The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Within two or three weeks Roosevelt had transformed his Winthrop Street quarters into a virtual vivarium. Mounted birds cluttered his desk and a well-used portfolio of Audubon’s Birds of America was placed on his shelf like an old friend, soothing and familiar. Stuffed owls, deer antlers, bottles of formaldehyde, arsenic paste, wren’s nests, and colorful eggs abounded—and those were just the inanimate objects. Roosevelt was like a golden retriever; you never knew, when he entered 16 Winthrop Street, whether he would be carrying a wounded squirrel or a kicking rabbit. Then there were the live finches and tadpoles, mice litters, and a formicary. One evening, his landlady—a Mrs. Richardson—nearly tripped over one of his escaped turtles; her face turned white with fright. Even though Roosevelt’s rent money was good, the notion of having a philotherian tenant made her uneasy.22

  Having untamed animals running around indoors marked young Theodore as an eccentric at Harvard. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since singularity had its time-honored virtues. After all, Cambridge was replete with brilliant characters. Oliver Wendell Holmes scouted the out-door bookstalls for rare editions, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could be seen strolling down Brattle Street window-shopping for elegant canes. The great historian Francis Parkman was sometimes found in the library working on Montcalm and Wolfe, and Charles Francis Adams served as university “overseer.” Charles Darwin’s chief American supporter, the botanist Asa Gray, was no longer teaching at Harvard, but he lived near the campus and was available to answer questions about evolution if any student knocked on his front door. Ralph Waldo Emerson was spied from time to time poking around the campus. (His remark “Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors” always appealed to Roosevelt’s bare-knuckled Darwinian sensibility.23) Being different brooked no condensation at Harvard if you were intellectually astute.24

  While other freshmen were enthralled that William James and George Santayana were on the Harvard faculty, Roosevelt bemoaned the fact that professor Louis Agassiz—who, like Uncle Rob, had published a landmark book on Lake Superior—had died three years before. During the last year of his life Agassiz—founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which soon rivaled its counterparts in London and Paris—traveled to Brazil as an ichthyologist, participated in a deep-sea dredging project sponsored by the U.S. Coast Survey, and founded the Anderson School of Natural History at Penikese Island off the southern coast of Massachusetts. “Study nature, not books” was Agassiz’s dictum. Clearly Roosevelt would have had a lot to learn from the charismatic zoologist, even though Agassiz had been an antievolutionist to the bitter end. One got the feeling Roosevelt had wanted to challenge Agassiz in class over the accuracy of On the Origin of Species. (The old-fashioned Agassiz had fought against having evolution as part of the museum.25)

  Perhaps because Roosevelt was autodidact, he wasn’t inspired by any of the geology or zoology professors at Harvard. This attitude caused some classmates to consider Roosevelt a presumptuous snob, and it caused some of the faculty to write him off as lazy and pedantic. These professors weren’t pathfinders or explorers like Audubon or Darwin, and their lectures, without trailblazing deeds, did little to stir the imagination. Microscopes and laboratory garb didn’t interest Roosevelt in the least; the mastodon in Boylston Hall certainly did. A slightly above-average student, earning a cumulative seventy-five in his freshman year and an eighty-two as a sophomore, Roosevelt struggled most with foreign languages.26 Nevertheless, he excelled in German, perhaps because he had lived with a German family in Dresden. Still, he extolled the virtues of Americanism every chance he could, and a slow-burning resentment toward European claims of intellectual superiority was detectable in his letters and diaries. He lampooned the smallness of England and the boorishness of Germany (although the primitive Volk-moot of the ancient German forests always interested him). Perhaps because they were predominately of Dutch ancestry, the Roosevelts often blamed Germany for the worst influences on American life. For example, in his novel Five Acres Too Much (1869), Robert B. Roosevelt complained that Staten Island was “overrun by sour-kraut-eating, lager-beer-drinking, and small-bird-shooting Germans, who trespass with Teutonic determination wherever their notions of sportsmanship or the influence of lager leads them.”27

  As for natural history, his major, Roosevelt’s excellence became legendary. However, the example of his faculty adviser, Professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, turned Roosevelt off even more from the idea of becoming a scientific naturalist. Ostensibly, Roosevelt should have liked Shaler, who was a prized student of Agassiz and who specialized in the study of what were then called earth sciences. Serving as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War, Shaler fought nobly; he returned to Harvard as a twenty-seven-year-old professor of zoology and geology in 1865 and would stay at Harvard the rest of his life. By the time Roosevelt arrived to take his Introduction to Geology course in 1876, Professor Shaler had made Harvard the center of American geological research, and his The First Book of Geology was considered a new classic in the field.28 Training students in how to biologically observe natural selection was a specialty of Shaler’s; he was one of the first Americans to adopt Darwin’s specimen collection methods.29

  But for a young man who’d already shot plovers in the Middle East (as well as the Adirondacks), and was the son of a New York millionaire, Shaler’s explanations about shifting tectonic plates and paleontology seemed dull; the professor might be a young Turk, but he had abandoned nature’s awesome drama, Roosevelt believed, by an overreliance on arcane theories about ancient dirt and meteorite rock. It was naive of Roosevelt to think that naturalists were buckskin-clad outdoorsmen like Audubon or Wilson, spending their lives in the wild. To Roosevelt, Shaler was a pedant who talked about how the mechanisms of evolution still needed to be ironed out instead of hitting the trail on a treasure hunt. Roosevelt wanted to learn about types of skunks, not faux erudition from a self-conscious Kentuckian struggling to become a prig, poor man. Theodore challenged his professor regularly, until they squared off one afternoon. “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk,” an exasperated Shaler stated. “I’m running this course.”30

  Roosevelt whizzed his way through a slate of courses in the natural history department: Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, Elementary Botany, Physical Geography and Meteorology, Geology, and Elementary and Advanced Zoology.31 And in truth, even though Roosevelt refused to give him any credit, Shaler was an inspirational teacher, known for taking students on geology field trips in the tradition of his mentor, Agassiz. Roosevelt, in fact, went on an excursion with Professor Shaler to study glacially formed cliffs. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, in a swipe at Shaler, lamented that Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, had failed to hire a first-rate “faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist, and observer of nature.”32 Yet Eliot believed T.R. and Shaler were two peas-in-a-pod, regardless of intellectual differences.33 Likewise, Roosevelt would convey to Gifford Pinchot that no matter what their squabbles had been, Shaler, in fact, was “a very dear friend of mine.”34

  Despite his apparent eccentricities, Theodore was popular with and respected by his classmates. Nobody ever questioned his bedrock honesty or inbred decency. Years later, Richard Welling—in an article in American Legion Monthly—revealed perhaps the strangest personality trait of Roosevelt at Harvard. Whenever Roosevelt was performing gymnastics indoors—doing somersaults, skipping rope, or doing pull-ups—he acted hesitant and clumsy. His caution and trepidation were evident. As Welling bluntly put it, Roosevelt was “verily a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development.” But when Welling went ice-skating with Roosevelt at Fresh Pond—a kettle-hole lake that served as a reservoir for Cambridge—with the wind-chill factor around zero, the brutal cold would send everybody else home shivering, but Theodore would get an adrenaline rush, shouting, “Isn’t this bully!” He had no fear of frostbite or pneumonia.* This was unusual behavior. Welling realized his friend was overcompensating for something. Nature at its mo
st brutal flipped some switch of fortitude in Roosevelt’s peculiar makeup. “Roosevelt had neither health or muscle,” Welling concluded. “But he had a superabundance of a third quality, vitality, and he seemed to realize that this nervous vitality had been given in order to help him get the other two things.”35

  Detachment might be the best word to characterize Roosevelt’s measured indifference to Harvard in 1876 and 1877. Even though his grades were good, he didn’t buy into all of the traditional aspects of undergraduate life as one would have expected. Regularly he would send his father updates from Cambridge, describing in detail his asthma flare-ups and his prayer sessions at the local church. There were soirees at Chestnut Hill and Beacon Hill to report, usually with reassurances that his morals were intact, but his reportage from Harvard seemed contrived. It was his two touchstone places—Oyster Bay and the Adirondacks—that continued to arouse his enthusiasm. And he thought a lot about Maine.

  III

  Ever since Frederick Osborn had drowned in the Hudson River, a void had existed in Roosevelt’s life. He needed a close chum to share his enthusiasm for ornithology, someone with whom to prowl his favorite hunting grounds come summer break. Now, as a Harvard freshman, he found such a friend in Henry “Hal” Davis Minot of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Hal, a lanky young man with piercing blue-gray eyes and a thin brown beard, had already written a booklet: The Land and Game Birds of New England would be published the following spring. Together Theodore and Hal hatched plans to spend the next summer collecting warblers and thrushes. “Our lessons will be over by the twentieth of June,” Roosevelt excitedly wrote to his parents from Harvard, “and then Henry Minot and I intend leaving immediately for the Adirondacks, so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible, and in two or three weeks we will get down to Oyster Bay, where I should like to have him spend a few days with us. He is a very quiet fellow, and would not be the least trouble.”36

  Haunted by his humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt—to improve his physique—boxed regularly during his freshman year. He learned how to throw a pretty good one-two punch, but his eyesight was terrible and he was never light on his feet. What made him quite remarkable in the ring, however, was his godawful ability to take a thrashing, to be pummeled unmercifully but still come back for more. This wasn’t a recipe for winning matches, but it did win the respect of his classmates. Clearly, Roosevelt had a genius for pushing the limits. Instead of hopping onto a streetcar to downtown Boston as most of his classmates would do, Roosevelt often chose to walk the three or four miles. As an oarsman, Roosevelt preferred rowing when a heavy nor’easter kicked up, seeking the challenge of advancing forward in rivers and lakes when the wind was least favorable.

  As planned, during the summer of 1877—between his freshman and sophomore years—Roosevelt spent weeks camping in the Adirondacks with Minot. Because Edith had been excited about spending time with Theodore at Oyster Bay, the news that birds came first may have bruised her feelings. As the historian Edmund Morris joked in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edith “could compete with the belles of Boston, but what were her charms compared with those of the Orange-Throated Warbler, the Red-Bellied Nuthatch, and the Hairy Woodpecker?”37 As soon as classes ended at Harvard on June 21, Roosevelt and Minot headed straight to Saint Regis Lake “so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible.”38 Once again Moses Sawyer served as the trusted guide through the rugged Adirondack forests, on what turned out to be the most serious bird collecting trip of Roosevelt’s life. Spurred on by his classmate, he made careful notes and pulled together his own first publication on birds: it was modeled on Minot’s The Land and Game Birds of New England, which had just been published by Estes and Lauriat (in cooperation with the Naturalist Agency of Salem, Massachusetts) to fine peer reviews. In fact, Harper’s New Monthly, which had just been launched, commended The Land and Game Birds to “all who care for out-door sights and sounds.”39

  The resulting booklet by Roosevelt, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, not much more than a broadside, was instantly the finest list on the subject in print. Although Minot was credited as coauthor, The Summer Birds was clearly Roosevelt’s accomplishment, the end product of four collecting trips to the Adirondacks. Roosevelt’s ample descriptions of nearly 100 species were based on firsthand outdoors observations. The Summer Birds, in fact, was impressive in its thoroughness. With an exacting eye, Roosevelt delineated everything from the sprightliness of juncos to the “strikingly” common on least flycatchers. With brevity he analyzed the nests of the Swainson’s thrush and Wilson’s warbler. It was clearly a work aimed at specialists—only a true-blue bird enthusiast would want such a detailed local key.

  Sticking to straightforward scientific observation, Roosevelt, perhaps fearful of being trivialized as a populizer, edited his most poetic journal writing out of The Summer Birds. Here, for example, was a journal passage from June 23, 1877, that he apparently deemed too fanciful to include in his booklet. The “we” in the following journal entry refers to Minot, Sawyer, and himself:

  Perhaps the sweetest bird music I ever listened to was uttered by a hermit thrush. It was while hunting deer on a small lake, in the heart of the wilderness; the night was dark, for the moon had not yet risen, but there were clouds…. I could distinguish dimly the outlines of the gloomy and impenetrable pine forests by which we were surrounded. We had been out for two or three hours but had seen nothing; once we heard a tree fall with a dull, heavy crash, and two or three times the harsh hooting of an owl had been answered by the unholy laughter of a loon from the bosom of the lake, but otherwise nothing had occurred to break the death-like stillness of the night; not even a breath of air stirred among the tops of the tall pine trees.40

  Theodore spent the rest of his summer rowing around Long Island, discussing birds with his father, and preparing his little book for publication. Roosevelt considered it his highest intellectual achievement to date, proof that he had learned “how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”41 By the time Roosevelt returned to Harvard in September 1877 for his sophomore year, he was ruddy-cheeked, bronzed, hardened, and strangely handsome, and his asthma was in remission. In October a few hundred copies of The Summer Birds were printed. He received accolades from scholars—an important development in enhancing his self-confidence as a naturalist. At the time bird lists for specific locations were considered very important, as national data were just starting to be collected seriously.

  No less a personage than Dr. C. Hart Merriam, in fact, a graduate of Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School, embraced Roosevelt with open arms in the April 1878 Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club (the house organ for the first organization in North America devoted to ornithology). It was the list’s accuracy that impressed Dr. Merriam, who had just published his own Birds of Connecticut. “By far the best of these recent [bird] lists which I have seen is that of The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N.Y.., by Theodore Roosevelt and H. D. Minot,” Dr. Merriam wrote. “Though not redundant with information and mentioning but 97 species, it bears prima facie evidence of reliability—which seems to be a great desideratum in birds lists nowadays.”42

  Although the down-to-earth Merriam was only three years older than Roosevelt, he was already a legend among naturalists. Born in Locust Grove, New York, on December 5, 1855, Merriam spent much of his childhood exploring the Adirondacks and hunting mammals with bow and arrow. Like Roosevelt, Merriam had put together his own wildlife museum as a boy. Hart’s mother, objecting to the stench of dead rabbits and squirrels, hired an old army surgeon to teach him taxidermy. Using corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid as his preservatives, young Merriam became something of a prodigy at his craft. In 1871 Hart’s father, a U.S. congressman from New York, playing the role of promoter and coach, took his son to meet Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Once Baird saw the boy’s work he was awestruck; every specimen of bird or mammal was perfectly embalmed. Even the mounted butterflies
and grasshoppers were first-rate. That same year Merriam struck up a correspondence with John Muir regarding glaciation in Yosemite Valley.

  Worried that he couldn’t make a living at ornithology, Merriam, whose expertise on the subject of small mammals and fauna led to an assignment by the Hayden Survey classifying animal populations in Yellowstone National Park, was a prodigy who at age seventeen collected 313 bird skins and sixty-seven nests. His resulting fifty-page report was published in 1873 to high praise from zoological circles. Merriam went on to study at Yale University’s Sheffield Science School, and then in the medical school at Columbia University. He practiced medicine in Locust Grove from 1879 to 1885, delivering many babies. Nevertheless, if you wanted to understand elk, deer, or grizzly bears, Merriam was the man to turn to.43

  With Merriam’s glowing review in the Bulletin, Roosevelt was anointed an up-and-coming naturalist of the Ivy League and was listed in the 1877 Naturalists’ Directory. He had been accepted by the fraternity of scientists as one of their own.44 The Nuttall Ornithology Club—founded as recently as 1873—had said so. That was good enough for Roosevelt. Although Merriam hadn’t yet reached fame as perhaps the top U.S. government biologist of his generation, the fact that he saluted the Harvard sophomore in such a high-minded fashion won Roosevelt over. Thereafter, he would always hold Merriam in high regard. Nobody working in the Darwinian specimen collecting circuit, Roosevelt believed, knew more about North American wildlife than Merriam. Building on Roosevelt’s Summer Birds, Merriam, in fact, in 1881 published a better “Preliminary Life of the Birds of the Adirondacks.” It was his last foray with birds before his focus shifted to mammals.