The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (97 page)

Roosevelt was also eager to visit Fort Sill. On January, 8 1869, Major General Phil Sheridan had chosen this strategic site for a cavalry fort; he named it after a friend. It had been his headquarters during his successful effort to quash the Plains Indians’ border raids. Comanche and Apache had been pillaging pioneer communities in Texas and Kansas even after the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 had declared the frontier closed. Fort Sill was a form of revenge. Hiring Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok as scouts, Sheridan used the fort as U.S. Army headquarters in the Indian wars. Eventually, the army pacified all the Indians on the South Plains. In 1867 the Medicine Lodge Treaty was signed by the chiefs—all under
duress—of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who thereby agreed to reservations in southwestern Oklahoma. After being recalcitrant for a difficult eight years, in June 1875 Quanah Parker had his Quohada Comanche surrender at Fort Sill. With no buffalo herds present for sustenance, his people couldn’t go on. Quanah considered escaping as Chief Joseph had done with Nez Perce, disappearing into the Guadalupe Mountains between Carlsbad, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. But he didn’t. He couldn’t put his people through the necessary deprivations and ordeals. A new, less bloody era had arrived in Comanche country.
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With the Comanches pacified and McKinley’s homesteading lottery operating, approximately 29,000 Americans moved to Oklahoma. No hill or knoll was unclaimed. Suddenly, Lawton, the town attached to Fort Sill, grew into the third-largest city in Oklahoma. Sensing the closing of the frontier, and aware that raids were a thing of the past, Roosevelt soon transformed the mission of Fort Sill from cavalry to field artillery. On many days in Lawton, china cupboards would shake from cannon blasts. Curiously, after four or five years of mortar rounds, the usually skittish songbirds seemed to decide that the army practice wasn’t a menace: they paid little attention to the loud artillery. The birds had adapted; call it Darwin’s natural selection at work. As a western historian, Roosevelt was deeply interested in studying the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, Nineteenth Kansas Volunteers, and the Tenth Cavalry buffalo soldiers. And, in keeping with his hobby, he wanted to see with his own eyes where Sheridan had once trained troops. Therefore, Fort Sill was a special American place to Roosevelt—like Valley Forge, the Alamo, the Chalmette Battlefield, and Appomattox Court House—simply because Sheridan had been connected to it.

Surrounding Fort Sill were the rugged Wichita Mountains—a jumbled landscape of rocky outcroppings, rock-crowded peaks, towering sentinels, granite ridges, and huge boulders strewn around 60,000 acres of prairielands. The Wichita Uplift—which occurred during the Pennsylvania Period about 300 million years ago—had created a number of peaks over 2,000 feet above sea level; they were older than the Alps or Himalayas. Four types of habitats could be found in the Wichita Mountains: rocklands, aquatic, mixed grass prairie, and cross-timbers.
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In this strange range, bunch grass was interspersed with scrub oak forest, cactus, and aloe plants. The Wichitas were a botanical crossroads (
ecocene
) with more than 270 bird species taking advantage of the buffet, fattening up for the winter. It was said by western frontiersmen that the ancestral Wichitas—this series of rock prominences—was where the East met the West at
the vertex of the Great Plains.
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The Red Beds here—formed by prehistoric ocean currents, huge earthquakes, and glacial shifts—resembled the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs. It was a geologist’s dream, a rock garden in which boulders hung off cliffs, seemingly ready to tumble in a roaring avalanche with a northerly gust.

The president’s lead guide in the Big Pasture and Wichita Mountains was going to be Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy, a white, Anglo counterpart of Holt Collier; though his specialty was hunting the prairie wolf (
Canis latrans
) with catch rope instead of hunting the black bear with a knife. Born in 1876 in Bosque County, Texas, colorful Abernathy cut such a swath across the Red River valley of Texas-Oklahoma that he became a legend to drovers from Amarillo to Tulsa. By the time Abernathy was fifteen years old he had already had successful careers as a cowboy on the A-K-X Ranch and as a bronco buster with the J-A outfit. Nobody, it was said, could saddle a wild horse as skillfully as Abernathy. Some people complained that he overworked and underfed his stallions. But everybody agreed that at dusk, Abernathy was usually the last man to hobble his horse.

Brickish and bullnecked, Abernathy was an excellent pianist and bluegrass fiddler in the fast Smokies style of eastern Tennessee. At his regular gigs in bars in Sweetwater, Texas, “Dixie” was still the most frequently requested song, followed by “Ole Paint” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Gregarious to the point of causing irritation, Abernathy had the smile of a dedicated drinker. In reality, he was nearly a teetotaler, taking only an occasional shot or two of bourbon for a toothache. “My six-shooter was my friend,” Abernathy wrote of his youthful days, “and constant companion.”
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Refusing to be an antihero Abernathy, a proud and devout Christian, lived on the straight and narrow. A man who could defend himself in a scrape, he was dutifully married and had five children. Abernathy was always looking for freelance law enforcement work; handcuffs often dangled at his side. Fairly regularly, he served as an under-sheriff or posse leader for day wages. Townspeople looked up to him. He also took on short ranch jobs at regular intervals. Around a campfire, Abernathy was always the guy tossing kindling on the flames, hoping to keep the conversation going. With his white horse, Sam Bass, and his brave dog Catch (a Scottish shepherd), he was as close to the character called “the Virginian” as was possible in north Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. Owen Wister could easily have woven Abernathy’s trademark quip—“I am a goner for keeps”—into
The Virginian
. Adding to his western appeal, a kind of Fort Worth drawl colored Abernathy’s utterances: “cow” was “kyow” and
was “womb-man.” But for all of his decency, Abernathy wasn’t a nester. Restlessness was his normal condition.

By 1905, what had really made Abernathy legendary, a one-man show more dazzling than Annie Oakley shooting glass balls out of the sky, was his ability to catch a wolf alive by jumping off a horse, wrestling the wolf bare-fanged to the ground, and jamming his fist into the back recesses of the wolf’s jaw. Hence his sobriquet, “Catch ’Em Alive.” The wolves (or “loafers,” as cowboys called them), unable to bite, would become utterly passive and submissive. With the skill of a wrangler, Abernathy would then wire the captured wolf’s muzzle closed and hog-tie its feet.

“Coyote” was the Spanish name to distinguish these wolves from the larger gray wolves that lived in the same Mexico-Texas-Oklahoma range. (In writing about Oklahoma, Roosevelt often used the terms “coyote,” “prairie wolf,” and “gray wolf” interchangeably. “Thus was born Catch ’Em Alive Jack,” the historian Jon T. Coleman writes in a foreword to Abernathy’s autobiography, “the alter ego that would carry Abernathy from Texas to the White House.”
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Roosevelt first learned of Abernathy’s bold, enterprising feats from a doctor friend, Sloan Simpson of Fort Worth, in January 1903.
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In his customary way, he grunted in disbelief and raised his eyebrows questioningly. Abernathy was brought to Roosevelt’s attention again by Colonel Lyon, over Christmas 1904. Apparently, Lyon had witnessed Catch ’Em Alive Jack hand-trap a few coyotes and immediately told the president about the crazy stunt. A vague plan was begun—that he’d go wolf coursing with Abernathy in Texas or Oklahoma soon and make the Wichita Forest Reserve the site of the buffalo preserve inspired by Baynes, Hornaday, and Lacey. Before long Roosevelt would give Abernathy the highest praise he could, saying that the plainsman had “a perfect knowledge of the coyote.”
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II

As the “Roosevelt Special” pulled out of New York on April 3, 1905, the president was in a fun-loving mood, even though he was grappling with the Moroccan crisis (involving Germany, Spain, and France, whose military and economic interests in Morocco were threatened when its emperor called for Moroccan independence and anticolonial integrity). About foreign affairs in general, Roosevelt joked to the press that he had left the 300-pound William Howard Taft “sitting on the lid keeping [it] down.” Reporters covering Roosevelt’s trip asked why he had chosen dusty Texas and the Twin Territories, of all places, for a holiday. “I don’t exactly say
that I need a rest,” Roosevelt said, “but I am going to take one in the open, under God’s blue heaven.”
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Excitedly, Roosevelt talked of meeting with Rough Riders at a reunion in San Antonio, riding with Quanah in the Big Pasture, and coursing for wolves with Catch ’Em Alive Jack in the Wichitas near Sheridan’s old Fort Sill. The prospect of being caked with cracked mud seemed idyllic to Roosevelt. Other easterners might seek comfort, but he spoke in favor of burrs and smelling the blossom-spray of spring on the prairie. One of his favorite Rough Riders—“Little” (five-foot-two) Billy McGinty of Ripley, Oklahoma—would be around for casual laughs. As a horseman, Roosevelt said, McGinty had no peer. And holidaying in the dry plains had obvious benefits for Roosevelt’s heath. Asthmatic wheezing was unheard along the 1,290-mile Red River of the South: this was open-lung country. Unbeknownst to reporters at the time, Roosevelt, as noted, was also planning to see if the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve would be a suitable place to reintroduce bison. In fact, predator control was a major reason why he wanted to hunt wolves. The zoologist William Temple Hornaday at the Bronx Zoo had informed Roosevelt that he was ready—more than ready—to send his hand-fed bison herd by railroad from the Bronx to Oklahoma. All he needed was Roosevelt’s go-ahead. Roosevelt, in a sense, was serving as Hornaday’s advance scout.

Although this is unprovable, at his inauguration in March 1905 Roosevelt probably told Quanah Parker (the last of the Quahadi Comanche chiefs) about the buffalo repatriation that the New York Zoological Society was overseeing; after all, Congress had (through the Lacey Act) authorized the president to create a big game reserve in the Wichitas, just two months earlier.
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There was never a Native American that Roosevelt liked more than Parker. Because he had a white mother—Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been captured by Comanches in a raid near Groesbeck, Texas—Chief Quanah was a so-called half-breed. A tough Plains fighter in his youth, by 1905 he had become an American pragmatist, more of an optimist like William James than a fatalist like Crazy Horse. Yet there was also something mystical about him, an unaccountable reverence in his every utterance. Actually, some of Quanah’s guru wisdom may have been drug-induced. The chief used peyote; eating mescaline made him feel equal to every task, able to glide like a bird or crawl like a snake.

The advisability of taking such drugs is always doubtful, but they seemed to work for Quanah. He was bookish and knew that mescaline in the form of peyote buttons had been used along the Rio Grande Valley by Native Americans since 3,700 BC. In the sixteenth century, Spanish priests in Mexico forbade native people to use it; but as the Comanche lost their foothold in the American Southwest in the late nineteenth century, peyote came into vogue among them, like the Ghost Dance.
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In the face of defeat, why not get high and pray? Around 1890, after a particularly intense vision, Quanah created the Native American church movement. This religious experience led to his denouncing his past raids against white settlers and becoming a committed pacifist. He adopted peyote as a ritual for the Comanche and Kiowa. The bitter sweet taste of mescaline could, he believed, free his people’s minds from the white man’s tyranny, and at the very least it was far better than being locked up at Fort Sill or Fort Leavenworth. The fact that Quanah ate
Lophophora williamsii
was unimportant to Roosevelt, because the drug had brought Parker into the arms of Christ. “The white man goes into his church and talks
about
Jesus,” Roosevelt famously said. “But the Indian goes into his tipi and talks
to
Jesus.”
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No one knew for certain where Quanah was born. However, he claimed it was somewhere around the Wichitas; and just as Roosevelt had learned the North Dakota topography inside-out, Quanah understood every nook and cranny of his beloved Wichita range and the Llano Estacado (Stalked Plains). Even though Quanah wore his hair in long braids and had several wives, he nevertheless adopted many of the white man’s ways. An impetuous cordiality informed his dealings with white men. Often, he wore a business suit and derby hat. For example, his home in Cache, Oklahoma—the two-story, twelve-room “Star House,” where Roosevelt dined and slept on the porch one evening—was modeled after the U.S. Army general’s headquarters in Fort Sill. (Fourteen white stars symbolizing generals in the cavalry were painted on its red roof.
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) It had been a gift of the Texan rancher Burk Burnett and was equipped with one of the first residential telephones in southwestern Oklahoma.
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What Roosevelt most admired about Quanah was his never-failing reverence for buffalo. Unlike Geronimo, the Chiricahua Apache who appeared in William Cody’s Wild West Show, Quanah never abandoned his vision of a vast “buffalo common” on the Great Plains. The deeds of the U.S. Cavalry never diminished his fervent belief in the prophecy of a rebirth for the buffalo. A hard worker, not given to idle hours, the soldierly Parker had no concept of quitting. In 1903, Roosevelt had been informed
that the 101 Ranch in Bliss, Oklahoma, had hired the capricious Geronimo to lead a hunt for captured buffalo. This was a theatrical pageant: Geronimo, in war paint, would lead on horseback, followed by a convoy of automobiles whose drivers would shoot at terrified buffalo acquired from the Goodnight Ranch in Texas. When Roosevelt heard from the National Editorial Association about this inhumane and unsportsmanlike hunt, he was furious. He wired Governor Thompson B. Ferguson of the Oklahoma Territory to stop the brutality at once. Also, according to the
New York Times
, federal troops from Fort Sill were ordered to arrest the culprits.
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