The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (5 page)

Michael McCurdy, well-known illustrator of John Muir reprint books, pays homage to President Roosevelt’s saving of Florida’s brown and white pelican rookeries.
Illustration of T.R. petting a brown pelican. (
Courtesy of Michael McCurdy
)

What Roosevelt doesn’t mention in
An Autobiography
was the backlash against his creation of bird refuges. The plumers and the millinery industry fought back, appealing to public opinion, lobbying Congress, and, in the most extreme cases, shooting at bird wardens. A battle royal ensued between powerful exploiters of nature versus beleaguered preservationists. Determined to win the so-called Feather Wars against plumers and market hunters—not to give an inch and to use the full force of the U.S. federal government as his arsenal—Roosevelt declared Passage Key, another brown pelican nesting area in Florida, the third federal refuge in October 1905.
*
This sixty-three-acre island was located offshore from Saint Petersburg, Florida, at the entrance to Tampa Bay. Roosevelt had studied it in 1898, when his legendary Rough Riders were waiting to transfer to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, so he knew firsthand the high quantity of both migratory and year-round birds using it.
⁵¹

Now as president, with another “I So Declare It” decree on Florida’s behalf along the Gulf Coast, Roosevelt had helped every bird at Passage Key to continue to survive and thrive in its marine habitat. Slowly but steadily, the federal bird reservations grew. Many of his first reserves were in Florida—Indian Key, Mosquito Inlet, Tortugas Keys, Key West, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, Palma Sole, and Island Bay. Roosevelt’s “Great Wildlife Crusade” also protected colonies of white-rumped sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, and piping plovers on the East Timbalier Island preserve in Louisiana; provided safe nesting grounds for herring gulls on the Huron Islands Reservation in Lake Superior three miles off the shore of Michigan; and offered sanctuary to the sooty and noddy terms on the Dry Tortugas Reservation in the Gulf of Mexico. At the Pathfinder Federal Bird Reservation in Wyoming—created on February 25, 1909, just before T.R. left office—the president not only saved an essential waterfowl mi
gration stopover place on the western edge of the Central Flyway but also preserved herds of pronghorns, the fastest mammal in North America.

IV

When writing or lecturing about American birds Roosevelt often became lyrical, sometimes even songlike. His sparkling writings are often good enough to put him in the company of such first-rate naturalist writers as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Peter Matthiessen, and John Burroughs. In 2008 the nature writer Bill McKibben included Roosevelt’s 1904 speech at the Grand Canyon in Library of America’s
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
.
⁵²
“To lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm,” Roosevelt wrote in
A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open
(1916), “or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in the shifting maze above the beach—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”
⁵³

During his presidency, Roosevelt also instituted the first federal irrigation projects, national monuments, and conservation commissions. He quadrupled America’s forest reserves and, recognizing the need to save the buffalo from extinction, he made Oklahoma’s Wichita Forest and Montana’s National Bison Range big game preserves. Others were created to protect moose and elk. To cap it off he established five national parks, protecting such “heirlooms” as Oregon’s iridescent blue Crater Lake, South Dakota’s subterranean wonder Wind Cave, and the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. Courtesy of an executive decree, Roosevelt saved the Grand Canyon—a 1,900-square-mile hallowed site in Arizona—from destructive zinc and copper mining interests. The doughty scrawl of his signature, a conservationist weapon, set aside for posterity (or for “the people unborn”
*
as he put it) over 234 million acres, almost the size of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida (or equal to one out of every ten acres in the United States, including Alaska.)
⁵⁴
All told, Roosevelt’s acreage was almost half the landmass Thomas Jefferson had acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
⁵⁵

Full of environmental rectitude, Roosevelt turned saving certain species into a crusade. Unafraid of opposition, always watchful of political timing, and constantly ready with a riposte, Roosevelt acted with the
prowling boldness of a mountain lion on the hunt. Suddenly, before people knew what hit them, strange-sounding place-names like Snoqualmie, Nebo, and Kootenai were national forest reserves. Because Florida was known as a bird haven, perhaps turning Pelican Island and Passage Key into Federal Bird Reserves wasn’t too shocking. But imagine how perplexed people were when Roosevelt ventured into the supposedly arid desert territories of Arizona and New Mexico, establishing federal bird reservations at Salt River and Carlsbad. Roosevelt believed there was no type of American topography that posterity wouldn’t enjoy for recreational purposes and spiritual uplift: extinct volcanoes, limestone caverns, oyster bars, tropical rain forests, artic tundra, pine woods—the list goes on and on. As Roosevelt noted when dedicating a Yellowstone Park gateway in 1903, the “essential feature” of federal parks was their “essential democracy,” to be shared for “people as a whole.”
⁵⁶

With the power of the bully pulpit, Roosevelt—repeatedly befuddling both market hunters and insatiable developers—issued “I So Declare It” orders over and over again. Refusing to poke at the edges of the conservation movement like his Republican presidential successors, Roosevelt entered the fray double-barreled, determined to save the American wilderness from deforestation and unnecessary duress. The limited (though significant) forest reserve acts of the Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley administrations were magnified 100 times over once Roosevelt entered the White House. From the beginning to the end of his presidency, Roosevelt, in fact, did far more for the long-term protection of wilderness than all of his White House predecessors combined. In a fundamental way, Roosevelt was a conservation visionary, aware of the pitfalls of hyper-industrialization, fearful that speed-logging, blast-rock mining, overgrazing, reckless hunting, oil drilling, population growth, and all types of pollution would leave the planet in biological peril. “The natural resources of our country,” President Roosevelt warned Congress, the Supreme Court, and the state governors at a conservation conference he had called to session, “are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.”
⁵⁷

Wildlife protection and forest conservation, Roosevelt insisted, were a moral imperative and represented the high-water mark of his entire tenure at the White House. In an age when industrialism and corporatism were running largely unregulated, and dollar determinism was holding favor, Roosevelt, the famous Wall Street trustbuster, went after the “unintelligent butchers” of his day with a ferocity unheard of in a U.S. president. As if recruiting soldiers for battle, Roosevelt embraced rangers
and wardens far and wide—even in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico—insisting that the time was ripe to protect American wildlife from destructive insouciance. By reorienting and redirecting Washington, D.C. bureaucracy toward conservation, Roosevelt’s crusade to save the American wilderness can now be viewed as one of the greatest presidential initiatives between Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I. It was Roosevelt—not Muir or Pinchot—who set the nation’s environmental mechanisms in place and turned conservationism into a universalist endeavor.

“Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs,” Roosevelt said in his book
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
, in 1905. “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon in the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever with their majestic beauty unmarred.”
⁵⁸

Theodore Roosevelt spent his adult life crusading on behalf of the national parks and monuments. Here he is at Yosemite in April 1903.
T.R. at Yosemite National Park. (
Courtesy of the National Park Service
)

I

A
t a very early age, Theodore Roosevelt started studying the anatomy of more than 600 species of birds in North America. You might say that his natural affinity for ornithology was part of his metabolism. As a child Roosevelt became a skilled field birder, acquiring a fine taxidermy collection while recording firsthand observations in note-books now housed at Harvard University.
¹
And it wasn’t just birds. When Roosevelt was four or five years old he saw a fox in a book and declared it “the face of God.”
²
This wasn’t merely a flight of fancy. The mere sight of a jackrabbit, flying squirrel, or box turtle caused Roosevelt to light up with glee. The multilayered puzzle that was Roosevelt, in fact, was titillated by the very sound of species names in both English and Latin—wolverines
(Gulo gulo)
, red-bellied salamanders
(Taricha rivularis)
, snapping mackerel
(Pomatomus saltatrix)
, and so on. At times revealing a Saint Francis complex regarding animals, Roosevelt wanted to understand all living matter. “Roosevelt began his life as a naturalist, and he ended his life as a naturalist,” wrote the historian Paul Russell Cutright. “Throughout a half century of strenuous activity his interest in wildlife, though subject to ebb and flow, was never abandoned at any time.”
³

Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in the noisy hubbub of gaslit New York City. He struggled with ill health well into adulthood. “I was,” Roosevelt later wrote, “a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma.”
⁴
Often wheezing, the young Roosevelt found physical relief by simply observing creatures’ habits and breathing fresh air. Nature served as a curative agent for Roosevelt, as it’s been known to do for millions afflicted with respiratory illness. “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness,” he wrote, “that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.”
⁵
Literally from childhood until his death in January 1919—following his arduous journey down the River of Doubt through Brazil’s uncharted Amazon jungle—he epitomized Ralph Waldo Emerson’s criterion for being an incurable naturalist. “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,” Emerson explained, “who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”
⁶

As a precocious child Theodore Roosevelt became an amateur ornithologist. Trained by one of John James Audubon’s student taxidermists, Roosevelt started his own natural history museum in New York City to show off his specimens. Later in life Roosevelt argued that parents had a moral obligation to make sure their children didn’t suffer from nature deficiency.
A precocious young T.R. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

Just over a year after Roosevelt’s birth, the British naturalist Charles Darwin published his great scientific treatise
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
. Deeply personal in tone, without esoteric graphs or undecipherable tables,
On the Origin of Species
set off heated global debate over religious beliefs that underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s great idea was evolution by natural selection, a death knell to the ancien régime of rudimentary biology. Although the Darwinian catchphrase “survival of the fittest”—which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer and which Roosevelt adopted practically as a creed—didn’t appear until a revised 1869 edition, by the time Theodore was ten or eleven the biologist was his touchstone, a Noah-like hero. He was enthralled by the idea of collecting species in faraway places, and in his youthful imagination the Garden of Eden was replaced by Darwin’s Galápagos Islands. (Almost twenty years before
On the Origin of Species
raised tantalizing questions about the Creation, Darwin had written about circumnavigating the world collecting specimens of animals and plants—both alive and dead—in
The Voyage of the Beagle
). Once Roosevelt grasped the concept of natural selection his bird-watching instincts went into overdrive. Suddenly he understood that the biological world wasn’t static. Observed similarities between living creatures were often a product of shared evolutionary history. With Darwinian eyes he now studied every bird beak and eye
stripe, hoping to reconcile anomalies in the natural world.
⁷
As an adult he would often carry
On the Origin of Species
with him in his saddlebag or cartridge case while on hunts.
⁸

There was nothing unusual about a nineteenth-century child being enamored of animals and wildlife. Whether it’s
Aesop’s Fables
or
Mother Goose
, the most enduring children’s literature often features lovable, talking animals. But the young Roosevelt was different from most other children: from an early age he liked to learn about wildlife scientifically, by firsthand observation. The cuteness of anthropomorphized animals in the popular press annoyed Theodore; Darwinian wildlife biology, on the other hand, captured his imagination and had the effect of smelling salts. Roosevelt loved the way the British naturalist had gone beyond physical similarities of anatomy and physiology to include behavioral similarities in his extended analysis
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). This devotion to Darwin, a real sense of awe, continued long after Roosevelt was an adult. Even when he was president, grappling with showcasing the Great White Fleet and building the Panama Canal, stories abounded about Roosevelt hurrying across the White House lawn exclaiming “Very early for a fox sparrow!” and then suddenly stopping to pick up a feather for closer coloration inspection.
⁹
Believing that evolution was factual, President Roosevelt nevertheless conceded that the concept of natural selection needed to undergo constant scientific experimentation, and the more data the better.
¹⁰

But before Roosevelt discovered Darwin there were the picture books and outdoors narratives aimed at the boys’ market. Every parent recognizes the moment when a child displays a special aptitude or precocity for learning, when hopes arise that it’s a harbinger of great educational accomplishment to come. Such sudden bursts of enthusiasm from a toddler indicate both personality and preference. When Theodore Roosevelt obsessed over the lavish illustrations in David Livingstone’s
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
and asked questions about Darwin’s theory of evolution, his parents, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, realized their son was an aspiring naturalist.
¹¹

A Scottish physician and African missionary, Livingstone always had a high-minded scientific purpose for his jungle explorations—for instance, to discover the headwaters of a river. Even though the elegantly bound
Missionary Travels
was almost too heavy for young Theodore to carry, he would stare at the photographs of zebras, lions, and hippopotamuses for hours on end, thirsting for Africa. His early fancy for animals was the most appealing and tenderest part of his adolescence. “When I cast around for
a starting-point,” his friend Jacob A. Riis wrote in
Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen
(1904), “there rises up before me the picture of a little lad, in stiff white petticoats, with a curl right on top of his head, toiling laboriously along with a big fat volume under his arm, ‘David Livingstone’s Travels and Researches in South Africa.’”
¹²

Nearly coinciding with the publication of
On the Origin of Species
, a Neanderthal skullcap was found three years earlier in Neander Valley, Germany. For anybody even remotely interested in the relationship between animals and man the discovery of the first pre-
sapiens
fossil was stunning news. Suddenly Thomas Huxley, a discerning British biologist with long, wild sideburns, began saying in his lectures that the skull was proof that man was a primate, a direct descendant of apes. Just as exciting was Huxley’s work on fossil fish, which he collected and classified with gusto. Although Huxley had been skeptical of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the publication of
On the Origin of Species
changed that. As the introverted Darwin retreated to a more private life, spending time with family and friends, Huxley became
the
leading interpreter of Darwin, explaining the master’s theories and articles to rapt audiences all over the world. Determined to defend evolution to the hilt, Huxley declared himself “Darwin’s bulldog,” ably drawing gorillas on blackboards to explain to the old-school scientists how man evolved from them. Whereas Darwin was a field naturalist, his advocate Huxley practiced anatomy; together they constituted a nearly lethal one-two punch on behalf of modern biology.

Although Theodore couldn’t possibly have understood the intricacies of evolutionary theory as a young boy, the explicit fact that man had evolved from apes appealed mightily to him. As a naturalist Darwin was unafraid to cut into the tissue of a cadaver looking for clues to creation. Merely having the temerity to write that man, for all his nobility, still bore “in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” made Darwin heroic to Roosevelt.
¹³
“Thank Heaven,” Roosevelt wrote about his childhood a year before his death, “I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley.”
¹⁴

Besides reading heavily illustrated wildlife picture books and hearing about the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Huxley from his family, Theodore gravitated to the Irish adventure writer Captain Mayne Reid. Generally speaking Captain Reid—a school tutor turned frontiersman on the Missouri and Platte rivers—wrote about the “Wilderness Out There” in a highly romantic way, as in a cowboy western.
¹⁵
His seventy-five adventure novels and oodles of short stories are full of backwoods contrivance. In
The Scalp Hunters
(1851), for example, Captain Reid, with
an air of superior wisdom, went so far as to declare that the Rocky Mountains region was a sacred place where “every object wears the impress of God’s image.”
¹⁶
But Reid also appreciated evolution, filling his writings with sophomoric Darwinian analysis. He never missed a chance to describe birds, animals, and plants in vivid and apposite detail.
¹⁷
Although Captain Reid never made much money with his hair-raising tales, he consistently milked his Mexican-American War military service for a string of successful plays. Strange wild locales were among Captain Reid’s specialties; for example, in
The Boy Hunters
(1853) he made the Texas plains, Louisiana canebrakes, and Mississippi River flyover seem like teeming paradises for any youngster interested in birds. There was, in fact, an able naturalist lurking underneath his often racist (even by mid-nineteenth-century standards) dime-novel prose.

Anybody wanting to understand Roosevelt as an outdoors writer must turn to
The Boy Hunters
. The plot is fairly straightforward—a former colonel in Napoléon’s army moves to Louisiana with his three sons and a servant, determined to be at one with nature—but by Chapter 2 the narrative takes a strange twist. One afternoon a letter arrives from Napoléon’s hunter-naturalist brother asking the old colonel to procure a white buffalo skin for France. Feeling too arthritic to tramp the Louisiana Territory in search of the rare buffalo, the colonel sends his sons—the “boy hunters”—in pursuit of the rare beast. Accompanied by the faithful servant, the adventurous boys head into the dangerous wilderness, determined to find a white buffalo, thought to be a sacred symbol in many Native American religions.
*
(Starting in 1917 the white buffalo also became a featured image in the state flag of Wyoming.)

Swooning over such chapter titles as “A Fox Squirrel in a Fix,” “The Prong-Horns,” and “Besieged by Grizzly Bears,” Roosevelt loved every page of
The Boy Hunters
. Much of the novel’s action took place in the Big Thicket of Texas, where wild pigs and horses roamed freely. After exposure to the American West the boys were no longer content shooting at birds: they coveted big game. Their ambition, Reid wrote, was not “satisfied with anything less exciting than a panther, bear, or buffalo hunt.”
¹⁸
Like a trio of well-armed Eagle Scouts, the boy hunters grew to be com
pletely self-reliant, able to ride horseback, dive into rivers, lasso cattle, and climb huge trees like black bears. They scaled a steep cliff and shot birds on the wing with bow and arrow. They were taught to “sleep in the open air—in the dark forest—on the unsheltered prairie—along the white snow-wreath—anywhere—with but a blanket or a buffalo-robe for their beds.” Drawing on the legends of the mountain men like Jim Bridger, Reid, preaching the strenuous life for boys, created little Natty Bumppos who could “kindle a fire without either flint, steel, or detonating powder.”
¹⁹
These boys didn’t need a compass for direction. They could read all the rocks and trees of that “vast wilderness that stretched from their own home to the far shores of the Pacific Ocean.”
²⁰