The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Roosevelt promised to let Hornaday develop exhibits at the Bronx Zoo any way he wanted. He had faith that Hornaday was the man best able to breed buffalo in captivity as the first step in repopulating the Great Plains. Always speeding up the timetables, Roosevelt was impatient and held the view that if it took six years to destroy all the bison in Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and the Texas panhandle, then the Bronx Zoo should be able to repopulate those same expansive grasslands with buffalo in an equivalent time. Only a maladjusted obsessive like Hornaday, with fever in the veins, could possibly pull off a breeding program in such unrealistically short order. Promised a handsome salary, Hornaday agreed, with a little pressure from the Boone and Crockett Club, to accept the zoo directorship—a position he held for the next thirty years. During these decades Hornaday wrote a series of books, articles, and lectures that are the core documents of the wildlife conservation movement in America. His Our Vanishing Wild Life is perhaps the single most important (if deeply flawed) book ever published on protecting endangered species. “Give the game the benefit of every doubt!,” he would lecture. “If it becomes too thick, your gun can quickly thin it out; but if it is once exterminated, it will be impossible to bring it back. Be wise; and take thought for the morrow. Remember the heath hen.”19

  As Hornaday saw it, the Bronx Zoo would celebrate the whole post–Civil War generation of Darwinian naturalists, including the affluent Roosevelt. The center of Hornaday’s zoo was Baird Court—the administrative and library offices—named after the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Then there was Lake Agassiz, named after the great Harvard zoologist. The Boone and Crockett Club contributed hundreds of horns and antlers to put on display. Meanwhile, plans to raise buffalo got off to a rocky start. The native Bronx grass on which the bison grazed was not the same as prairie grass; in fact, it was so different that the first domestically raised herd of American bison died. Grinnell, it seemed, had been right. Bitterly disappointed, Hornaday had to remove all the native grasses and then pay zookeepers to feed the buffalo the proper prairie grasses by hand and keep the water hole always full.20

  That was quite an embarrassing failure for Roosevelt; he felt a real, if momentary, sense of loss when the buffalo died. But Roosevelt wasn’t a quitter. He stuck by his determined zoo director. Since buffalo weren’t going to be the zoo’s only mission, Hornaday, at Roosevelt’s request, hired the field researcher Andrew J. Stone to survey the status of Alaska’s caribou herds, polar bears, and seal rookeries.21 For even if the Bronx buffalo range went away, Roosevelt and Hornaday’s plan of breeding buffalo in the Indian Territories (and two or three prairie states) was on track. And Grant, lobbying for financing from the New York state legislature, got the Boone and Crockett Club all the appropriation provisions it had requested. Roosevelt essentially left all the fund-raising and architectural details of the Bronx Zoo up to Madison Grant, whose actorish ways could move mountains. When the Bronx Zoo was officially sanctioned by the Park Board around Thanksgiving of 1897,22 Roosevelt offered Grant thanks. “I congratulate you with all my heart upon your success with the Zoo bill,” he wrote. “Really, you have done more than I hoped. I always count myself lucky if I get one out of three or four measures through.”23

  III

  The creation of the Bronx Zoo, with the help of regiments of planners, was the capstone to Roosevelt’s tenure as president of the Boone and Crockett Club. Over the years 1888 to 1894, he had achieved a scorecard of extraordinary accomplishments. From the Timberland Act of 1891 to the Yellowstone Protection Act of 1894 to the creation of the New York Zoological Society, the Boone and Crockett Club had become the most effective big-game conservation group in America. Even though Roosevelt was sometimes tasked with club work that he despised—such as preparing accounts for audit 24—he relished promoting outdoor writers in his edited books. Encouraged by the fine reviews of American Big-Game Hunting, Roosevelt and Grinnell began working throughout 1894 on a successor volume, one having a more global perspective than the first. How did North American white-horn deer compare with the fallow deer of the Mediterranean region of Europe and Asia Minor? Why did the Nubian ibex of the Palestine countryside have larger scimitar-shaped horns than the mountain goats Roosevelt had hunted in the Rockies? What caused the nyala of southeastern Africa to be slightly faster than the Badlands antelope? These were the types of questions Roosevelt and his coeditor George Bird Grinnell wanted answered in the new book, called Hunting in Many Lands.

  When commissioning Madison Grant to write on moose in Hunting in Many Lands, for example, Roosevelt preferred that his hunt story take place in Canada. Roosevelt wanted to know everything about moose found farther north than Maine and Minnesota, around the headwaters of the Ottawa River along the Ontario-Quebec border. This, Roosevelt wrote to Grant, would run against the current zoological thinking that the differences between species in tropical and temperate zones were the most scientifically important. By focusing on moose in a specific Canadian habitat, Grant could show (so his editor hoped) the variation among moose populations in North America. “The best zoologists nowadays put North America in with North Asia and Europe as one archetypal province, separate from the South American, Indian, Australasian, and South African provinces, which have equal rank,” Roosevelt complained to Grant. “Our moose, wapiti, bear, beaver, wolf, etc., differ more or less from those of the Old World but the difference sinks into insignificance when compared with differences between all these forms, Old World and New, from the tropical forms south of them. The wapiti is undoubtedly entirely distinct from the European red deer; but I don’t think the difference is as great as between the black-tail [mule] and white-tail deer.”25

  In 1895 Hunting in Many Lands was published, with a sterling article by Madison Grant, “A Canadian Moose Hunt,” about the upper Ottawa River, essentially companion piece to his article in Century. Grant also eventually became instrumental in two other conservationist causes besides the Boone and Crockett Club and its offshoot, the Bronx Zoo: these were the American Bison Society (founded by Roosevelt and Hornaday in 1905) and Save the Redwoods League.* Unlike American Big Game, this second volume, comprising sixteen essays (plus appendixes, which included the Yellowstone Protection Act), was, as Roosevelt and Grinnell planned, international in approach. Fine photographs were interspersed throughout the text. The final product included essays on hunting Russian wolves, Sierra Mountain bears, Mexican rams, East African zebras, Korean leopards, and American antelope-deer (by Roosevelt).

  And another contributor, the future U.S. secretary of state Henry L. Stimson, wrote of the wildlife he encountered when he was climbing the turret-shaped mountains of northwestern Montana. W. W. Rockhill, a friend of the Dalai Lama, focused on the big game found in Mongolia and Tibet. There was even an essay on dogsledding in Manitoba by D. M. Barringer, a nineteen-year-old graduate of Princeton University who dedicated his life to the “impact theory” (he became the first geologist to discover that Coon Butte, Arizona, was in fact a meteor crater). In the impressive essay “The Cougar,” by Casper W. Whitney (the editor of Outlook) Roosevelt himself was praised as being the world’s expert on the mountain lion’s “moods.”26 The global approach to wildlife conservation of Hunting in Many Lands was smart and innovative. In the preface Roosevelt and Grinnell called for accelerated mammological research. Color variation, hoof sizes, whisker lengths, mating habits—the more scientific data compiled, the easier it would become for “wild creatures” to be taught “to look upon human beings as friends.”27

  In a piece that Roosevelt and Grinnell wrote together, the Yellowstone Protection Act of 1894 was held up as a model for policing wild refuges around the world. All the contributors to Hunting in Many Lands (except Elliott Roosevelt, whose posthumous contribution, “A Hunting Trip in India,” was embarrassingly antediluvian in attitude), promoted spirited ideas for global forestry and wildlife protection. Charles E. Whitehead of New York, for example, wrote that the “true hunter” too
k “more pleasure in watching the natural life around him than in killing the game that he meets.” His essay “Game Laws” recommended that the U.S. Army be authorized to try and punish poachers under martial law. “When we reflect how many and valuable races of animals in North America have become extinct or nearly so, as the buffalo and the manatee,” Whitehead fumed, “how many varieties of birds that afforded us food, or brightened the autumn sky with their migrations, have been annihilated, as have been the prairie fowl in the Eastern States and the passenger pigeon in all our States, the necessity of these laws appears urgent.”28

  Most of the essays in Hunting in Many Lands made at least a passing reference to proper land and wildlife management. An argument was also made that all the other existing national parks besides Yellowstone—Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant—should likewise have game protection laws.* As for the coeditors themselves, Roosevelt argued that the reports of various hunters would help naturalists and zoologists better understand species. Grinnell endorsed Roosevelt’s participation in the Committee on Measurements exhibition, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in May 1895, which rated the symmetry and coloration detail of big-game trophies.29 In the registration book Roosevelt, wanting to be associated with the American West, untruthfully gave his residence as “Medora N.D.” Along with other furrists and taxidermists, Roosevelt had submitted to the show numerous specimens, none of which drew more attention than his Texas tusked peccary head.

  IV

  That month also saw a career development: Roosevelt left the U.S. civil service to become a member of the Board of Police Commissioners of New York City.† He had lived as a bureaucrat in the District of Columbia and was ready to return home. At the time, New York’s police department was perceived as untrustworthy and corrupt; the new commissioner would have to make public integrity his first priority. From day one, Roosevelt had a two-pronged approach to running the force: do away with bribery and force officers to abide by the law. Making the city’s police department more honest, however, proved difficult. The Bowery, in particular, a mile-long row of brothels, bars, and burlesque clubs, was the most notorious tenderloin district in America; the police patrolling the beat were mostly on the take. Always “prudish as a dowager,” as one biographer put it, Roosevelt thought prostitution caused moral debasement and was a menace to health.30 Roosevelt began making surprise visits to Bowery saloons, firing officers if they were found partaking in the draft beer and revelry.31 Nothing at the police department pre-Roosevelt, it seemed, had been done on the up-and-up. Roosevelt found that even instituting a standard for the promotion of police officers was fraught with controversy. “The public may rest assured that so far as I am concerned,” Roosevelt stated on accepting the appointment, “there will be no politics in the department and I know that I voice the sentiment of my colleagues in that respect. We are all activated by the desire to so regulate this department that it will earn the respect and confidence of the community.”32

  Commissioner Roosevelt wasn’t just handcuff-happy in the Bowery or on the Lower East Side. Bitten by the temperance bug, he tried to enforce the moribund blue law against allowing saloons to be open on Sunday and went after nefarious dealers of exotic pets like a tyrant. Following the old Henry Bergh–ASPCA line, Roosevelt believed in ethical treatment of captured wildlife for both humane and sanitary reasons. Although many Americans liked to have some of the world’s 350 parrot species as pets, a majority of these parrots died in transit from South America or Africa. Roosevelt wanted to have such importation regulated to ensure the birds’ safe passage. But exotic birds hardly consumed much of his time. To instill discipline on the force, Roosevelt took to taking “midnight prowls” to investigate the cops’ beats. Determined to run a squeaky-clean department, he insisted that public integrity was an essential component of proper law enforcement, that a single bad apple poisoned the nobility of the entire force. “Two years and eight months left to me on this Board,” he boasted after just a few weeks in office, referring to his appointed term “and that is time enough to make matters very unpleasant for policemen who shirk their duty.”33

  But even as Roosevelt succeeded at modernizing the police headquarters on Mulberry Street, introducing bicycle squads and implementing pistol shooting practice, he continued his work for the Boone and Crockett Club. In late 1895, for example, the National Academy of Sciences asked him for his opinions on the condition of America’s national forests. Gleaning information from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (Biological Survey), Roosevelt didn’t like what he found. In his report, he worried that the 13 million acres of national forests set aside by the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 were being plundered for timber, and that the sheep pasturing in forest reservations would destroy all the herbage. In addition, Roosevelt once again called for the U.S. Army to do more policing of western reserves; urged the hiring of dozens of wardens; and, last, recommended to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith that still more forest acreage be set aside by the Cleveland administration.

  As New York’s police commissioner, Roosevelt appeared in the newspapers daily throughout the spring of 1896. In particular, the press reported his searching the streets and saloons for “slacking cops.”34 Not that Roosevelt, in his zeal to end corruption on the force, ignored the need to fight crime. For instance, when Owen Wister spent some time with Roosevelt on Mulberry Street, he was impressed by how committed his old friend was to stopping gambling and prostitution in the city. After one lunch Wister dutifully noted that Roosevelt’s jaw was “acquiring a grimness which his experience of life made inevitable; and beneath the laughter and the courage of the blue eyes, a wistfulness had begun to lurk which I had never seen in college; but the warmth, the eagerness, the boisterous boyish recounting of some anecdote, the explosive expression of some opinion about a person, or a thing, or a state of things—these were unchanged, and even to the end still bubbled up unchanged.”35

  Truth be told, Roosevelt wasn’t happy as police commissioner, finding the work “grimy” and “inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating.”36 Firing underlings for gross incompetence was demoralizing, and the job left him hardly any time for the outdoors life. Roosevelt found consolation in the fact that at least he wasn’t forgotten as a historian. The final volume of The Winning of the West was published in June 1896, to a fourth round of positive reviews. However, this time Roosevelt received no psychic uplift from the publication, and perhaps he was relieved that the long work, based on antiquated ideas he had first paraded before the public seven years ago, was at last over. Instead of reviewing Volume 4, the New York Times presented a feature article about how Roosevelt couldn’t wait to tramp around the West (where he hadn’t been in two years) with a new small-caliber Winchester. Roosevelt commuted back and forth on the Long Island Railroad from Sagamore Hill to his Mulberry Street office, preferring the pastoral Oyster Bay to the hurly-burly of the carriage-choked city. Roosevelt would have preferred to make his way to Yosemite or Alaska to write a book, just as John Burroughs had done—his friend had just published Birds and Bees and Other Studies of Nature. Roosevelt would title his book, the article intimated, something like Bears and Deer of the American West and Beyond.37

  That August Roosevelt managed to spend a couple of weeks in the Dakotas and Montana. He was preparing to close the Elkhorn ranch while in the west he campaigned tirelessly on behalf of Republican William McKinley of Ohio. Once Roosevelt returned to New York, in fact, he accused the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, of being a wild-eyed anarchist willing to usher in dissolution and disunion. Roosevelt never before had so much fun belittling an opponent. He told everybody in the Boone and Crockett Club that Bryan, a Nebraskan who served two terms in Congress, besides being an agrarian radical (and admittedly a first-class orator) was against forestry science, wildlife protection, and national parks. Roosevelt warned that as Election Day neared Bryan would beco
me downright demagogic, turning the worst class of voters into a rabble armed with pitchforks, demanding that the dollar be leveraged on the silver standard instead of gold. If Bryan was elected, Roosevelt worried, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 (and any other wise federal government initiatives) would be overturned, for his supporters had the kind of peasant mentality that would end up even denuding Pikes Peak and Mount Olympus in what Roosevelt saw as a “Witches Sabbath.”38

  In any event, Roosevelt needn’t have worried. On Election Day, McKinley bested Bryan and the existing U.S. government’s timberlands—at least on paper—were safe.39 That holiday season Roosevelt was in high spirits, lunching with Burroughs and plotting with Grinnell.

  A great moment in U.S. conservation history occurred a few weeks before William McKinley’s inauguration on March 4, 1897. On Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1897, ten days before the end of his term, the outgoing president, Grover Cleveland, created thirteen new or expanded forest reserves totaling 21 million acres; much of this land was in the verdant Pacific Northwest. Naturally howls of protest came roaring into Washington, D.C., from lumberers, grazers, and miners.40 “The rage of the lumber and railroad men,” the reporter George B. Leighton later noted in Five Cities, “knew no bounds.”41

  Timber barons, in particular, felt that they had been blindsided by the fat, hatless departing president. From their entrepreneurial perspective Cleveland had just served them strychnine in their coffee. Western businessmen couldn’t believe the sheer treachery of Cleveland’s parting shot. They were on the verge of mutiny. Suddenly all the milling of lumber and hauling of river stone had to cease at Cleveland’s designated forest areas unless the U.S. government said otherwise. Always predisposed to underrate Cleveland, Roosevelt was surprised and grateful that the outgoing president had unsheathed a sword. “This action,” he and Grinnell later bragged, “was directly in the line of recommendations urged in the Boone and Crockett Club books.” 42