Read The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America Online
Authors: Douglas Brinkley
While Roosevelt was studying birds and animals (and even evidence of insects), Burroughs was analyzing
Homo sapiens Roosevelti
. Since leav
ing Union Station in the District of Columbia, and all through the Midwest, while Roosevelt was giving stirring speeches in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, a watchful Burroughs was keeping copious notes. What amazed Burroughs most was how cordial Roosevelt was to everybody he met, offering good fellowship, firmly shaking people’s hands as if he were a next-door neighbor handing out free
Farmer’s Almanacs
. His hail-fellow-well-met routine was paying dividends. The trip seemed less like a presidential tour than a triumphant homecoming for a native son. “He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he went,” Burroughs noted. “He could easily match their Western cordiality and good-fellowship.”
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It seemed that Roosevelt treated the citizens of North Dakota especially warmly. Every old ranch foreman in the state was offered red-carpet hospitality. Roosevelt truly admired these rural folks. North Dakotans never complained about working long hours or giving a neighbor free help. And the unbounded hills and plains hadn’t been spoiled by industrialization. Somehow the children of North Dakota seemed purer than children back east, whose heads were filled with false ideas of what constituted success in America. To Burroughs, in fact, it seemed as if Roosevelt were from North Dakota, as if the yeomen planting crops and the village merchants selling wares were somehow his kinfolk.
As his constant companion, with time to while away, Roosevelt regaled Burroughs with stories about western characters he loved, including Hell-Roaring Bill Jones and Hash-Knife Joe. At Saint Paul, Seth Bullock joined the Roosevelt party for a few days of travel. Once they reached Yellowstone, Roosevelt borrowed a sure-footed gray Third Cavalry stallion while Burroughs, hampered by arthritis, rode in a carriage (or ambulance, as he jokingly called it) pulled by two mules. Burroughs had a wild ride because the team got spooked and took off running. Off they went to Mammoth Hot Springs, which Burroughs later described as “the devil’s frying pan.” Roosevelt sported khaki pants, puttees, a black jacket, and a tan Stetson hat. Burroughs still wore his dark suit—a fashionista from the Whitman catalog of refined dishevelment. Shedding the Secret Service and newspapermen, they explored caves, spied songbirds, inspected pinecones, and studied topographical aberrations. “He craved once more to be alone with nature,” Burroughs wrote, “he was evidently hungry for the wild and the aboriginal.”
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Burroughs understood that America had a lot of weather-vane politicians, but Roosevelt, particularly when it came to conservation, wasn’t one of them. He understood that natural resource management was
the
imperative! He understood why species needed to be saved, if only for aesthetic purposes! And nobody Burroughs had ever met knew more about birds. “Surely,” Burroughs wrote, “this man is the rarest kind of a sportsman.” When it came to conservation, Burroughs understood that Roosevelt was “the most vital man on the continent, if not on the planet, today.”
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One of the oddest aspects of Roosevelt’s trip to Yellowstone was the vigorously enforced ban against journalists. The president wanted sixteen days off from work to study the abundant wildlife without being pestered by reporters. Both Roosevelt and Burroughs wanting to be like old antelopes, straying from the herd of humans. Their headquarters were at Major Pitcher’s house, but several U.S. Army camps were also set up deep in the wilderness (but not too far from established roads) so Roosevelt and Burroughs could commune with the outdoors without signs of irritating civilization. Only matters of utmost national importance would be conveyed to Roosevelt through his personal secretary William Loeb, Jr. (whose railway car, Elysian, the “rolling White House,” had been unhitched in Cinnabar, Montana). Burroughs was suffering from a head cold, coughing and sneezing, but he gamely trooped onward into the wild with Roosevelt, sleeping in the springtime snow a few miles from Major Pitcher’s house.
On April 11, the
Times
, in a mistaken rush to judgment, ran a bogus story under the headline “President Kills Lion in Yellowstone Park” (presumably, he had killed it with his pistol).
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Because cougars weren’t protected in Yellowstone, the
Times
concluded that the president hadn’t violated any regulations; he had merely blasted a feline varmint. But the entire story was fabricated: a scoop-hungry reporter had used an unreliable source. When he heard of it, President Roosevelt was livid, because he had worked so hard to avoid giving the impression that he was hunting in Yellowstone. Instead, with Burroughs at his side, Roosevelt had hoped to emphasize his preservationist side. But he could hardly go after the
New York Times
. It was his hometown newspaper, and it had long promoted his political and literary careers. In an article titled “President on the Move,” the
Times
clarified the earlier story, explaining that Buffalo Jones—the apparent source—had offered to go cougar hunting with Roosevelt but the president had “declined the offer.”
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Nearly every day thereafter, the
Times
, covering Roosevelt as best it could from Cinnabar, Montana, would assure readers that the president had “shot no game.” By not hunting, Roosevelt was showing that he was a reformed sportsman, that nature could be enjoyed for its own
sake. In fact, all Roosevelt and Burroughs hunted for in Yellowstone were voles for the Biological Survey. They also explored the Yellowstone and Lamar rivers; analyzed the shaped balconies and terraces of porcelain-like travertine at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner; camped near Old Tower Fall Soldiers Station; pondered the great assemblage of petrified wood; rode sleighs to the Upper Geyser Basin; and even tried skiing around the Norris Hotel. What surprised Burroughs was the bizarre erosion to be studied in this patch of Wyoming: aeolian, biological, fluvial, lateral, and sheet were just some of the conditions. You needed a geological textbook to decipher the cycles of erosion, and to differentiate between piping (badlands erosion) and residual boulder (weathered in place). It was a little too much, so he turned to flowers. “I even saw a wild flower,” Burroughs wrote, “an early buttercup, not an inch high—in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only fragrant buttercup I know.”
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Spending so much time hiking together, the two naturalists talked about Merriam, who, for all of his God-given talent, had yet to produce a first-rate American zoological book. But Roosevelt believed that gossip was a black art, akin to blasphemy. If one talked badly about friends behind their back, then one had an obligation to tell them to their face. That was the honor code, he believed, of a “real” man. Therefore Roosevelt’s letter to Merriam on April 22 can best be classified as tough love, and a long-deferred goad, putting his thirty-year friendship with the biologist on the line:
Both John Burroughs and I agree that it is very lamentable that you will not produce a really big book. John Burroughs gives me permission to quote him. He says—I entirely agree with him—that you are in danger of taking your place among those men of great natural power and enormous industry, who collect innumerable facts but are somehow never able to do the work of generalization and condensation—that is, to build a structure out of the heap of bricks. It is an awful thing to generalize hastily, and not to pay proper heed to the need of accumulating masses of material. But where one meets a genuine master in his profession—and such I esteem you—it is a loss to the world if he fails to put his discoveries in durable, in abiding, form. This is exactly what I fear will be the case with you. To publish quantities of little pamphlets is merely to take rank with the thousands of small and industrious German specialists. You have it in your power to write the great monumental work on the mammals
of North America,
including their life histories
. If you put it off too long, you will never do it. And if you wait until you are sure you have exhausted the resources of trinomial nomenclature on very obscure shrew or fieldmouse from Florida to Oregon, you will also have to postpone your work indefinitely; for I firmly believe that after you and I are dead there will still be ample opportunity for industrious collectors to secure “new forms” and “probably valid species” from almost any region which it is thought worth while minutely to investigate. But the labors of ten thousand such would not equal one production of a book by you on the lines I have indicated.
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IV
Roosevelt’s visit to Yellowstone culminated on April 24, when he laid the cornerstone for a basaltic stone railroad archway near the Northern Pacific Railroad depot at Gardiner, Montana. Architecturally similar in style to the Old Faithful and Canyon hotels, the Roosevelt Arch, as it became known, was twenty feet wide and thirty feet high. It looked as if it belonged on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Carved above the keystone was a phrase Roosevelt fancied: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Smaller plaques read “Yellowstone National Park” and “Created by Act of Congress March 1, 1872.” Approximately 3,500 people were on hand for the dedication, inducing a group of local Masons, who presented him with a Montana gold nugget mounted on a plaque.
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In the cornerstone, the Masons also deposited their grand lodge papers, some local newspapers, a handful of rare coins, photos, a King James Bible, and a brief history of Yellowstone.
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“The Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt said in his dedication, “is something unique in this world, as far as I know. Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be found such a tract of veritable wonderland, made accessible to all visitors, where at the same time not only the scenery of the wilderness, but the wild creatures of the Park are scrupulously preserved as they are here, the only change being that these same wild creatures have been so carefully protected as to show literally astounding tameness.”
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With John Burroughs and Major Pitcher sitting behind him on the platform, Roosevelt offered his own impromptu reflections on the American West, and thanked locals for his tremendous “two-week holiday” in Yellowstone. In what the historian Aubrey L. Haines described as a “rambling speech,” Roosevelt talked about buffalo breeding, forest protection, water conservation, and the geological sites that made Yellowstone unique. With a palpable sense of urgency, he warned coming generations
to protect Yellowstone from the scars of ore pits and mine tailings—also, forest fires had to be prevented, or fought when they did occur. Flattering the crowd, Roosevelt conveyed his full confidence in their stewardship of a glorious natural setting straight from the hands of God. He praised Montanans, Idahoans, and Wyomingites for their wise protectionist ethics. “I like the country,” Roosevelt said in a crowd-pleasing line reported in the
Times
. “But above all I like the men and women.”
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A few weeks later,
Forest and Stream
magazine published Roosevelt’s speech in its entirety. In his talk, Roosevelt had driven home the point that national parks were “essential democracy” at work. America’s treasures, like Yellowstone, had to be safeguarded from vandals and exploiters. Here was a place for city dwellers to restore themselves. The president lamented that Europeans were flocking to see Yellowstone more excitedly than Americans. He said that the United States needed to become “awake to its beauties.” And he praised the successes of the wildlife protection movement in the park.
“Here all the wild creatures of the old days are being preserved,” he said, “and their overflow into the surrounding country, means that the people of the surrounding country, so long as they see that the laws are observed by all, will be able to insure to themselves and to their children and to their children’s children, much of the old-time pleasure of the hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter of the wilderness.”
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It was a bittersweet occasion for Roosevelt when, bound for Saint Louis, he had to say good-bye to Montana and part company with Oom John (who was going to Spokane for a prearranged lecture) at the Gardiner arch on April 25.
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Their wonderful times together in the open air were over. As a parting gesture, Roosevelt rallied to Burroughs’s defense against a cheap shot at him in the latest issue of
Forest and Stream
. Either in a fit of jealous pique for having been excluded from the Yellowstone trip or, more likely, simply as a result of editorial misjudgment, George Bird Grinnell had run a cruel, devastating personal attack on Burroughs in the magazine. Angrily, Roosevelt responded that Burroughs was a true man, a saint of the woods, a human being of breathtaking sincerity and a naturalist of unparalleled skills. Whitman had once said that Burroughs was “in a sense almost a miracle.” For weeks, Roosevelt and Burroughs had observed deer, elk, wild geese, wild mice, chickadees, and red squirrels. Together they had laughed at the jargoning Canadian jays (or camp robbers, as Burroughs called them) in the mornings and watched the sun set over the Yellowstone River gorges at dusk. They had inhaled the fragrance of scattered pines and had been silenced for hours by the beauty
of secluded valleys. Now, in Grinnell’s magazine, in an article written by someone in New Hampshire who wrote under the name “Hermit,” slammed Burroughs—of all people—as a bad naturalist.
*
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Burroughs, who was averse to conflict, assured Roosevelt that the attack didn’t matter; a single day’s news of other matters would erase it from people’s memory. The president was not so easily mollified, however. He wrote Grinnell a long letter defending Burroughs and lambasting the magazine for allowing the “Sage of Slabsides” to be ridiculed. The letter was postmarked Gardiner, Montana, and immediately fast-mailed to New York. Its reception marked the beginning of a serious rift in Roosevelt’s personal relationship with Grinnell. This was a risk that Roosevelt was evidently ready to take. “I have just seen the long letter by ‘Hermit’ in the
Forest and Stream
attacking John Burroughs, and incidentally furnishing the most ample reason for utter distrust of Hermit’s truthfulness in narrating or else his power of accurate observation,” Roosevelt wrote. “I will say frankly that I am surprised that a paper of the standing of the
Forest and Stream
should publish such an article, especially unsigned…. It is thoroughly discreditable of Hermit not to have attached his real name, and when the
Forest and Stream
permits the article to be published without the name it of course, in the eyes of the public, itself becomes responsible for the attack on Mr. Burroughs.”
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