The Wilderness Warrior

Douglas Brinkley

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061940576
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

From New York Times bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley comes a sweeping historical narrative and eye-opening look at the pioneering environmental policies of President Theodore Roosevelt, avid bird-watcher, naturalist, and the founding father of America's conservation movement.

In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our "naturalist president." By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor. This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I. Roosevelt's most important legacies led to the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.

CHAPTER ONE

THE EDUCATION OF A DARWINIAN NATURALIST

I

At 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 completely 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

The Boy Hunters included marvelous Hogarth-like woodcut illustrations of ferocious cougars and a bear wrestling an alligator, which spiced up the narrative. Lovingly Captain Reid described in credible naturalistic detail tulip trees and the fanlike leaves of palmettos, weird yuccas, and lofty sugar maples. Most ambitiously, however, he anticipated Darwinian theory in anecdotes about the food chain.²¹ Academics have (accurately) criticized Captain Reid for harboring racist views of Indians and black slaves, but they’ve traditionally overlooked his essentially Marxist analogies about how the rich preyed on the poor in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a radical Republican, and to him the mega-capitalists were “king vultures...