The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (81 page)

Deeply concerned, Palmer and a fellow AOU member, Frank Bond, asked the Public Surveys Division Chief—Charles L. DuBois—what their options were. It would be suicidal to get into a real estate bidding war against the millinary lobby or try to gain an exemption from homesteading. Wisely, DuBois suggested to them that Pelican Island could legally be made a so-called government reservation by executive order of the president of the United States. The next day Palmer sent that message to Dutcher, in a letter dated February 21, 1903. Palmer urged Dutcher to immediately write to the secretary of agriculture requesting that Pelican Island be set apart as a government reservation.

This would, of course, be unprecedented, but it could nevertheless be done. What a helpful suggestion for DuBois to make! If there was one thing Roosevelt loved, it was setting precedents. You can almost see a cartoon of Dutcher and Chapman thinking “Eureka!” All they needed, to procure Pelican Island for posterity, was (1) to schedule a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt and (2) to convince him on the idea of a bird reservation. Knowing of Roosevelt’s insistence that wildlife protection wasn’t possible without police protection, Chapman now had Paul Kroegel to present as the ideal warden, a counterpart of Captain Anderson at Yellowstone, Ranger Warford in Arizona, or Seth Bullock roaming the Black Hills.
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V

Chapman and Dutcher set up the March 1903 meeting at the White House. And, as noted in the “Prelude,” Roosevelt handed them their reservation on a silver platter. With little more than a wave of the hand, Pelican Island was established as a federal bird reservation by the president’s “I So Declare It.” This was a revolutionary moment for biological conservation. Throughout America in 1903 land
was
being set aside for wildlife; but it was for private game preserves. The Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, had sequestered a pristine 100,000-acre forested preserve, and a resort hotel in Virginia saved 10,000 acres along the Chickahominy River for fishing and hunting. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in fact, in its 1903
Yearbook
, indicated that more and more large tracts of wilderness were being sold on the private market to the highest bidder. Pelican Island, the department noted, was an anomaly.
⁴⁰

Roosevelt’s initial “I So Declare It”—instituted through the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Biological Survey division (or, more simply, “Dr. Merriam’s shop”)—wasn’t difficult to establish. It slipped by essentially unnoticed among reams of government appropriations and bills. Immediately, Roosevelt wanted to know the next steps needed to protect Pelican Island’s wildlife. Could Kroegel manage to protect the rookeries in Indian River Lagoon on his own? What other bird sanctuaries needed saving in Florida and elsewhere? These were the kind of probing questions Roosevelt wanted to ask Chapman and Dutcher. Appropriately, the ornithologists, their spirits high, pondered the president’s questions and answered them directly. Breeding grounds in Louisiana and North Dakota were high on their list. Both unofficial advisers believed that only lots of game wardens could curtail the relentless slaughter of birds in Florida. Wildlife needed paid guards to protect it from marauders. At Yellowstone National Park in July 1902, Colonel Charles J. (“Buffalo”) Jones had been appointed game warden—the first in U.S. governmental history. Now, Kroegel joined him as number two. (And Kroegel was the first on behalf of birds). Hiring wardens like Jones and Kroegel was ideally suited to Roosevelt’s innate “sheriff” temperament. As a law enforcement zealot the president liked to brag that he’d personally track down and shackle bird-killing scoundrels himself, if necessary, to send a broad message throughout Florida that there was a new management in town.

Immediately, Roosevelt appointed Kroegel as his first national wildlife refuge warden for Pelican Island. In a U.S. Department of Agriculture letter dated March 24, 1903, Kroegel was put “in charge” of the rookery
effective April 1. He would report directly to Merriam.
⁴¹
Roosevelt was going to organize the Biological Survey as his special force on behalf of wildlife protection. “Paul was a convincing person,” his granddaughter Janice Kroegel Timinsky recalled. “By the time Theodore Roosevelt was president when he told these hunters to flee he was pure intimidation. It helped him psychologically, I think, to have the Audubon Society on his side. Don’t get me wrong—he didn’t change. He was still kind of silent. He didn’t like shouting or yelling. But after the Lacey Act, and with President Roosevelt in charge, they knew Grandpa wasn’t bluffing when he pointed his gun.”
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There was, however, a hiccup. Because the Department of Agriculture had no money earmarked for wardens, the Audubon Society stepped in and paid for Kroegel’s modest salary: one dollar a month. (A couple of years later the Department of Agriculture gave Kroegel a substantial raise, to twelve dollars a month.
⁴³
) But Paul never balked at the low salary. He was now Warden Kroegel. That’s what mattered. Although he had voluntarily protected wildlife on Pelican Island for years, Kroegel now held the distinction of being America’s first “refuge manager.” On April 28, 1903, Dutcher wrote Kroegel with a laundry list of federal instructions, noting that at all costs he was to “prevent the killing of wild birds or taking of their eggs,” and adding that any violations of President Roosevelt’s executive order should be “reported at once.”
⁴⁴

Word had been delivered loud and clear: President Roosevelt wanted the plumers and eggers flushed. Following Roosevelt’s executive order a ferocious federal crackdown on market hunters rocked Florida. Roosevelt actually relished using the rule of law to incarcerate all the plumers and eggers who could be found. “His sense of right and duty was as inflexible as adamant,” John Burroughs wrote in his diary. “Politicians found him a hard customer.”
⁴⁵

When Kroegel heard that Pelican Island had become a federal bird reservation he matter-of-factly lit his pipe to celebrate. His son Rodney later said he was in a kind of controlled stupor, half-imagining that the Pelican Island decree was a parlor trick from Washington, bound to be revoked. There was, however, no hocus-pocus. The opening salvo in the crusade to save American wildlife had been fired by President Roosevelt. When Warden Kroegel now pointed a rifle muzzle at a pelican poacher, he was doing so with the full authority of the president of the United States. Once again, Roosevelt’s genius as a conservationist was that he never listened to other politicians about how to get things done. His instinct was always to turn to the professional biologists, foresters, and field natural
ists first. He always consulted with Darwin-minded men like Chapman, Dutcher, or Pinchot and then acted. Once the biological imperative was established he engaged the rough-and-ready outback types like Kroegel. Over and over again, this was the formula Roosevelt used to eventually set aside more than 234 million acres of America for posterity.

With reserved pride, and a sense of genuine responsibility, as of April 1 Warden Kroegel proudly flew a huge American flag—which the USDA had sent him—on a twelve-foot pole at the end of his long dock at Indian River Lagoon. The instructions from the Roosevelt administration had been for Kroegel to put the gigantic flag on the island itself as an unmistakable federal warning to all encroachers. But Kroegel worried that the bright red-white-and-blue flag might scare away the birds. So the flimsy wooden dock it was. The Kroegel homestead now had the look of a U.S. Coast Guard customhouse. “Folks would be more inclined to not mess with the birds if they saw that flag,” his granddaughter Janice Kroegel Timinsky recalled. “It was his way of saying, ‘Don’t tread here.’”
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The flag also served as a sentinel. When boats sailed past, they would invariably give a patriotic salute by sounding their horns. This alerted Kroegel to head off potential vandals.

Just a couple of months after saving Pelican Island as the first federal bird reservation, Roosevelt decided that he should pay a long-overdue courtesy visit to the author of
Florida Game Birds
at Lotus Lake on Long Island’s South Shore. Bringing his oldest boy, Ted, who was fifteen, with him (along with his cousin Emlyn Roosevelt’s kids), Roosevelt had much to talk to Uncle Rob about. Together they went bird-watching and drove an automobile around Sayville reminiscing long into the night. Environmentally, two of the states R.B.R. had fought hardest to protect—New York and Florida—were now safeguarded by his nephew. The Roosevelts—Robert and Theodore—were protectors of wild Florida at a time when most rich Americans were searching for development dollars from the coastal state with year-round warm weather.

VI

Kroegel now wore a badge issued by Roosevelt and had framed his diploma-like appointment letter with its raised seal (both courtesy of the Department of Agriculture). But this didn’t mean the Feather Wars of Florida were over in the spring of 1903. For starters, Pelican Island had decades before been shot out by plumer gangs. Seeking roseate spoonbill feathers in full spring color, they had sprayed bullets in every direction, leaving shattered bone and guts strewn about the mangrove islet. Not
only did the adult roseate spoonbills die, but the young chicks, suddenly parentless, perished too. Essentially, two whole generations of these birds, among other unlucky species, were simultaneously wiped out.

Compounding Kroegel’s problem was the fact that plumers and eggers soon owned newfangled motorboats. Sailboats—even fine ones built by Kroegel—simply couldn’t keep up with a vessel that could move at forty or fifty miles per hour. Recognizing the disparity in speed, the Florida Audubon Society raised $300 for Kroegel to build a seaworthy twenty-three-foot-long boat fitted with a three-horsepower engine. The power boating era had truly arrived in the Indian River, and the Audubon Society wasn’t going to concede the technology edge to the opposition. The vessel commissioned by the Audubon Society was ideal for tropical seas, rain squalls, and storm-swept distances. Fueled by naphtha, an easily flammable oil product, the motorized
Audubon
was operative for warden-guide patrols around Florida’s tidal flats and mangrove keys a year before Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” decree. On July 15, 1902, William Dutcher sent Kroegel a telegram with an immediately pressing need for a motorboat.
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Guy Bradley, a former plume hunter, now a bird protector, was in desperate need of the motorized
Audubon
down in the Everglades. The AOU had just made Bradley a warden, too. He was something of an Everglades yokel, and his primary responsibilities as warden centered on the islands off Cape Sable—a watery prairie ecosystem at the southernmost point on the U.S. mainland. Here, in the shallow turtle grass flats and marshlands, the great white heron—a swan-white relative of the great blue heron—was making an impressive last stand. Nearly 500 nests of these rare birds had been counted, and there were probably many more.
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The AOU wanted them protected.

Kroegel rendezvoused with Bradley in Miami and turned over the stout little motorboat
Audubon
. The Audubon Society would pay any out-of-pocket costs incurred. Because Bradley kept a diary (even though it was irregular), we know that the handoff of the boat took place, albeit with a lot of hitches. Kroegel was a superior boatbuilder, but his knowledge of naphtha-fueled motors was very limited. As a result, the
Audubon
broke down after a relatively untaxing 230-mile trip. The outboard motor had seized, and the boat was dry-docked to work out the kinks.
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By September 1903, the
Audubon
, at long last, was in tip-top shape and Bradley began chasing plume hunters throughout the Ten Thousand Islands around the cape, venturing up the Shark and Rogers rivers, among others. The state authority made him feel empowered and reverent. After
dropping a big mushroom anchor and running a stern line to a mangrove, Bradley, like a Wild West sheriff, would post “No Trespassing” and “Do Not Disturb the Birds” signs on every clam shack or fishing camp he encountered. Often his day companions were the peregrine falcons and bald eagles which coursed the savanna searching for small prey. The ospreys and terns hovered around porpoise schools doing the same. The only hamlets in this strange backcountry region—Flamingo, Chokoloskee, and Cape Sable—each had a sleepy population of roughly fifty people. Still, his flyers didn’t go unnoticed by locals.

By all accounts Bradley made impressive inroads patrolling the Everglades–Florida Bay–Cape Sable areas: a dizzying complex of freshwater sloughs, sapling thickets, cane fields, sawgrass ridges, and tree islands.
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The tides, which lashed like a hurricane, made much of Cape Sable appear arid, and the saline soil stunted the growth of hardwood hammocks. The steady sunshine Bradley encountered was often blinding, even unearthly. There were no gentle slopes or saddle ridges in this flat, forbidding landscape. But birdlife abounded. “Citizen Bird” enthusiasts, for example, traveled from faraway Boston and New York to see the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, a rare creature that Bradley encountered nearly every day on his beat. Life was good for Bradley, a man who enjoyed being outdoors. Catching silver fish for dinner from the
Audubon
in the quiet evening air—particularly kingfish or mackerel—he lived well off Florida’s natural bounty. “Guy’s first year as warden had been a busy one,” his biographer Stuart B. McIver wrote. “That year the price offered to hunters for egret plumes rose to thirty-two dollars an ounce, more than twice the price for an ounce of gold. Four egrets had to die to yield an ounce of plumes. Bradley’s vigilance had helped create a scarcity that was driving the price up—and ultimately making the rookeries all the more tempting to plume hunters.”
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Excited that the one-two punch of wardens Kroegel and Bradley was producing constructive results in Florida, Dutcher wrote an AOU report in late 1903 claiming that the tide had turned in the good guys’ favor. The document could be summed up in two words: imminent victory. Clearly, Dutcher understood that slight disturbances still occurred around Cape Sable, but the systematic avian slaughter (he insisted) had ceased. President Roosevelt was elated. Nothing could please him more than the fact that the U.S. Biological Survey and AOU were starting to seize control of precious rookeries to save them for posterity. Dutcher’s enthusiasm, however, was very premature. Bradley—because of the sheer geographi
cal magnitude of his beat—found himself stretched thin and doing the job of ten men.