The Wilderness Warrior
Page 38
The rational explanation lies in Roosevelt’s belief that it was only proper to treat a defeated people with dignity. A true nineteenth-century gentleman, he put his faith in the hope that education, assimilation, and the example of white Americans would improve Native Americans’ lot in the near future. In fact, he envisioned the day when high-quality men like Luther Standing Bear and Few Trails would dine in the White House. Regardless of which side was the real Roosevelt, his ideas intersected in a singular way: he consistently saw the Indians’ future in North America in stark Darwinian terms. Once U.S. federal government graft, skimming, and unconstitutional injustice were removed from the reservations, Roosevelt argued, it would be up to individual Indian tribes to survive. He had high hopes for the Cherokee and Pawnee, less so for the Sioux. “We must turn them loose,” Roosevelt wrote in one report, “hardening our hearts to the fact that many will sink, exactly as many will swim.”84
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BRONX ZOO FOUNDER
I
In the autumn of 1894, Roosevelt began collaborating with Madison Grant, a lawyer and explorer, on the creation of the New York Zoological Society. With his waxed handlebar mustache, Yale pride, penchant for bow-ties, and habit of always talking with his hands clasped as if in prayer, Grant was a preeminent figure in the world of zoology, credited with discovering several North American subspecies of mammals (a species of Alaska caribou was named Bangifer granti in his honor).1 That very year he had written for Century an article entitled “The Vanishing Moose,” which Roosevelt loved.2 Now both wildlife protectionists would turn their attention to the vanishing buffalo as part of their ambitious scheme for a new American zoo.3
This zoo would be situated in the Bronx, then a rural section of New York City. Roosevelt and Grant had been disappointed by the European zoos they visited. Little educational information was disseminated to visitors about species variation or habitat, and most zoological parks emphasized the freakishness and oddity of their collections. Such come-ons as a six-legged deer in Berlin and a two-headed turtle in London sickened Roosevelt. Worse yet, the animals in European zoos paced back and forth in tiny cages, like prisoners waiting for the end of a lifetime sentence. This kind of backward zookeeping had to end. As Roosevelt envisioned it, their modern New York zoo would be built “on lines entirely divergent from the Old World zoological gardens.”4 The animals would have more room, in open-air exhibits where possible, and broadsheets would be created specifically for schoolchildren explaining the principles behind wildlife preservation and Darwinian evolution. And while the Bronx Zoo wasn’t as showy as a production by P. T. Barnum or Buffalo Bill, the Chicago Exposition had taught Roosevelt to think outside the box when it came to devising a tourist attraction that would bring throngs to see wildlife up close. A subway stop, in fact, was slated to open at the southeastern entrance to the zoological park.
In planning this zoo, Roosevelt and Grant included a singularly ambitious goal: they would breed buffalo in captivity there and eventually would turn them loose throughout the Great Plains and upper Rocky Mountain region. This so-called New York repopulation plan would reintroduce buffalo in their traditional grounds, such as the Black Hills, Pine Ridge Reservation, Flint Hills, Osage Hills, and Wichita Mountains; even the remaining herd in Yellowstone Park would be augmented with Bronx-bred buffalo. As Roosevelt saw it, buffalo would once again be trampling the luxuriant tall grasses into muddy thoroughfares, as in the days before Christopher Columbus. Unlike the 45 million cattle in the Great Plains, reinroduced buffalo wouldn’t overgraze the prairie into a dust bowl. He hoped to create a buffalo common. While there were few dramas as frightening as a bison bull at bay, zoologically schooled members of the Boone and Crockett Club like Roosevelt and Grant nevertheless knew that buffaloes were essentially timid creatures, as easy to corral as cattle. Only when a mother buffalo felt that her young were in jeopardy did they turn frothingly hostile, staving off predators such as wolves and cougars with the threat of a horrific stampede. Then look out! Buffalo might appear slow and lumbering, but they could outrun a racehorse. As domesticated creatures, however, they were fairly benign.5
While George Bird Grinnell was supportive of a Buffalo common in the West, he thought bison needed lots of roving space to survive and that the New York grasses were completely different from those on the plains. Therefore, he wasn’t keen on the Boone and Crockett Club’s throwing its weight behind acquiring wildlife for display in New York City; he preferred having the members concentrate on enacting tougher hunting laws. Running a zoo was a headache he simply didn’t want. To Grinnell it made more practical sense to have the Department of Agriculture help C. J. Jones of Garden City, Kansas—who had captured fifty buffalo on his own and purchased an additional eighty in Manitoba—lead a serious repopulation program right in the heartland of “Buffalo Country.”6
The Great American Buffalo was drawn by Audubo
The Great American Buffalo. (Courtesy of the Boone and Crockett Club)
But, as was often the case, Roosevelt got his way. He insisted that the zoo would teach New Yorkers about the perils western big-game species faced. Also, the zoo allowed Roosevelt, as a New York politician, to found something great for the Empire State, an added political bonus. One of the zoo’s most tireless advocates, in fact, was Andrew H. Green, then known as the “father” of greater New York City. When Green concurred that a natural-setting zoo was a fine idea, long overdue, Roosevelt knew his brainchild would take off. A truly creative philanthropist, Green had been a close friend of Roosevelt’s father, envisioned Central Park as a recreational center, bankrolled the American Museum of Natural History, investigated the Tweed Ring, and created the Niagara Falls Commission to save the falls from destruction in a bilateral agreement with the Canadian government. Grinnell warned his friends against forming a zoo committee in late 1894 before club members could, at the very least, vote on the idea. They should settle their differences, Grinnell believed, through at least a tip of the hat toward the democratic process.
But Roosevelt, spurred by his idea about buffalo, had another important ally besides Green and Grant. Professor Fairfield Osborn of Columbia University, curator of the American Museum of Natural History, sided with Roosevelt (as he always did), even offering his fund-raising contact list. Starting in the 1890s Osborn had become quite a fixture in zoological circles. The refined, fashionable Osborn would tuck a paisley scarf into his collar instead of a tie, sported corduroy pants, and was constantly jotting notes on legal pads while chain-smoking cigarettes. Green was the first president of the New York Zoological Society, but when he became suddenly ill Osborn took over the obligations. Deep down, Roosevelt probably knew that Grinnell was correct in his skepticism. Roosevelt nevertheless wrote to Madison Grant—whose hand-tailored suits and donnish manners made him a kind of WASP caricature, like a cucumber sandwich at afternoon tea—that regardless of Forest and Stream’s view-point, “I’ll go ahead and do it.”7 Being the impresario of a zoo was simply too irresistible to turn down.
In the spring of 1895, a group from the Boone and Crockett Club officially formed the New York Zoological Society. The leaders included Roosevelt, Grant, Green, and Osborn. Behaving like fraternity brothers, they created a crest for the society, with a ram’s head in its center and “Founded 1895” underneath, long before the development plan was officially approved in late 1897.8 The 261-acre forested zoo, with a topographical range from granite ridges to natural meadows and glades to forest, was ideal for a wide variety of animals to thrive in the open air. The Bronx River wound through the site, and the woods were already home to many birds. It would be relatively easy to create marvelous replicas of diverse habitats here, allowing the wildlife to feel at home.
The zoo officially opened in November 1898, after the blitzkrieg of the Spanish-American War. Grinnell essentially fell into line, now and again flashing an over-the-shoulder look that said “I told you so” when any animal emergency transpired; Darwianism, he beli
eved, was veterinarianism. Roosevelt was especially proud of the imposing Antelope House. But the Lion House soon became the premier tourist attraction. These “houses” were established to tell the biological history of species in a truly detailed, exciting, educational way. A special wooded range had been developed for moose, and a wonderful stream surrounded by plants was devised so children could watch industrious beavers construct dams and lodges. At the time, the new zoological park was the largest in the world, and its open-air displays became the model for its successors, such as the zoo in San Diego, which opened in 1922.
As it entertained tourists and educated schoolchildren, the zoo simultaneously served as a scientific laboratory. For example, the twenty acres reserved for buffalo allowed ample space for mammalogists to study these North American quadrupeds through the rutting cycle.9 Likewise, elk got fifteen acres in which to thrive and be observed. Moose were brought in from Maine and cougar from somewhere west of Kansas City. Aesthetically, what Roosevelt and Grant were trying to avoid was the zoo seeming like an oversized breeding pen. Bear dens were soon erected with awesome caves and rock precipices, and there were plans to build the world’s greatest House of Reptiles, which the foremost herpetologist in America, Raymond L. Ditmars, would curate. “It is extremely desirable that all animals living in the open air should be so installed that their surroundings will suggest,” the New York Times explained about the new zoo, “as a well-kept and accessible natural wilderness rather than as a conventional city park.”10
Besides breeding buffalo in captivity, the New York Zoological Society funded an extensive scientific report on the concept of creating wildlife sanctuaries or refuges across the country. Could buffalo reclaim the Black Hills, Red River Valley, or Drift Prairie of South Dakota? Would elk be able to roam freely again along the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers? Someday, would moose be protected in Maine and Minnesota? As Lincoln Lang recalled in Ranching with Roosevelt, T.R. “had discussed the possibilities of game protection,” in the 1880s and even spoke of someday establishing the North Dakota Badlands as a “national preserve.”11 With the zoological society launched, Roosevelt’s vision was no longer an impossible goal. A subtle brotherhood of men—hunters and naturalists—were now in the business of species education.
Already at Black Mesa Forest Reserve in the Arizona Territory two members of the Boone and Crockett Club—Dr. Ed W. Nelson and Alden Sampon—were studying the feasibility of a wildlife reserve in the Navajo lands, a reserve that would be completely off-limits to hunters along the upper border of the Little Colorado River basin.12 The deep box canyons, yellow pine forests, piñons, cedars, and junipers of the Black Mesa needed protection, as did the three intact cliff dwellings of the Pueblos. Although Roosevelt hadn’t been to Black Mesa, he knew from Nelson that creating a big-game reserve there would be ideal for black-tailed deer and silver-tipped bears. And it would mean a great deal to the Native American peoples. But Roosevelt also understood that without irrigation the Arizona rock oasis would become uninhabitable; the scattered pines would wither. The residents of the adjoining sheep and cattle settlements were opposed to a Black Mesa wildlife playground.13
Roosevelt—unusually for him—made snide, belittling remarks about the Arizona business types who were unable to comprehend the concept of antiquities. Arizona needed to be maintained, not mined. Stopping growth in Black Mesa, Roosevelt worried, was going to be difficult, but he believed the “fantastic barrenness,” “incredible wildness,” and “desolate majesty” of the Navajo lands needed to be protected forever. With quiet cheerfulness he began looking for ways to get the job done. “No one could paint or describe it,” he later wrote after camping out in the Black Mesa valley, “save one of the great masters of imaginative art or literature—a Turner or Browning or Poe.”14
II
The recruitment of William Temple Hornaday as the first director and general curator of the New York Zoological Society was a brilliant coup by Roosevelt. (Like George Bird Grinnell, Hornaday regularly used all three of his names.) Born in Plainfield, Indiana, in 1854, four years before Roosevelt, and raised in Iowa starting in 1856, Hornaday grew up earthy and dirt-poor.15 “I shall always believe,” he wrote in his memoir Two Years in the Jungle, “I was born under a lucky star as a compensation for not having been born rich.”16 He managed to attend Oskaloosa College and then Iowa State College, where his intuitive genius for handling both domestic and wild animals, added to his excellence in taxidermy, opened the doors to a zoological career upon graduation. While Roosevelt was preparing for Harvard with a private tutor, the irascible Hornaday was traveling the world as a young man searching for exotic species to shoot and stuff in the name of science. His primary employer, the Wards National Science Foundation (of Rochester, New York), sent him to the Bahamas, Cuba, Florida, Brazil, Ceylon, Malaysia, and Borneo.
Obsessive, unbuckling, and stubborn beyond words, Hornaday was a highly sophisticated version of Bill Sewall or Moses Sawyer. Unlike Baird or Merriam, Hornaday had calloused hands. There was always a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, like a child who had suddenly aged overnight. He was the kind of immature prankster who yodeled in church just to hear the echo. There was a cultivated crudeness to his manners, and his certainty about zoology bordered on arrogance. His daily conversation was filled with such bio-trivia as the flesh preferences of wolverines and why hawks were copper-clawed. Hornaday also bristled with statistics on the possible extinction of Delaware swans, Louisiana woodpeckers, and Ohio turtledoves. Vermont was the only state, he believed, which managed its wildlife properly. For all his eccentricities, you had to give Hornaday credit: he walked the walk. Unlike most Harvard-trained scientists, Hornaday had actually wallowed in the mud with alligators, tying their mouths with rope like Jim Bowie working the tip jar in a French Quarter sideshow. And when it came to buffalo, nobody—not even Grinnell—understood their psychology as keenly as Hornaday. The West was full of horse whisperers, but Hornaday—with the notable exception of C. J. Jones—was the only buffalo whisperer around. (Unlike Jones, Hornaday at least didn’t try to crossbreed wild buffalo with Hereford cattle.)
By 1879 Hornaday was chief taxidermist and director of the now defunct United States National Museum. When Hornaday created the National Society of American Taxidermists the following year, Roosevelt sat up and paid attention. Stitch for stitch, Hornaday was probably the best American mammal taxidermist of his era. When working on a buffalo, for example, he took the extra step of ridding his specimen of screwworm flies (Cochliomyia macellaria), which frequently laid eggs in an open wound or sore. He was an artist skilled enough to prepare an exhibit of a buffalo grazing, stampeding, or simply looking forlorn, bringing out the personality of the animal vividly in any mood or situation. Most famously, Hornaday himself shot a huge 1,800-pound buffalo in Montana; it became the centerpiece of a popular diorama at the National Museum of Natural History. Upon skinning this buffalo, however, Hornaday made a startling discovery, later claiming that it triggered an effusion of sorrow. “Nearly every adult bull we took carried old bullets in his body, and from this one we took four of various sizes that had been fired into him on various occasions,” he recalled. “One was sticking fast in one of the lumbar-vertebrae.” 17
When Roosevelt moved to Washington, D.C., in 1889 for his civil service job, he befriended the bawdy Hornaday, then chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian. Despite his skill at mounting, Hornaday was pushing for the Smithsonian to open a “live animal” department. Hornaday insisted that people preferred to see a real wobbly little buffalo rather than a stiff, old, stuffed one. The global killing of wildlife for science was the hackneyed way, Hornaday came to believe, for truly enlightened men and women to study animals. Newly developed netting techniques made it possible to capture everything from a hippopotamus to a cougar alive. He even wanted to start tagging animals in the wild. Once Hornaday was given permission to show live specimens at the Smithsonian turnstile increased three-fold. The public roared its approval and
Hornaday pratted on about the advanced wildlife protective ethos.
Hornaday’s new vision led to his founding of the National Zoological Park in 1889, in Washington, D.C.18 But such brilliant, original thinking (like that of Robert B. Roosevelt) can often go hand in hand with a difficult personality. Since Hornaday loved being out in the field, chief among the targets of his lacerating criticism were those zoologists and ornithologists who didn’t get grimy tracking down wildlife for science. You might say he had an outbank Audubon complex, like Theodore Roosevelt. Often smelling of buffalo or bears, Hornaday was far more comfortable in alpine hiking clothes than in a suit. Sometimes his hair was matted with dry grass and mud. There was, as noted above, a farmyard crudeness to his manners, and his rumored atheism did nothing to endear him to the pious Methodists and Episcopalians he worked with at the Smithsonian. In fact, when the people who were financing the National Zoological Garden started telling Hornaday how to run his shop, and radically changing his Darwinian plans for animal displays, he resigned and moved to Buffalo, New York. Once he was settled there, he tried to change the city’s name to Bison, New York, to be more zoologically accurate.
Although Roosevelt never approved of Hornaday’s vulgarness or imperiousness, he knew that Hornaday was the most knowledgeable expert in the world regarding buffalo. It was said that Hornaday, in a quick glance, could identify the precise home range of a buffalo—for example, Nebraska or Manitoba or Oklahoma—by the constitution of its dung. Furious that these wild creatures were treated so shabbily, he nevertheless remained hopeful that repopulation programs and new game laws might be able to reverse the trend toward extinction. When Hornaday told Congress in April 1896 that national bison ranges should be created to save the vanishing herds, Roosevelt fully agreed. Even though Hornaday wasn’t considered refined enough for the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt had no hesitation in asking him to head the Bronx Zoo. To Roosevelt’s thinking Hornaday was wasting his talent working in the Erie County real estate business and merely serving as a trustee for the Buffalo Museum of Science.