh air of upstate New York and New England helped fulfill this desire. Trips abroad were always structured for maximum educational uplift. Although not a naturalist, the elder Theodore Roosevelt was known throughout Manhattan as a devotee of the Hudson River valley. It’s little wonder that he became a founder and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History. To be a civilized person, Theodore Sr. believed, meant honoring the biological history of
On the Origin of Species
, the most revolutionary book of the nineteenth century.

Now a New York landmark and a national treasure, the museum began when Dr. Albert S. Bickmore, who had been a student of the zoologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard, arrived in Manhattan. Fresh from collecting species throughout the East Indian archipelago, Bickmore began telling colleagues of a dream he had of founding a museum of natural history. They all agreed it would take a lot of money. So Bickmore was directed to 28 East Twentieth Street, where Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., resided. The elder Roosevelt had an abiding philanthropic interest in promoting nature education and was friendly with the leading Darwinian scientists in America. Although his reputation for good works was renowned, he wasn’t a pushover. If Theodore Sr. didn’t like a sales pitch, he’d give a firm, definitive no, even if his directness bruised sensibilities. Theodore Jr. wrote in
An Autobiography
that his father was the “best man” he ever knew but “the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”
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