The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  T.R. visiting the Arizona Territory in 1913. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

  PROLOGUE

  “I SO DECLARE IT”: PELICAN ISLAND, FLORIDA

  (FEBRUARY—MARCH 1903)

  I

  On a wintry morning in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at a White House cabinet meeting unexpectedly and with great exuberance. Something of genuine importance had obviously just happened. All eyes were fixated on Roosevelt, who was quaking like a dervish with either excitement or agitation—it was unclear which. Having endured the assassinations of three Republican presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley—Roosevelt’s so-called kitchen cabinet at least had the consolation of knowing that their boss, at the moment, was out of harm’s way. Still, they leaned forward, bracing for the worst. “Gentlemen, do you know what has happened this morning?” Roosevelt breathlessly asked, as everybody leaned forward with bated breath for the bad news. “Just now I saw a chestnut-sided warbler—and this is only February!”1

  The collective sigh of relief was palpable. His cabinet probably should have known that T.R.—an ardent Audubonist—had a bird epiphany. With a greenish-yellow cap, a white breast, and maroon streaks down their sides, these warblers usually wintered in Central America; his spotting one in Washington, D.C., truly was an aberration. By February 1903, after his seventeen months as president of the United States following the murder of McKinley in Buffalo by a crazed anarchist, it was common talk that Theodore Roosevelt was a strenuous preservationist when it came to saving American wilderness and wildlife. His track record was in this regard peerless among the nation’s political class. “I need hardly say how heartily I sympathize with the purposes of the Audubon Society,” Roosevelt had written to Frank M. Chapman, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, just two years before becoming president. “I would like to see all harmless wild things, but especially all birds, protected in every way. I do not understand how any man or woman who really loves nature can fail to try to exert influence in support of such objects as those of the Audubon Society. Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers, and I only wish that besides protecting the songsters, the birds of the grove, the orchard, the garden and the meadow, we could also protect the birds of the sea-shore and of the wilderness.”2

  By the time Roosevelt wrote that letter, Chapman—a droll, hardworking, unshowy activist spearheading the Audubon movement—was a legend in ornithological circles, considered by many the father of modern bird-watching. Back in February 1886 Chapman had stirred up a serious commotion in a letter to the editor of Forest and Stream titled “Birds and Bonnets” in which he lamented the fact that in New York City alone three-quarters of all women’s hats sold were capped by an exotic feather from a gun-shot bird. A devotee of comprehensive assessments and long-range planning for protecting aviaries, Chapman deemed the mutilation of birds for fashion “vulgar” and “unconscionable.” 3

  Raised on an estate in New Jersey just across the Hudson River from New York City, Chapman had a love of birds from an early age. Although his rich parents had pushed him into the financial world, his passion was ornithology. Still, he went to work on Wall Street, without going to college first—a university degree wasn’t required for a nineteenth-century gentleman banker. But the financial rewards of his brokerage work didn’t satisfy him, so the dapper Chapman walked away from wealth to pursue a career in ornithology. He began volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History and worked his way up to become the preeminent expert in the Department of Birds. Even without an academic degree, Chapman, with his cleft chin, pursed mouth, and perfectly groomed mustache, became something of a dandyish town crier for his adopted profession, as well as a pioneer in using a camera to study the nesting habits and egg hatching of birds. He believed the modern ornithologist needed to take behavior, psychology, breeding, biology, migration, locomotion, and ecology into consideration during fieldwork.4

  Theodore Roosevelt, whose father was a founder of the American Museum of National History, not only followed Chapman’s rising career but cheered on his pro-bird activities every step of the way. Thrilled by Chapman’s autonomy from academia, Roosevelt embraced his “public service” work aimed at helping everyday citizens to better understand the wild creatures flittering about in their own backyards. Before Chapman, for example, ornithologists practiced taxidermy on birds, stuffing them with cotton and lining them up on museum shelves. For every specimen on display, there were many others in storage. Bored by this strictly “study skins” approach, Chapman developed innovative dioramas in which habitat was also included as part of the educational experience.5 A profound, inexplicable infatuation with birds was simply part of Chapman’s curious chemistry, and he shared his zeal with Roosevelt and other outdoor enthusiasts. As a protector of “Citizen Bird,” Chapman insisted that ornithologists needed to teach fellow hunters that often “a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.”6

  As the editor of Bird-Lore magazine (precursor to Audubon)—and author of numerous popular bird guides, including Bird-Life: A Guide to the Study of Our Most Common Birds in 1897—Chapman was the bird authority of his generation. Roosevelt enjoyed being his enthusiastic sponsor. Chapman insisted in saving not just birds but their habitat—particularly breeding and nesting grounds in Florida. It was the essential condition, he insisted, for dozens of migratory species’ survival. To Chapman—and Roosevelt—creating “federal reserves” for wildlife and forests wasn’t debatable; it was an urgent imperative.

  Roosevelt and Chapman weren’t unique in their promotion of vast reserves. They were, in fact, reviving conservationist convictions that had been stalled by shortsighted politicians. Since the American Revolution the idea of game bird laws and habitat conservation had struck a responsive chord. In 1828 President John Quincy Adams set aside more than 1,378 acres of live oaks on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola Bay.7 Although Adams’s personal journals did, at times, show an abiding interest in birds, his motivation for saving Santa Rosa Island was ultimately utilitarian: its durable wood could be used to construct future U.S. naval vessels. But even such a low-grade conservationist effort as Adams’s tree preserve drew a fierce backlash. Running for president in 1832, Andrew Jackson denounced Adams’s tree farm as an un-American federal land grab, an unlawful attempt to deny Floridians timber to use as they saw fit. “Old Hickory,” as Jackson was nicknamed, believed God made hardwood hammock to cut and birds to eat. He ridiculed New England swells like Adams as effete, anachronistic sportsmen overflowing with ridiculous notions of “fair chase” rules and regulations for simply killing critters.8

  While Jackson clearly lacked the conservationists’ foresight, he was correct in labeling Adams and others who applied etiquette to hunting as aristocrats. Because New England had such strong cultural ties to Great Britain—where the idea of wildlife preserves (hunting) for aristocrats was an accepted part of the society since the reign of King William IV (1830–1837)—it’s little surprise that America’s first true conservationists came from the northeast. Starting in 1783 there were dozens of “sportsman” companion books, which promoted strict guidelines for upper-class gentleman hunters in places like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Furthermore, in 1832 the painter and sportsman George Catlin, returning from a sketching trip in the Dakotas, lobbied the U.S. government to establish “a magnificent park” in that region, to be populated by buffalo, elk, and Indians and marketed as a world-class tourist attraction. Filling his western reports with exclamatory prose, Catlin envisioned a “nation’s park” that would contain “man and beast, in all the wildness and freshness of their nature’s beauty!”9

  That same year John James Audubon hinted at the need for aviaries when he intrepidly journeyed around Florida, paint box and gun in hand, traveling from Saint Augustine to Ponce de Leon Springs and the Saint Johns River to Indian
Key to Cape Sable to Sardes Key and finally to Key West and the Dry Tortugas.10 Yet he still wrote enthusiastically about massacring brown pelicans and legions of other shorebirds in the Florida Keys. “Over those enormous mud-flats, a foot or two of water is quite sufficient to drive all the birds ashore, even the tallest Heron or Flamingo, and the tide seems to flow at once over the whole expanse,” he wrote. “Each of us, provided with a gun, posted himself behind a bush, and no sooner had the water forced the winged creatures to approach the shore than the work of destruction commenced. When it at length ceased, the collected mass of birds of different kinds looked not unlike a small haycock.”11

  Even though the vast majority of nineteenth-century U.S. conservationists enthralled by the “great Audubon” were elite hunters and anglers, there was also a slow-burning idiosyncratic group of naturalists, epitomized by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a careful student of the New England ecosystem and was deeply influenced by William Bartram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of Chactaws (1794). His own long, sulking sojourns at Walden Pond and lonely hikes in the dank woodlands of Maine had transformed this onetime Harvard man of letters into a semi-hermetic Concord naturalist. It was Thoreau, in a seminal article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, who most passionately articulated a need to save wilderness for wilderness’s sake. “Why should not we,” Thoreau asked with mounting enthusiasm, “have our national preserves…in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race [Indians], may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’—[and] our forests [saved]…not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?”12

  Although this prescient article was added as a last chapter to Thoreau’s classic The Maine Woods after his death, our great national hermit, in truth, was an anomaly in pre–Civil War America. His condemnation of the “war on wilderness” was, as the conservation scholar Doug Stewart put it, “a mere whisper in the popular conscience.”13 Instead, the pilot-light credit for galvanizing what the conservationist Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac (1949), called “the land ethic” belonged to well-to-do Eastern Seaboard hunters who loomed over the early campaigns to create wilderness preserves. In other words, Thoreau the poet contemplated nature preserves in the Atlantic Monthly while hunting clubs like the Adirondack Club and the Bisby Club circa 1870 started actually creating preserves in the Adirondacks.14

  Long before Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot were born, in fact, New York’s aristocratic hunters, using sportsmen’s newspapers and circulars to deliver their message, challenged loggers and sawmill operators and every other kind of forest exploiter to abandon their reckless clear-cutting. They wanted places like the Adirondacks saved for aesthetic and recreational pleasures. The precedent these pioneering gentlemen hunters started needed an indefatigable champion like Theodore Roosevelt to put the U.S. government fully on the side of the bird and game and forest preserves. “When the story of the national government’s part in wild-life protection is finally written, it will be found that while he was president, Theodore Roosevelt made a record in that field that is indeed enough to make a reign illustrious,” William T. Hornaday, the legendary director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote in Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913). “He aided every wild-life cause that lay within the bounds of possibility, and he gave the vanishing birds and mammals the benefit of every doubt.”15

  Even though Roosevelt’s alliance with Chapman (and other visionary naturalists like Hornaday) launched the modern conservation movement between 1901 and 1909, Roosevelt’s preservationist vein, first developed in 1887, has been unfairly minimized by scholars. Partly that’s due to a left-leaning bias against aristocratic hunters. In addition, historians studying the progressive era have been confused by, or failed even to recognize, the distinction between hunting game birds and helping save song birds that are unfit to eat. Crowds of scholars have unfairly rounded on Roosevelt for having a bloodlust. Nevertheless, to Roosevelt, gentleman hunters were the true front line in the nature preservation movement. Over the years, however, historians have usually deemed Roosevelt first and foremost a “conservationist”—a term first seriously coined in 1865 by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature but not popularized until the publication, in 1910, of Gifford Pinchot’s manifesto The Fight for Conservation (to which ex-President Roosevelt provided an introduction). “Conservation,” Pinchot famously wrote, “means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”16

  A wildlife enthusiast since childhood, Roosevelt in 1887 cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with George Bird Grinnell in order to create bison, elk, and antelope preserves for future generations of Americans to enjoy. Smitten with “the chase,” he had also written a fine trilogy of books largely about his hunting experiences in the Dakota Territory: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). While living at the Elkhorn Ranch thirty-five miles north of Medora, North Dakota, for extended periods between 1883 and 1892 (and shorter ones thereafter), Roosevelt developed a highly original theory about land management and wildlife protection. As president he promoted the pro-wildlife approach with revolutionary zeal. The immortal beauty of America’s rivers and its vast prairies, rugged mountains, and lonely deserts stirred him to nearly religious fervor. Yet he remained a proud hunter to his dying day. In fact, Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, New York, had walls lined with trophy heads and skins of birds and mammals. Boom (an elk), Pow-Pow (a buffalo head stuffed for library display), and Pop-Pop-Pop (a massive 28-point blacktail buck head spanning more than fifty inches) were his to showcase.17 They represented Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for big game hunting.

  On the other hand, President Roosevelt, with scholar’s fortitude, kept detailed lists of birds he saw grace the White House lawn. An avid birder, he spied on Baltimore orioles as they flicked their orange-edged tails and on crimson cardinals building sturdy nests. Dutifully he would record their numbers and habits in notebooks. Paradoxically, even though Roosevelt hunted game birds, when songbirds were the issue he agreed with the naturalist John Burroughs, who wrote in Signs and Seasons (1886) that the “true ornithologist leaves his gun at home.”18 He understood the clear distinction between game birds (like ducks and ruffled grouse), which were hard to drop, and songbirds (like robins and mockingbirds), which were easy to shoot on the wing but not dinner table fare.

  Certain bird species—herons, terns, and ibises, for example—mesmerized Roosevelt. As president, he insisted that killing one of these Florida exotics was a federal crime. And although he wasn’t an expert on brown pelicans, he had carefully studied the freshwater white pelicans of North Dakota and Minnesota, who left their lakes near the Canadian border and migrated to the Indian River region in Florida like clockwork every autumn. Although T.R. had never been to Pelican Island, a teeming bird rookery, he had read a great deal about the place, thanks to Chapman. Situated in a narrow lagoon located near Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast of Florida, Pelican Island, a five-and-a-half-acre dollop of shells and mangrove hammocks, was abundant with flocks of wading birds, something akin to the Galápagos Islands (in miniature) when Charles Darwin began his evolutionary studies in 1835. If Roosevelt paddled around the island he would have heard the loud murmur of bird chatter, a dozen species all singing in different keys, yet all somehow in unison, giving the Indian River rookery the distinct feel of a God-ordained sanctuary. Exuberant streams of birds actually congregated on Pelican Island like figures in a timeless dream. Great blue herons, for example, lingered for long and often hot hours, statue-still while somehow still managing to groom their breeding plumage, including ornate onyx head feathers that seductively lured a mate. Reading about the calls, stillnesses, and hesitations of these long-legged birds fascinated Roosevelt no end.

  The most prom
inent resident of Pelican Island, however, was its namesake—the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis.) Chapman had taken dozens of photographs of brown pelicans congregating there, often carrying silver-colored fish in their elongated beaks as they flew contentedly over the tumbling waters of the Indian River. Studying Chapman’s photographs in his 1900 book Bird Studies with a Camera, Roosevelt knew these funny-looking birds were of incalculably greater value alive than dead; if the brown pelican passed into extinction, Florida, he believed, would lose one of its most enchanting charms.

  Clearly, Roosevelt understood that wildlife had a sacred order and pelicans were part of this grand design or teleology. For more than 2 million years, by adapting to changed circumstances, prowling for fish by turning downwind, half-folding their wings and then almost belly-flopping into brackish or saline water, they had avoided extinction. With their huge heads submerged, the brown pelicans’ narrow beaks—the attached pouches serving as a dip net—scooped fish amid swarms of mosquitoes and midges in Florida’s glassy lagoons.19 For all their innate awkwardness, these playful birds were actually very efficient hunters. By dive-bombing for mullets from as high as fifty or sixty feet in the air, a healthy brown pelican could consume up to seven pounds of fish per day. Their daily hunting range was a radius of about fifty to sixty miles. And it wasn’t just the frenetic avian activity of pelicans, egrets, ibises, and roseate spoonbills on Pelican Island that Roosevelt embraced as a biological hymnal. He studied the state’s weather and its terrain, and kept records of its climate. He loved every little thing that grew in wild Florida, studying the beach mice, the green anoles, the gopher tortoises, the ants, the sea turtles, and the osprey, all with biological sympathy.

  Ornithologists like Chapman who journeyed to wild Florida in the 1880s learned to love the shimmering wild egrets and elegant spoonbills that populated the rookeries, but only the brown pelicans made them laugh out loud. These were the clowns of the bird world. Their combination of short legs, long necks, and four webbed toes (which enhanced their swimming ability) made them seem clumsy. Because their bodies were so heavy, takeoff was something of a burlesque act. More than a few bird students (like Roosevelt) noted that when a pelican flew solo—which was often—it left an indelible impression. At times the pelicans resembled helium balloons with bricks attached to their feet, frantically flapping to get airborne, seemingly feverish with fatigue, desperate to defy the law of gravity. Nevertheless, they always managed to lift off.