The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Underlying President Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and other birds was a staunch belief in the healing powers of nature. That he had a mighty strong Thoreaurian “back to nature” aesthetic strain coursing through his veins becomes evident when we read his voluminous correspondence with Chapman, Hornaday, and other leading naturalists of his day, including John Burroughs, William Dutcher, George Bird Grinnell, John Muir, and Fairfield Osborn. Through a combination of book learning and field observations, Roosevelt had a keen sense of the importance of what would come to be known as biological diversity and deep ecology. His appreciation of the beauty of nongame birds like pelicans imbued him with a stout resoluteness to protect these endangered avians. To him the destruction of pelicans—and other nongame birds—was emblematic of industrialization run amok. In fact, with the exception of his family, birds probably touched him more deeply than anything else in his life.

  Starting after the Civil War, Americans were faced with the revolutionary impact of Darwinism: everybody, it seemed, weighed in for or against evolutionary theory. To Roosevelt, who read the revolutionary On the Origin of Species as a young teenager, Charles Darwin was practically a god, the Isaac Newton of biology. Besides being an excellent scientist, Darwin was a fantastic imaginative writer who had wandered the world far and wide. Because of his intense interest in Darwin, naturalist studies became Roosevelt’s guiding principle. Only the Hebrew scriptures had a more profound impact on human societies than On the Origin of Species.20 Although there was a Creator, Roosevelt believed, the natural world was a series of accidents. Yet he also held a romantic view of the planet, a belief that Homo sapiens had a sacred obligation to protect its natural wonders and diverse species. He believed every American needed to get acquainted with mountains, deserts, rivers, and seas. One ethereal experience with nature, he believed, made the world whole and God’s omnipotence indisputable. “Roosevelt,” the historian John Morton Blum concluded, accepted the Darwinian belief in “evolution through struggle as an axiom in all his thinking. Life, for him, was strife.”21

  II

  After the Civil War, a new “gold rush” throughout America fomented the massacring of wildlife for profit and sport. Game laws were practically nonexistent in much of the interior west and south of the Mason-Dixon line up until the 1890s. Roosevelt was repulsed by firsthand dispatches he received about the abominable eradication of species throughout America. The glorious bison (once somewhere around thirty million to forty million strong) were nearly exterminated from the Great Plains, and jaguars along the Rio Grande simply disappeared into the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Pronghorn antelope could no longer outrun the market hunters and ranchers. The colorful Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) and the ubiquitous passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) were about to vanish forever. So was the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). It was already too late for the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) and the Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius)—both species had been permanently eliminated from the planet.22 Using satire to open resistant minds to the conservation crusade, William T. Hornaday’s prophetic Our Vanishing Wild Life featured an illustration of a tombstone with “Sacred” carved on top and “Exterminated by Civilized Man 1840–1910” on the bottom. Scrolling downward on the tombstone, Hornaday listed birds made extinct by the epic brutality of humans—the Eskimo curlew, Gosse’s macaw, and purple Guadalupe parakeet among them.23

  By the turn of the twentieth century the situation in Florida was particularly acute. Once deemed a vast swamp of little value, the state was experiencing a boom due to the fashion trendiness of its birds—especially their feathers. Ironically, the Florida birds’ splendid display of colorful plumes—nature’s design to draw female birds into a mating ritual—had done its job too well: upper-class women of the “gilded age” were drawn to the male bird’s fanciful plumage and it became the rage to adorn their hats with the beguiling feathers. As a result plume hunters poured into the state, guns in hand, determined to bag wading birds for the exotic feathers then in high demand. A pound of roseate spoonbill or great white heron wings, for example, was worth more than a pound of gold. For unrepentant old Confederates and lowlifes on the lam, wild Florida’s vast thickets and tangled vegetation offered not only a haven but also a source of easy income. Along the banks of Florida’s coastal rivers, the pallid shine of oil-wick lamps was a common sight. It emanated from plumer camps, where hunters were poised to gun down nongame birds for the New York millinery industry, which paid handsome sums for pallets of feathers.24

  Most Florida plume-hunters were uneducated country bumpkins hired as day laborers. A lone plumer working the shallow pools along the Atlantic Ocean could collect 10,000 skins in a single season. A full-sized egret could yield fifty suitable ornamental feathers. Besides skinning the curlews, plovers, and turnstones, the hunters would put the carcasses on ice and ship them to New York by the barrel, where they were considered delicious “bird dishes” in some fine Manhattan restaurants.25 Still, the real dollars came from the fashion industry. White feathers, particularly those of the American egret (known today as the great egret) and the snowy egret, were the most coveted plumage of all. Although the pink feathers of flamingos (stragglers from the Bahamas) and roseate spoonbills were in high demand as trimming, their plumage started to fade away to an anemic pink after a year or two. The egrets’ white feathers epitomized decorative elegance and high status. The demand for beautifully adorned hats fueled an entire industry. By 1900 millinery companies employed around 83,000 Americans, mainly women, to trim bonnets and make sprays of feathers known as aigrettes.26

  Although feathers had been used to adorn men and women for centuries, both in the courts of Europe and among indigenous peoples around the world, the garish gilded age took them to a new level of popularity.27 The demand was advanced, in large part, by the proliferation of women’s fashion magazines, where exotic feathers were shown adorning gowns, capes, and parasols. “The desire to be fashionable led scores of thousands of women to milliners for something eye-catching and elegant,” the historian Robin Doughty wrote in Feathers and Bird Protection. “If plumes were costly looking, then ladies demanded them by the crateload, and the elegant trimmings pictured regularly in journals meant that bird populations all over the world fell under the gun.”28 Low-gauge shotguns were the weapon of choice. But starting around 1880, the introduction of semiautomatic rifles—although these were only sporadically used—made wholesale slaughter of wading birds much easier.29

  By 1886, when George Bird Grinnell founded the Audubon Society, more than 5 million birds were being massacred yearly to satisfy the booming North American millinery trade. Along Manhattan’s Ladies’ Mile—the principal shopping district, centered on Broadway and Twenty-Third Street—retail stores sold the feathers of snowy egrets, white ibises, and great blue herons. Dense bird colonies were being wiped out in Florida so that women of the “private carriage crowd” could make a fashion statement by shopping for aigrettes. Some women even wanted a stuffed owl head on their bonnets and a full hummingbird wrapped in bejeweled vegetation as a brooch. However, others were aghast at ostentatious displays of feathered hats and jewelry. Led by many of the same women who were agitating for the right to vote, a backlash movement to banish ornamental feathers was under way. The fashion pendulum was slowly swinging away from using birds for exhibitionism. Extravagant birds’ rights tenets and oaths were being advocated by many leading U.S. women suffragists, who took their lead from Queen Victoria, who had issued a public proclamation denouncing ornamental feathers in Great Britain.30

  Terrified by the genocide of birds, Frank Chapman, the leading popular ornithologist in America, began delivering a lecture titled “Woman as a Bird Enemy” around New York. He hoped to shame women into abandoning their cruel fashion statements.31 Convinced that an inventory of Florida’s birds was of paramount importance, he also organized the first Christmas bird count; it quickly grew into the largest volunteer wildlife census in
the world. Before long more than 2,000 Floridians began participating in bird counts during an annual three-week period around Christmas.32

  Early in 1903, the tireless Chapman knew that Theodore Roosevelt, now the president of the United States, remained a “born bird-lover.”33 As governor of New York, T.R. delivered a bold speech on avian rights and cheered on the Lacey Act (landmark legislation passed by Congress on May 25, 1900, to protect birds from illegal interstate commerce). As President William McKinley’s vice president, Roosevelt issued an unequivocal statement endorsing the eighteen state Audubon societies in the United States: “The Audubon Society, which has done far more than any other single agency in creating and fostering an enlightened public sentiment for the preservation of our useful and attractive birds, is [an organization] consisting of men and women who in these matters look further ahead than their fellows, and who have the precious gift of sympathetic imagination, so that they are able to see, and wish to preserve for their children’s children, the beauty and wonder of nature.”34

  Once Roosevelt became president, under his initiative, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had already publicly supported the various Audubon societies, and in its Yearbook 1902 it pleaded with farmers and hunters to leave nongame birds alone.35 With the future of Pelican Island in the balance, the bird population about to be wiped out, Chapman understood that the time to seek President Roosevelt’s support on banning the bird slaughter there was now. If the dollop of land was not declared a USDA reservation, it would soon be a dead zone like the ground-down New Jersey Flats.

  III

  In early March 1903 President Roosevelt was mired at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. trying to push forward an anti-anarchy bill and was meeting with newly elected U.S. senators (from Idaho, Kentucky, Washington, and Utah) at the White House. Nevertheless, he still made time for his ornithologist friends. William Dutcher updated T.R. on the status of lighthouse keepers employed by the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) in Key West and the Dry Tortugas (seven islands located seventy miles off the mainland in the Straits of Florida) to protect nesting roosts. The bird-lovers also swapped stories about the health and well-being of their various friends in the Florida Audubon Society, an organization of which Roosevelt happened to be an honorary founder.36 (Dutcher himself would soon become the first president of the new National Association of Audubon Societies.*)

  The gregarious president liked showing off his extensive knowledge about the state’s ecosystem, which included varied habitats like sea grass beds, salt marshes, and tree hammocks. Roosevelt’s library had a half-shelf of books about Florida’s wildlife. During the Spanish-American War he had been stationed at Tampa Bay waiting to be dispatched to Cuba. His Uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, his father’s brother, a famous mid-nineteenth-century naturalist, had written a landmark ornithological book in 1884, Florida and the Game Water-Birds of the Atlantic Coast and the Lakes of the United States. (It was Uncle Rob who taught Theodore about the importance of what is now called ecology.) At the time T.R. was forty-four years old. He was stocky, with piercing blue eyes. His rimless spectacles and robust mustache dominated a remarkably unlined face. He spoke in clipped sentences, often making hand gestures and grimaces to underscore a point. This was followed by a hearty chuckle that bellowed up from his very depths. Emphatic and worldly in manner, a tireless optimist with thousands of enthusiasms to juggle, in Rudyard Kipling’s terminology Roosevelt—who liked to be called the Colonel, in recognition of his service in the Spanish-American War—was quite simply a “first-class fighting man.” The journalist William Allen White perhaps summed up Roosevelt’s gregarious personality best: “There was no twilight and evening star for him,” White wrote. “He plunged headlong snorting into the breakers of the tide that swept him to another bourne, full armed breasting the waves, a strong swimmer undaunted.”37

  As expected, Roosevelt assured both visitors that of course he cared a great deal about the fate of Florida’s brown pelican, egrets, ibises, and roseate spoonbills. He always had, since childhood. He had, in fact, recently read Chapman’s Bird Studies with a Camera and loved the vivid chapter on Pelican Island. Chapman and Dutcher couldn’t have had a more receptive audience that March afternoon in Washington.

  The American Ornithologists Union had been trying to purchase Pelican Island outright from the federal government for three years, to no avail. That winter, members of the AOU finally had a constructive meeting with William A. Richards, the Department of the Interior’s new General Land Office (GLO) commissioner.38 Dutcher, acting as chair of the AOU’s committee on bird protection, along with Frank Bond, explained their quandary to Richards (a nononsense former governor of Wyoming). For years AOU had demanded that Pelican Island be surveyed—a prerequisite for placing a purchase bid on it. Now, with the official 1902 survey about to be filed, AOU felt boxed in. Legally, homesteaders’ applications had to be given preference when GLO land was sold. With homestead filings imminent, the AOU’s application would be shunned or given a low priority. And that meant the brown pelicans might not survive as a species on the Atlantic coast.

  A hunter and conservationist himself, Richards wanted to help AOU, and he summoned Charles L. DuBois, his chief of the Public Surveys Division, into the meeting. Was there an ingenious way to circumvent the homesteaders-first provision? DuBois, a jurist who always dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, at first said no. But he offered Dutcher and Bond one long-shot alternative. President Roosevelt could make Pelican Island a bird refuge by issuing an Executive Order. Worried that a firestorm would ensue if the U.S. Department of the Interior seemed to be in collusion with AOU, DuBois instead suggested pushing the Executive Order through the USDA, where it would go virtually unnoticed in the Biological Survey Division headed by Dr. C. Hart Merriam.

  Now that the AOU had a credible, legal way to protect Pelican Island, Dutcher wrote to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson asking that a federal bird reservation be created. A stamp on the top corner shows that the secretary received it on February 27. Immediately using Frank M. Chapman as his conduit, Dutcher pushed for a meeting with the president about Pelican Island. Time was of the essence. With minimal difficulty Chapman procured a White House meeting that March.39

  After listening attentively to their description of Pelican Island’s quandary, and sickened by the update on the plumers’ slaughter for millinery ornaments, Roosevelt asked, “Is there any law that will prevent me from declaring Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation?” The answer was a decided “No” the island, after all, was federal property. “Very well then,” Roosevelt said with marvelous quickness. “I So Declare It.”40

  For the first time in history the U.S. government had set aside hallowed, timeless land for what became the first unit of the present U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Refuge System. History teaches that a zeitgeist sometimes develops around a fountainhead figure, that sometimes a transforming agent—in this case President Theodore Roosevelt—serves as an uplifting impetus for a new wave of collective thinking. Building on a growing ardor for federal intervention into the regulation of the private sector, Roosevelt’s “I So Declare It” was in line with the legacies of all the Republican presidents since Lincoln. The Union victory in the Civil War, in fact, meant that the U.S. federal government had emerged as the principal proponent of national reform movements like conservation.

  Recognizing the need for scientific wildlife and land management, every U.S. president in the gilded age considered himself conservationist-minded to some limited degree: certainly Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley did. Each, in fact, had landmark “forest reserves” accomplishments in his portfolio to showcase for history. Yet they all lacked long-term vision, concerned instead with only the forestry issues and water-shortage emergencies of the moment. But Roosevelt was vastly different; nature was his rock and salvation. Refusing to be hemmed in by the orthodoxies of his time, he burst onto the national stage—first as civil service co
mmissioner and governor and vice president and then as president—promoting the Gospel of Wilderness. Bridging the gap as a naturalist-hunter, he deemed songbirds liberators of the soul and bison herds incalculably valuable to the collective psyche of the nation. Even though local communities across the American West complained about federal land grabs, Roosevelt insisted he was preserving wilderness for their own good, for the sake of the American heritage.

  With nationalistic optimism, Roosevelt’s patriotic summons essentially called for deranking the Louvre, Westminster Abbey, and the Taj Mahal as world heritage sites. The United States had far more spectacular natural wonders than these worn and tired man-made spectacles: it had the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, the Petrified Forest, Key West, the Farralon Islands, the Tongass, Devils Tower, and the Bighorns. American bird flocks, he insisted, were far more glorious than those found in the steppes and forests of staid Old Europe. The implicit assumption was that Roosevelt’s utter love of “American Wilderness” always had a heavy component of raw nationalism. When asked as ex-president in 1918 why he loved wildlife so much, Roosevelt had a characteristically direct yet unreflective answer: “I can no more explain why I like natural history,” he said, “than why I like California canned peaches.”41