The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (82 page)

Chapman—erroneously believing Bradley had taken South Florida from the plumers and eggers around the lower keys, as Dutcher had claimed—journeyed to Florida with his wife to witness the supposedly rejuvenated flocks at the Cuthbert Rookery. Unbeknownst to Bradley, however, either the Smith gang or the “Uncle Steve Boys” (vicious plumer organizations) had been eyeing Cuthbert for a broad-daylight strike. One misbegotten afternoon, when the
Audubon
was nowhere in sight, one of the bandit gangs pillaged the startled rookery, turning the avian nursery into a bloody slaughterhouse. Guns blazed nonstop. Before long the island was strewn with corpses of egrets and great white herons. Cuthbert Rookery has been “shot out,” a deeply embarrassed Bradley told the Chapmans upon their arrival to Florida. “You could-a-walked right around the ruke-ry on them birds’ bodies, between four and five hundred of ’em.”
⁵²

This news, and some investigative sleuthing of his own, made Chapman fear that the Biological Survey wardens, for no fault of their own, were in a precarious situation. The vast Florida Bay waterways Bradley was being asked to protect were impossible to patrol properly without a motorized fleet. President Roosevelt’s warden needed reinforcements and supplies (or at least something more intimidating than a .32-caliber pistol and a single outboard motor). “That man Bradley is going to be killed some time,” Chapman wrote in his journal. “He has been shot at more than once, and some day they are going to get him.”
⁵³

Chapman’s diary proved prophetic. On the morning of July 8, 1905, Bradley heard rolling gunfire at Oyster Keys rookery. Using binoculars, he could see the familiar blue boat the Smith gang often used for conducting raids, although it was difficult to see through the powder smoke. Hopping into a dinghy, Bradley rowed out toward the tiny island, determined to stop the killings of birds. Stupefied with anger, Bradley quite simply wasn’t going to suffer another embarrassing massacre on his watch. The Smith gang, it turned out, ignoring the Roosevelt administration’s admonitions, was murdering double-crested cormorants by emptying magazines into their breeding grounds.

Like all colonial birds, double-crested cormorants congregated on islands close to shore. Easily detectable even by a novice bird-watcher because of their shiny black and bronze plumage, cormorants were considered a nuisance by fisherfolk. In the spring and summer many of these
long-necked aquatic birds nested along Florida’s coast, while others migrated southward to Florida from more northern nesting grounds. What Roosevelt found fascinating about cormorants—the trait which gave him the most delight—was the way they dived and remained submerged for a long time. Scanning underwater for fish or shrimp, they seldom reappeared with an empty beak. As a Darwinian naturalist he was deeply intrigued that the bird had adapted to underwater life so strikingly.

Roosevelt worried that the disreputable plumers of Florida—“sordid bird-butchers” he later called them in his postpresidential
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
—were trying to exterminate the double-crested cormorants just as they did the brown pelicans.
⁵⁴
Fishermen, he knew, were worried about depleted shellfish harvesting areas and saw cormorants as competition. The future of cormorants, he believed, was imperiled. If federal intervention didn’t occur, they were headed toward near-extinction. Proactive measures had to be taken quickly. Consulting with ornithologists like Chapman and Dutcher, Roosevelt made it clear that he wanted cormorants protected, even if the U.S. Biological Survey had to hire more wardens quickly.

Somewhat unsteadily, Bradley approached the Smith gang at Oyster Keys, demanding that they drop their guns. He was the law and had come there to make arrests. From the moment he spoke, he was greeted with resistance. A quarrel ensued over whether an arrest warrant was neces
sary on the waterways; meanwhile, wounded birds, in a frenzy, let out a terrified chant. The initial tension heightened to ferocity. Harsh words were spoken. As the dispute intensified, a sharpshooter in the Smith gang suddenly shot Bradley in the chest, as if he had been wearing a bull’s-eye on his work shirt. “He never knew what hit him,” Walter Smith, head of the gang, the murderer, later told the police. Bradley slumped forward in the bow, bleeding profusely, motionless. His dinghy drifted westward in the slate-gray water. It journeyed over a reef, away from Oyster Keys and out to sea. The corpse of Bradley disappeared into the distant horizon as the Smith gang stood and watched from the shore.
⁵⁵
Bradley had died a martyr in the line of duty, murdered trying to stop an outlaw plumer gang.
⁵⁶

Warden Guy Bradley was murdered in Florida for trying to protect bird rookeries from plume hunters
.
Warden Guy Bradley. (
Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
)

The National Association of Audubon Societies (NAAS) immediately protested the cold-blooded murder of Guy Bradley, to draw even more attention to the menace of Florida’s rookery killers. Outraged, Roosevelt predictably promised not to cower or retreat in the face of the murder. Instead, he appointed more Department of Agriculture wardens in Florida (in a collaborative venture with the Audubon Society) and grew even more determined to create federal bird reservations (U.S. wildlife refugees) to protect cormorants, pelicans, herons, egrets, and other nongame birds. His belief in the Audubon Society’s mission, in fact, now increased tenfold. “Permit me on behalf of both Mrs. Roosevelt and myself to say how heartily we sympathize not only with the work of the Audubon Societies generally, but particularly in their efforts to stop the sale and use of the so-called ‘Aigrettes’—the plume of white herons,” Roosevelt wrote to Dutcher. “If anything, Mrs. Roosevelt feels more strongly than I do in the matter.”
⁵⁷

Recognizing that the concept of federal bird reservations was the best weapon against pluming, Dutcher staked NAAS’s future on creating sanctuaries like Pelican Island across America. Anger over Bradley’s death spun the feather wars plot. “If the National Association did no other work than to secure Bird Reservations and to guard them during the breeding season,” he said, “its existence would be fully warranted.”
⁵⁸

VII

There is no clear written record of how Paul Kroegel took the murder of Guy Bradley. All we know is that he retrieved the
Audubon
and continued to patrol Pelican Island in the boat he had built for Bradley. Flushed and confident in 1903 he boated out to Pelican Island with his aged father, Gotlobb, and posted two huge signs on the edge of Pelican Island, as
instructed: “No Trespassing: U.S. Government Property.” They hoped these signs would deter plumers and others who would willfully or unknowingly harm the birds. Unfortunately, the huge signs had a deleterious effect on Pelican Island’s wildlife. In November–December 1903, the first winter after President Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” decree, the birds abandoned the rookeries—they just didn’t show up. Pelican Island was an avian ghost town, with only three or four ruffled vultures poking around the mudflat. It turned out that the signs had intimidated the pelicans, preventing them from landing. Recognizing the mistake and determined to lure the leery birds back, Kroegel, with help from his father and with the concurrence of Frank Chapman, dismantled the billboards in 1904. And just like that, the pelicans returned.

Meanwhile, Chapman returned to Pelican Island in the spring of 1904, 1905, 1908, and 1914. True to form, he kept detailed records of the rookery and reported his findings directly back to Roosevelt, with a professional air.
⁵⁹
Chapman’s elegant black-and-white pictures from those sojourns, ideal for lantern-slide presentations, constituted a high-water mark of nature photography during the progressive era. Emotionally invested in Pelican Island, Chapman was thrilled to learn that his friend Kroegel was still fearless, issuing citations although less frequently pointing his rifle at would-be encroachers. No longer was Kroegel viewed as a bird kook in Sebastian; after all, he was working for none other than President Roosevelt. In 1905, in fact, Kroegel’s local status took another leap upward when he was appointed county commissioner of the new Saint Lucie County by Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. He held the office for the next fifteen years.

And Roosevelt continued pushing his agenda in Florida. One place in particular, Passage Key, seemed to have taken hold of Roosevelt’s imagination most firmly. Located offshore from Saint Petersburg, at the mouth of Tampa Bay, reachable only by boat, the Passage Key mangrove rookery had the largest nesting colonies of royal terms and sandwich terns in the entire state. There were so many whitish birds on the island that from above they looked like flocks of sheep corralled for market. Although royal and sandwich terns are difficult to distinguish from each other, royal terns are slightly larger and plumper, with an orange bill instead of a black one (yellow-tipped). Trained ornithologists like Roosevelt could also differentiate between them by the sounds they made. A royal tern made a shrill, rolling “keer-reet” whereas a sandwich tern went “kirr-ick.” Both species, however, were known for their wild chirrups when in distress.

When he was based in Tampa Bay in 1898, Roosevelt had grown fond of these terns. In the humid, stifling heat he had watched them fly over the bay with bills pointed downward, plunging into the water for black mullets, gray anchovies, and brown and white shrimp. Now, as president, he had an opportunity to do something permanent to help these pelagic birds survive in the Gulf of Mexico region. Because schools of blackfin and yellowfin tuna were thick around Passage Key, as were blue crabs, Roosevelt feared it might be only a matter of time before the pristine island became a fishing camp; another fear was that it might become a military base. No longer would it look like a deserted tropical orchard—it would be developed. As the gateway island to Tampa Bay, visible with binoculars from both Saint Petersburg (to the north) and Sarasota (to the south), Passage Key was like a natural Statue of Liberty, welcoming seafarers to shore; it was similar in this regard to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco Bay, or to Gibraltar in Spain. If the west coast birds of Florida were to be saved, Passage Key was a fine starting point.

On October 10, 1905, nineteen months after the designation of Pelican Island as a federal reserve, Roosevelt declared Passage Key a federal bird reservation. Signing this executive order whetted his appetite for more preservationist mandates. Not satisfied with having created two biologically intact wonderlands in Florida—Pelican Island (which was enlarged on January 26, 1909)
*
and Passage Key—Roosevelt asked Chapman, around Thanksgiving 1905, to report back to him on other possible locales in need of preservation.
⁶⁰
Bit by bit he would save America’s finest bird rookeries from molestation. Egrets, herons, pelicans, and dozens of other species could continue being masters of these universes. Before long, the Biological Survey was bombarded with information about ecosystems worthy of federal consideration. Roosevelt was hoping to establish refuges down the entire west coast of Florida. He imagined these sanctuaries as rather like a string of natural pearls dangling downward toward the Caribbean. These new federal bird reservations—which would become “national wildlife refuges” in 1942–were created to demonstrate the Rooseveltian wildlife protection strategy of no surrender, no retreat in Florida.

I

W
hile Pelican Island was being saved as a federal bird reservation in the first months of 1903, President Roosevelt was making last-minute adjustments for a visit to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite. The Great Loop tour, as it was called, would be the longest, most elaborate cross-country journey ever taken by a president of the United States. The trek served as an appealing way to present his conservation polices to all regions before the 1904 presidential election. Emphasizing America’s natural wonders, the adventure crystallized Roosevelt’s already potent belief that the Far West, in all its wildness and rawness, was the least exhausted part of the country. At that time, Yellowstone was interested in promoting popular animals such as elks and bears, while applying a policy of predator control to cougars, wolves, and coyotes. Eager to sneak in some cougar hunting around Yellowstone on the western odyssey, Roosevelt corresponded intensely with the superintendent, Major John Pitcher, about having the proper hunting dogs available for him upon arrival and securing a special U.S. government permit. Wary of repeating the disastrous press coverage of the Mississippi bear hunt, which had been mitigated only by the grace of a cartoonist named Berryman, Roosevelt emphasized that no detail of the itinerary be left to chance. “I am still wholly at sea [as] to whether I can take that trip or not,” Roosevelt wrote to Pitcher. “Secretary Root is afraid that a false impression might get out if I killed anything, as of course would be the case, strictly under park regulations and though it was only a mountain lion—that is, an animal of the kind you are endeavoring to thin out.”
¹

With unaccustomed suspiciousness, the president surreptitiously asked the secretary of the interior, Hitchcock, to quietly smuggle into Yellowstone three hunting dogs from John Goff’s kennel in Colorado. Plotting eight to ten days of clandestine cougar hunting, Roosevelt wrote to Pitcher that if word leaked out, if the reporters discovered his intentions, then he would have to content himself by studying “the game and going about on horseback, or if I get into trim, perhaps snowshoes.”
²
If
Roosevelt had his way, however, at least a few of the troublesome mountain lions wouldn’t get within sniffing distance of an elk or antelope. Meanwhile, the competitive Charles “Buffalo” Jones, who had a bounty hunter mind-set and did not want his role as an exterminator of predators to be co-opted by an-out-of-stater like Goff, imported into Yellowstone two lots of six cougar hounds from Aledo, Texas.
³
As a maxim of the T.R. era went, never pass up a chance to hunt or box or romp with the president, because these activities fostered a lifelong bond.

Meanwhile, in preparation for seeing the Pacific Northwest and California forestlands for the first time, Roosevelt dashed off a note to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the “lumber king,” known for his entrepreneurial acumen and zealous, ruinous de-timbering. Weyerhaeuser, who slurred his Edwardian w’s into Bismarckian v’s when speaking English, had emigrated from Germany at the age of eighteen to work as a day laborer in Erie, Pennsylvania. To him, America was the land of promises where the bold prevailed. He learned the lumber business from the ground up. He acquired his first sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1857, and began building a timber empire in the heavily forested Pacific Northwest. Determined to amass a fortune, he clear-cut every tree in sight without the slightest concern over deforestation. Obviously, he had never read
Man and Nature
. In his blinkered outlook, money mattered more than anything else in life. Where others saw a redwood tree or an old-growth hemlock, Weyerhaeuser saw boards and planks and, behind them, dollar signs.

In early 1903, Congressman Lacey had mentioned to Roosevelt that Weyerhaeuser was starting to come around, that he was becoming a forest reserve advocate of sorts, and that he was an untapped potential arborist. Intrigued, Roosevelt wanted to initiate a dialogue with Weyerhaeuser on the ticklish issue of reduced logging, and on the conservationist ethics of Southern Lumber Company: planting a tree for every one chopped down. “Could you come down here sometime next week so I can see you with Mr. Gifford Pinchot?” Roosevelt wrote to Weyerhaeuser on March 5. “I should like to talk over some forestry matters with a practical lumberman. I earnestly desire that the movement for the preservation of the forests shall come from the lumbermen themselves.”
⁴

When Roosevelt wrote to John Burroughs about his forthcoming Great Loop trip that March, however, the letter was devoid cougar hunting in Yellowstone, or courting timber barons from Minnesota. Instead, Roosevelt said he wanted to “see,” in liberal measure, the elk herds and mountain goats. And he was eager to see the geysers in winter. This was slightly disingenuous of Roosevelt, and further evidence of how skit
tish the fiasco of the Mississippi bear hunt had made him. Somewhat defensively, however, Roosevelt raised the specter of hunting in his long letter to Burroughs. The novelist Charles Dudley Warner, best remembered for coining the term “gilded age” in a novel of that title cowritten with Mark Twain, had also written an American outdoors classic in the 1870s:
The Hunter of the Deer and Other Essays
. Because Warner—a longtime columnist for
Harper’s Magazine
and first President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—had died in 1900, many of his earlier literary efforts were being reissued in his memory. When Burroughs told Roosevelt how excellent the Warner hunting essays were, the president unctuously doused his enthusiasm. “I think you praise overmuch for its fidelity to life Charles Dudley Warner’s admirable little tract on deer hunting,” Roosevelt wrote. “[It] was an excellent little tract against summer hunting and the killing of does when the fawns are young. It is not an argument against hunting generally, for as Nature is organized, to remove all checks to the multiplication of a species merely means that every multiplication itself in a few years operates as a most disastrous check by producing an epidemic of disease or starvation.”
⁵

What triggered Roosevelt’s letter was a hard-hitting article that Burroughs had recently written in the
Atlantic Monthly
, “Real and Sham Natural History.” Twenty years before, Burroughs had pleaded in
Scribner’s Monthly
that poets stop depicting wildlife falsely; they should instead follow the romantic Whitman’s fine naturalist example.
⁶
Now the usually mild-mannered Burroughs lit into Ernest Thompson Seton for completely fabricating bizarre species behaviors in
Wild Animals I Have Known
: Seton had claimed that foxes contemplated suicide, and that deer had sensitive humanlike feelings. What perturbed Burroughs was that Seton advertised his encounters with animals as nonfiction. This purported zoology book wasn’t natural history but
fable
. “There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record that match his,” Burroughs wrote. “Such dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows, as he has known, it is safe to say, no other person in the world has ever known.”
⁷

Roosevelt, on reading this article, hurled himself into the fray. On the Executive Mansion’s letterhead, Roosevelt wrote Seton a punishing note, haranguing him and challenging him to cough up his facts for the Biological Survey.
⁸
“Burroughs and the people at large don’t know how many facts you have back of your stories,” Roosevelt wrote to Seton. “You must publish your facts.”
⁹
Seton, wanting no part of the “bully-boy” Roosevelt (at least in public), wisely stayed mute. Burroughs actually began to feel some pity for Seton, whose ego was shattered and whose literary reputa
tion was taking a pummeling. And Seton, to his credit, took Burroughs and Roosevelt’s charges to heart; he later published the scrupulously accurate
Life Histories of Northern Animals
and
Lives of Game Animals
. Both are fine, highly readable zoological contributions to the American naturalist canon.
¹⁰
Eventually, after bumping into Seton at an ostentatious literary party hosted by Andrew Carnegie, Burroughs decided he
liked
Seton. “He behaved finely and asked to sit next to me at dinner,” Burroughs wrote to his son. “He quite won my heart.”
¹¹

Another of Burroughs’s “nature fakers” was Reverend William Long, who had an advanced degree in divinity from Heidelberg University in Germany. Long, who believed in the power of pets to heal the tormented soul, was a popular pastor at First Congressional Church in Stamford, Connecticut, and the author of some celebrated children’s books, including
Ways of Wood Folk
and
Fowls in the Air
. A zealous anti-Darwinist, he held that animals’ knowledge was based on parental training within each species. Picking apart Long’s false descriptions about how robins feed their young, Burroughs called the pastor a deliberate liar. And robins were the least of it. Long also claimed to have seen a woodcock mend its broken leg by making a clay and grass cast for itself. “Why should anyone palm off such stuff on an unsuspecting public as veritable natural history?” Burroughs asked in the
Atlantic Monthly
. “When a man, writing or speaking of his own experience, says without qualification that he has seen a thing, we are expected to take him at his word.”
¹²

Long came to his own defense that May in the
North American Review
, arguing that wildlife observation was inexact and diverse enough that no one man—not even
le grand
John Burroughs—had the status to say what was true or false with such arrogant definitiveness. Roosevelt was incensed beyond words by this rejoinder. He wanted to go to war, publicly, with both Seton and Long. He wrote to Burroughs a defense of Rudyard Kipling’s
The Jungle Books
, which were labeled correctly as fiction. And he launched into an academic discussion with Burroughs that included his views on domestic dogs first introduced to a Pacific Island; differences between the Falkland and the artic fox; polar bears versus black bears; and Lewis and Clark meeting grizzlies. Roosevelt wanted to convey his support for his friend Oom John in this controversy. He ended the letter by asking Burroughs to accompany him to Yellowstone in April. “I would see,” the president wrote, “that you endured neither fatigue or hardship.”
¹³

Even though the idea of killing cougars to protect elks had a certain merit, it was a biologically naive practice, and a backward view of the
predators’ role in the ecological order. Furthermore, Roosevelt was right to be concerned about damaging his reputation by hunting
anything
in Yellowstone. He himself viewed hunting as a pastime of great natural and spiritual value, but an increasing number of Americans saw it as a violent vacation. Moreover, the notion of the commander in chief as exterminator in chief at Yellowstone wasn’t going to play well with the president’s newfound “teddy bear” constituency.
¹⁴
Realizing that the cougars weren’t a dire threat, Roosevelt decided that “the elk were evidently too numerous for the feed,” and the cougars were not “doing any damage.”
¹⁵
Suddenly, Roosevelt’s philosophy became that the cougars in Yellowstone should be left alone. They were, after all, part of the natural balance. Most likely, Roosevelt had known all along that cougars weren’t a real problem in Yellowstone; he had just wanted to hunt them for fun. To his credit, when this rationalization broke down, Roosevelt was intellectually honest enough not to hunt the cougars.

Nevertheless, it was becoming painfully obvious to the naturalist community—especially to those like Muir and Underwood, who respected Roosevelt’s Harvard training and his knowledge of species traits and coloration—that the president had a blood lust. For all of his promotion of Kodaks, Roosevelt preferred shooting a rifle to clicking a camera. And the president never really disputed this characterization, though he grew tired of continually having to explain himself to animal-rights types such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.

Roosevelt, however, had little difficulty in justifying his seemingly paradoxical attitude toward wildlife. Yes, he revered the mountain lion, yet he thrilled to see one treed by his dogs. Roosevelt reconciled his own proclivities by drawing no distinctions between himself and any other forest predator. Nonhunters could indulge in the fantasy that they existed outside the biotic community, as either passive observers or omniscient masters. And yet, most of them ate meat. Hunters shattered this conceit by participating directly in ecological cycles of life and death. The act of hunting forced a re-reckoning of the relationship between the human and natural worlds, and in that sense it was more intellectually honest than all the bleatings of its vociferous critics. Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s penchant for the chase was troublesome to his friends in the preservationist community, and has made him a frustrating and somewhat equivocal figure in much of modern environmental history.
¹⁶

II

On March 15 the
New York Times
announced President Roosevelt’s Great Loop tour, with a hint that he might hunt in Montana or Wyoming. From Washington D.C., Roosevelt would travel to Chicago, Milwaukee, La Crosse, Madison, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Sioux Falls, Yankton, Mitchell, and Aberdeen before reaching the town of Edgeley in his beloved North Dakota. In Fargo, he planned to deliver a major address on American policy toward the Philippines; it was a gift to his favorite state. On April 7 he would greet well-wishers in Jamestown, Bismarck, Mandan, and then Medora. With Burroughs at his side, he would then take the “Roosevelt Special”—six opulently appointed railway cars provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad—to the northern entrance of Yellowstone, where his party would camp from April 8 to 24. From Wyoming, he would backtrack to Saint Louis to dedicate the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Grounds in commemoration of the bicentennial of Jefferson’s acquisition from France. He would then head to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles and Yosemite to be with Muir. Next he would make campaign-like appearances in a string of major cities along the Pacific Coast before finally returning to the White House. The conductor for the trip would be Roosevelt’s friend William H. Johnson, who had taken him to Mississippi in 1902.
¹⁷