A founder of the National Geographic Society, Merriam joined the American-British fur seal commission determined to save the great herds of Alaska from extinction, in the same way that Roosevelt and Grinnell were protecting the buffalo. By the time Merriam became president of the Biological Society of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. in 1891, he was considered the greatest authority on applying Darwinian theory to American species and topography.43
Writing reports from Arizona and saving seals constituted the fun part of Merriam’s job at the Biological Survey. As an administrator he had to find ways for wildlife and humans to coexist in America. Everything from poisoning ground squirrels with barley and strychnine to promoting lime and sulfur wash to prevent rabbits from attacking orchards fell under his job description. Anxious to save the beaver from being over-hunted, Merriam became a supersalesman on behalf of muskrat fur as an alternative. Starting in 1886 he also oversaw publication of the Annual Reports of the Biological Survey. He also made sure U.S. Department of Agriculture “bulletins” were printed and disseminated all over the country.44 If you were a farmer in Mississippi or Arkansas, for example, constantly shooting raccoons as varmints, Merriam was the national voice that would say, “Not a good idea.” Raccoons fed on crayfish, which infested leveled embankments; so the raccoons were actually providing a pest-control service by destroying the potentially destructive crustaceans. Such pragmatic solutions to wildlife control are why Roosevelt respected Merriam so much. When it came to wildlife protection, Merriam was a living instruction manual.
CHAPTER NINE
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK WITH JOHN BURROUGHS AND BENJAMIN HARRISON
I
It is strange now to picture them meeting for the first time in March 1889 at the Fellowcraft Club at 32 West Twenty-Eighth Street in New York. With a membership of around 200 sophisticated newspapermen, writers, and artists, the Fellowcraft had the kind of leather-chair ambience preferred by the literary-minded aristocrats of the gilded age. The thirty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was one of the club’s younger members. Although he was preparing to move to Washington, D.C., for his new post as U.S. civil service commissioner, he nevertheless continued fulminating against the deplorable conditions in New York City’s notorious cordon of louse-infected tenement slums. No job could ever rein in his multifarious reformist interests and instincts. But Roosevelt dropped his anti-poverty crusade and his history writing on March 7 for a long-coveted opportunity to meet the naturalist John Burroughs. The date, in fact, should be noted in the annals of U.S. conservation history as the cementing of an extremely significant alliance that would last for nearly three decades. “I thought him very vigorous, alive all over, with a great variety of interests; and it was surprising how well he knew the birds and animals,” Burroughs recalled. “He’s a rare combination of the sportsman and the naturalist.”1
Roosevelt and Burroughs’s lunch reportedly came about through an intermediary. As an assemblyman, Roosevelt had gotten to know Jacob A. Riis, a Danish-born newspaperman whose How the Other Half Lives would soon awake the nation to the suffering of New York City’s immigrants. Roosevelt regularly visited a boys’ club run by the reformer and polemicist John Jay Chapman in Hell’s Kitchen with Riis, and would often give away copies of Burroughs’s compilations of essays, such as Wake-Robin and Winter Sunshine. Chapman, who was a neighbor of Burroughs, arranged to have the two birders meet for lunch at the Fellowcraft Club.2 Joining them was Elizabeth Custer, the widow of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Since her husband died at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, she’d published two western memoirs: “Boots and Saddles” or Life in Dakota with General Custer (1885) and Tenting on the Plains or General Custer in Kansas and Texas (1887). She, too, would have plenty to converse about with Roosevelt.3
Theodore Roosevelt with John Burroughs in Yellowstone National Park in 1903. The photograph was taken by Illustrated Sporting News.
T.R. and John Burroughs at Yellowstone camp. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
T.R. was always trying to engulf people up in the tidal wave of his erudition, which some interpreted as monomaniacal self-regard. As one close friend kindly put it, “He was the prism through which the light of day took on more colors than could be seen in anybody else’s company.” 4 But Burroughs was a household name—his books were mandatory reading in schoolhouses all over America—and he made Roosevelt feel inferior.5 Burroughs didn’t just tramp around the wooded countryside keeping field notes or hunting game—he was the wooded countryside personified. Unlike Roosevelt, who was constantly showing off his credentials as a naturalist, Burroughs, as if half divine, believed there was sanctity in every fallen leaf or grain of sand. (Or, as Charles Dickens wrote of a favorite character in his 1854 novel Hard Times, he was a “man who was the Bully of humility.” 6
Concerned over the post–Civil War abandonment of agrarian communities in favor of overcrowded cities, the usually benevolent Burroughs wrote stingingly against “scientific barbarism,” even calling humming factories “the devil’s laboratory.”7 Raised in the Catskill mountains, Burroughs would rub his eyes in disbelief as he surveyed the environmental degradation of New York City’s waterways. Although Burroughs never postulated a social philosophy per se, there was a sympathy for the Transcendentalists in everything he did or said. But he nevertheless admired captains of industry like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who rose from the tinker’s bench to change the world. Roosevelt, by contrast, never fully condemned industrialization—he wanted only to break up trusts and to create great American parks, forest reserves, and bird rookeries to help invigorate city dwellers and uplift their urban spirits from chronic factory smoke and industrial disease.
There were other differences between the two naturalists. Burroughs was contemplative whereas Roosevelt preferred direct action, always ready to rumble. Although both men hunted, Burroughs’s pockets didn’t always bulge with bullets. While in Wake-Robin Burroughs wrote about a deer hunt in the Adirondacks and about shooting rabbits for sport, his literary talent was better suited to promoting the joy of watching wildlife. The older Burroughs got, in fact, the more hunting bored him. To Burroughs, for example, the American Museum of Natural History was a morgue, an abominable mockery of the great web of vibrant life in the animal kingdom. “A bird shot and stuffed and botanized is no bird at all,” he later told a group of children who came to visit the museum. “And a bird described by another in cold paint is something less than you deserve. Do not go to museums but find Nature. Do not rely on schoolbooks. Have your mothers and fathers take you to the park or the seashore. Watch the sparrows circle over you, hear the gulls screech, follow the squirrel to his nest in the hollow of an old oak. Nature is nothing at all when it is twice removed. It is only real when you reach out and touch it with your hands.”8
One can be reasonably sure Roosevelt knew Burroughs’s biography from Catskills childhood to Signs and Seasons publication practically by heart at the time of their first meeting. Born in Roxbury, New York, on April 3, 1837, Burroughs was six years younger than Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. In his memoir My Boyhood, Burroughs wrote of growing up poor on his family’s farm yet being enchanted by juniper trees, gurgling streams, apple orchards, and picturesque dairy farms. “I deem it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so many other things find it good to begin life,” Burroughs wrote in My Boyhood. “Father probably tapped the sugar bush about this time or a little earlier; the blue-bird and the robin and song sparrow may have arrived that very day.”9
While he was growing up, Burroughs’s life revolved around the Roxbury harvest cycle. Enthralled by the cool sweep of the Catskills, he adopted the upstate woodlands as his own “open-air panorama.”10
By the time he was nine or ten years old, birds—of all kinds—became Burroughs’s fixation. One spring day, he later recalled, a cloud of passenger pigeons descended on a grove of beeches. The birds’ collective noise in his pasture sound
ed like a gust at sea or a tornado.11 Not long afterward—while visiting the U.S. Military Academy at West Point—Burroughs, who had started to style himself as a backwoods ornithologist, dipped into a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America in the library and couldn’t put it down.12 The beauty of Audubon’s flamingos and wild ganders was beyond stimulating. (Years later, in 1902, while Theodore Roosevelt was president, Burroughs wrote a biography of Audubon. Its purpose was to restore Audubon’s place as the premier American literary naturalist by virtue of his voluminous journals.13) Yet Burroughs noticed that Audubon had also written a ghastly essay on how farmers were slaughtering passenger pigeons by setting tree traps and filling water pots with sulfur. How much more beautiful was the cooing of live passenger pigeons than the heaps of dead birds local farmers used to feed hogs!
To earn a living, Burroughs decided to be a rural schoolmaster. He worked first in New Jersey, not far from the Atlantic coast. When he was twenty years old he traveled to Chicago and had his daguerreotype taken; it shows a rare handsomeness. His longish hair was slicked back, and his straightforward gaze suggested deep wisdom. But Burroughs was always most comfortable in rural settings. Whenever he found himself in New York or Chicago, he would clutch his wallet, worried that pickpockets might spot him as an easy mark. Struggling to find steady work, Burroughs moved to Washington, D.C., in 1862, during the height of the Civil War, and clerked in the Currency Bureau of the Treasury Department. Before long he was befriended by the poet Walt Whitman, who was also living in Washington.
It’s unclear whether Whitman fell in love with Burroughs’s physical beauty or with his rural innocence (or both) in the fall of 1863, but he did fall in love. (There is, however, no evidence of a sexual encounter between them.) To Whitman, his twenty-six-year-old protégé was like an only son; also, Burroughs was an open-hearted romantic with an unjaded face like “a field of wheat.” Mentoring young men like Burroughs came easily to Whitman. He had come to Washington to help nurse the 70,000 Union and Confederate soldiers wounded in action and recuperating in poorly run, unsanitary hospitals. Under Whitman’s tutelage, Burroughs started writing about nature in a more intimate way, perfecting his literary craft as a prose stylist when he was not working at his desk in the Treasury Department. There was a refreshing hominess to Burroughs’s essays about bullfrogs, maple syrup, and trout spawning. As Burroughs explained, his privileged education under Whitman—who was meticulously working on his cycle of war poems Drum Taps when they met—led him to try to “liberate the birds from the scientists.” Unlike Roosevelt, Burroughs wasn’t overly interested in John James Audubon, the hunter and taxidermist extraordinaire, carting around arsenic paste and a shotgun. But Burroughs did want to become a writer about green spaces who would be celebrated as the “Audubon of prose.”14
For the most part Burroughs spent 1863 to 1873 in Washington, D.C., writing outdoors prose. His friendship with Whitman grew and grew; the gray-bearded poet calling the Catskills writer his own personal “naturalist-in-residence” who felt empathy even for quick-breeding insects. To Burroughs, Whitman’s controversial Leaves of Grass was “an utterance from Nature, and opposite to modern literature, which is an utterance from Art.”15 When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Whitman—who used to cher confrère with Lincoln whenever they passed on the street—mourned like a grieving widow. The great Lincoln, Whitman moaned, had been stolen away in his prime.16
Just before the assassination, Burroughs had hiked up Batavia Mountain in the Catskills seeking an afternoon of solitude. Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, he was suddenly mesmerized by the long, ethereal, flutelike song of a hermit thrush. The sounds of this bird held Burroughs transfixed, as if in a dream, for ten or fifteen minutes. Craning his neck high and low, looking up in tree branches and along the ground where the songster might have been foraging, Burroughs struck out. There would be no sighting of a hermit thrush that afternoon. All he took away was a comforting memory of the delicate ringing melody. Upon hearing Burroughs talk effusively about the hermit thrush, Whitman wrote his celebrated eulogy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” One verse went as follows:
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat.17
While Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass, Burroughs became his cheerleader, comparing him to Thoreau and Emerson. Encouraged by Whitman, confident that Leaves of Grass was the great American masterpiece, the very embodiment of democracy in verse, Burroughs wrote his own first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person.18 Whitman himself helped edit the manuscript, rearranging quotations and sentences. Walks through Washington’s parks now became commonplace for the two nature lovers, who often strolled through the White House gardens or Rock Creek Park in search of a veery thrush or ruby-crowned kinglet.19 And Whitman was the one who chose Wake-Robin—the trillium found in American woods—as a title for Burroughs’s second book. “He thinks natural history, to be true to life, must be inspired, as well as poetry,” Burroughs wrote of Whitman, following one of their hikes. “The true poet and true scientist are close akin. They go forth into nature like friends…. The interests of the two in nature are widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile.”20 Whitman’s belief in the special connection between science and poetry was shared by Roosevelt.
As an ice-breaker at the Fellowcraft lunch, Roosevelt had told Burroughs about his European honeymoon with Edith and how Burroughs’s nature books—especially Birds and Poets and Locusts and Wild Honey—made him long terribly for the United States. Roosevelt added that Burroughs’s prose was “thoroughly American.” Their talk shifted to the reform work Roosevelt was doing to help impoverished New York City boys; Roosevelt told Burroughs that, like Santa Claus, he regularly handed out mint copies of Wake-Robin as gifts, instructing the recipients to read every page carefully, for it embodied “all that was good and important in life.”21
Perhaps somewhat embarrassed, Burroughs feigned mild disbelief at the anecdote, certain that his musings about plovers and blackbirds couldn’t uplift ghetto boys who panhandled for stale bread and rotten fruit in the Bowery. But he was pleased that the nephew of Robert B. Roosevelt thought so highly of his work. Totally uncynical, seldom if ever putting anybody down with a jolt of criticism, Burroughs decided that he liked the cut of Roosevelt’s jib. (Essentially, Burroughs felt about Roosevelt as he did about a Catskills neighbor: “That man hasn’t a lazy bone in his body. But I have lots of ’em”—lots of ’em”22). After lunch, on the train ride back to the Hudson River valley, as Burroughs passed stops in Tarrytown, Cold Spring, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, and Hyde Park,* he wrote about his luncheon with Roosevelt, musing on how much luckier rural children like his own son, Julian, were than the urban poor. “How different is the life of Julian,” he wrote, “in the country with fresh air, good books, and parents with a measure of leisure—from that of the boys that Chapman and Roosevelt want so much to help.”23
While Burroughs simply thought of the lunch as enjoyable, Roosevelt had been deeply impressed. Burroughs, he was now certain, was the Thoreau of his time, perhaps the finest literary naturalist America had ever produced. Frequently when fans meet a writer or artist they admire, encountering the celebrity in person is a terrible disappointment. The exact opposite occurred at the Fellowcraft Club; the upshot of the lunch was that Roosevelt was now indissolubly linked to Burroughs. Not since his father died, in fact, had Roosevelt seen such Homeric dimensions in anyone as in John Burroughs. When Roosevelt started writing the last book of his North Dakota trilogy, The Wilderness Hunter, his style became infused with Burroughs’s naturalist writing. Unlike his previous two Dakota volumes, The Wilderness Hunter would emphasize the wildlife-sportsman ethos over even the best-honed hunting yarns.
II
Another factor that contributed to this change of emphasis in Roosevelt’s writings was his move to Washington, D.C.
, to assume his new duties as a member of the Civil Service Commission. Theodore and Edith had decided that she and the children (a second son, Kermit, was born in October 1889) would at first remain at Sagamore Hill while he lived rent-free at Cabot and Nannie Lodge’s residence in Washington.24 An insomniac Roosevelt usually slept only four or five hours a night, so he figured that, after his desk job, there would be plenty of spare time to continue writing The Wilderness Hunter and start in earnest to write The Winning of the West (his history as mural). Everything was either handwritten or dictated to a stenographer—typing never appealed to him. Every waking hour was a whirlwind of activity. “He was a live wire,” Burroughs noted about T.R. in his journal, “if there ever was one in human form.”25 (On another occasion Burroughs said Roosevelt was “a many-sided man and every side was like an electric battery.”26) Roosevelt himself wrote in Ranch Life, “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough”—a fitting observation that David McCullough used as the epigraph of Mornings on Horseback.27
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