The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  The letters Roosevelt wrote from Cuba crackle with the kind of martial detail also found in Crane’s Civil War novel of 1895, The Red Badge of Courage. Yet they’re also full of natural history, with observations about the “jungle-lined banks,” “great open woods of palms,” and “mango trees,” “vultures wheeling overhead by hundreds,” and even a whole command “so weakened and shattered as to be ripe for dying like rotten sheep.” Constantly, Roosevelt tried to conjure up nature as a way to increase personal power. When the director Terrence Malik made The Thin Red Line in 1998—a film about the Battle of Guadalcanal, based on a World War II novel by James Jones—he constantly cut away to exotic birds. This device helped illustrate that nature always watched the pageant of human combat from the sidelines, waiting for the artillery to cease before coming back to life and inventorying the new morning.

  In Roosevelt’s correspondence and war memoir the land crab is omnipresent, almost the central metaphor of his Cuban campaign. Experts noted that the local species, Gecarcinus lateralis, commonly known as the blackback, Bermuda, or red crab, leaves the tropical forests each spring to mate in the sea. This made for an eerie spectacle all along Cuba’s northern coast as these disfigured creatures, many with only one giant claw, crawled out of the forests across roads and beaches to reach the water. Swollen with eggs, the female red crabs made their journey to the Caribbean Sea, which was their incubator, traveling five to six miles a day over every obstacle. Roosevelt noted that they avoided the sun’s glare, often gravitating to shade, just like wounded soldiers. As if in a scene from Borges or García Márquez, these burrowing red crabs—their abalone-like shells marked with gaudy dark rainbow swirls—while living on land, still had gills, so they needed to stay cool and moist. “The woods are full of land crabs, some of which are almost as big as rabbits,” Roosevelt wrote to Corinne; “when things grew quiet they slowly gathered in gruesome rings around the fallen.” 74

  For the first time as an adult, Roosevelt was in the tropics. The very density of vegetation was daunting, the white herons often standing out against the greenery like tombstones. These red crabs were to him what tortoises or finches were to Darwin; everything about them spoke of evolution. Unlike the stone crabs of Maine, these red crabs, by contrast, weren’t particularly good-tasting; from a culinary perspective they were off-putting. Still, with food supplies sparse, the soldiers smashed the red crabs with rocks, discarded the shells, and mixed the meat into their hardtack, calling the dish “deviled crab.” Although the crabs were not dangerous, many Rough Riders were jarred awake at night by the formidable pincers. And the crabs were persistent—a soldier would shake them away from his bedroll, but after scurrying away, the crabs would come back a short while later. Sleeping off the ground on a hammock became more coveted than having a can of tobacco or bottle of rum. What disturbed Roosevelt the most about the Cuban crabs, however, was their attraction to carrion, fallen soldiers as well as dead animals. It wasn’t pleasant to think that the price of liberating Cuba was to die on a lonesome beach with red crabs and ants crawling all over your body, entering your mouth and eyes and ears.

  In The Rough Riders, Roosevelt ably described the timeworn, brush-covered flat in the island village of Daiquirí where his volunteer regiment camped one evening, on one side of them the tropical jungle and on the other a stagnant, malarial pool fringed with palm trees. After the sacking of Santiago, many of his Rough Riders, a third of whom had served in the Civil War, lay wounded in ditches with flies buzzing around them. Sometimes, after an American died, local Cubans would strip the corpse of all its equipment. Humans could be scavengers, too. Roosevelt turned to images of avians and crustaceans to explain the horror of death. “No man was allowed to drop out to help the wounded,” he lamented. “It was hard to leave them there in the jungle, where they might not be found again until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but war is a grim game and there was no choice.” 75

  Roosevelt then went on to tell of U.S. volunteer soldiers, comrades in arms, mortally wounded—perhaps shot through the stomach—dying without uttering a sound or gasping out a last wish. Men lucky enough to crawl propped themselves up against palm trees and expired in the dismal shade, their uniforms drenched in sweat, urine, and blood. A little field hospital was set up, and Roosevelt witnessed the pathos of men heaving for air, their lungs collapsed, broken ribs piercing vital organs. “We found all our dead and all the badly wounded,” he wrote. “Around one of the latter the big, hideous land-crabs had gathered in a grewsome ring, waiting for life to be extinct. One of our own men and most of the Spanish dead had been found by the vultures before we got to them; and their bodies were mangled, the eyes and wounds being torn.”*76

  If that ghastly scene wasn’t harrowing enough, Roosevelt proceeded to tell another story. After staring at a corpse that had been mutilated by vultures, the blood having coagulated hours before, Rough Rider Bucky O’Neill, who at home was the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, came up to Roosevelt, shook his head, and said, “Colonel, isn’t it [Walt] Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes out of princes and tear the flesh of kings?” Not wanting to discuss poetry, Roosevelt muttered that he wasn’t sure about the proper attribution and walked away. Then, as if to demonstrate how tenuous life really was, Roosevelt matter-of-factly noted in The Rough Riders that O’Neill himself soon perished in the trenches of Cuba: “Just a week afterward we were shielding his own body from the birds of prey.”77

  V

  In his review essay “Kidd’s Social Evolution” for The North American Review, Roosevelt offered an example of when the dictates of natural selection superseded a love of wildlife. “Even the most enthusiastic naturalist,” he wrote, “if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark.” 78 By this criterion, Roosevelt was a success in Cuba in two ways. He not only thwarted the Spanish sharks but managed to make detailed diary notes about vultures and crabs, which he planned to use in his memoir The Rough Riders.

  When the victorious Rough Riders returned to the United States, Roosevelt was the most acclaimed man in America. His homeward journey, in fact, had been treated as major news. In hard, good health, taut and fit, his face coppered and his hair cut short, he was living his boyhood fantasy of being a war hero. Roosevelt had endured the vicissitudes of war with commendable grit, and now it was all bouquets. “His personal view of the war was reported to have been extracted from Social Darwinism,” the historians Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels say in their landmark work Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan. “The superior Anglo-Saxon race necessarily won over the decadent Spaniards.” 79 As Roosevelt wrote in a new foreword to The Winning of the West, the Spanish American War had completed “the work begun over a century before by backwoodsmen” by booting “the Spaniard outright from the western world.”80

  Anglo-Saxonism was hardly all there was to the victorious battlefield prowess of the Rough Riders. Something in the American wilderness experience, Roosevelt believed, gave his regiment the upper hand over the Spaniards. Not a single Rough Rider got cold feet or shrank back. Something about the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona had taught them to be tough. In an important essay, “The Darwinist Frontier,” the historian Patrick Sharp has contended that Roosevelt believed the American fighting spirit would continue only as long as outdoorsmen didn’t get lazy and rest on the laurels of modernity.81 Slowly, Roosevelt was developing a theory about this, which he would call the “strenuous life.” The majestic open spaces of America like the Red River Valley, Guadalupe Mountains, Black Mesa, Sangre de Cristo Range, Prescott Valley, and Big Chino Wash had hardened his men, teaching them the kind of self-reliance Emerson promoted. Wouldn’t Rough Riders make terrific forest rangers and wild-life wardens? Didn’t the wildlife protection movement need no-nonsense men in uniform to stop poaching in federal parks? “In all the world there could be no better material for soldiers than that afforded by
these grim hunters of the mountains, these wild rough riders of the plains,” Roosevelt said. “They were accustomed to following the chase with the rifle, both for sport and as a means of livelihood.” 82

  While the Rough Riders recovered from bodily atrophy at Montauk, where they were watched for signs of yellow fever, New York’s Republican Party was urging Roosevelt to run for governor that fall. Two prominent local politicians—Lemuel Ely Quigg (who had backed him for mayor in 1894) and Ben Odall Jr. (chairman of the Republican state committee), met with him on August 19 to strategize how best to turn a war hero, about whom New Yorkers were currently fanatical, into a sitting governor.

  After the hot trenches of Cuba, the cool summer breezes on the Montauk peninsula were a welcome relief to Colonel Roosevelt, even though the makeshift barracks had no charm. There were ocean beaches and dunes, shrublands and tidal flats, brackish wetlands and salt marshes. As Roosevelt contemplated his political future, and as everybody clamored to shake his hand, the raccoons and white-tailed deer of Montauk brought balance to his newfound fame. There was even Nantucket Juneberry along the sand plains to meticulously study. One hundred years later, to honor the fact that the famous Rough Rider had lived at Camp Wikoff in 1898, the community of Montauk named a 1,157-acre wilderness area Roosevelt County Park.83

  Much has been written about Roosevelt’s 137 days of service in the army, mostly blandishments in the style of Heroes of American History. The whole island of Cuba had been a theater to Roosevelt, and he was the lead actor. For more than fifteen years, Roosevelt had cultivated good relationships with reporters, and they delivered fresh copy of his dramatic charges with gusto in 1898. He even appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly. General Nelson A. Miles—who was famous for his part in the Indian wars of the West and had been in Cuba but never saw much action there—complained that Roosevelt had never actually charged up San Juan Hill. Miles was correct—Roosevelt’s skirmish was on Kettle Hill—but the misnomer was widespread, and it stuck. Why let a geographic mistake beset a powerful war story? The immodest Roosevelt even put in for a Medal of Honor for himself, only to be rebuked by Secretary of War Russell Alger. Although it took until 2001, Roosevelt, through the lobbying of his family, eventually won the Medal of Honor posthumously for his bravery during the battle for San Juan Heights.84

  Every day that Colonel Roosevelt was at Montauk, the New York press, seemingly in concert, covered even his humdrum statements as if they were major news. There was no need to light the fuse of his celebrity, for he had already been hurtled onto the front page of every national newspaper. The mascots, in particular, grabbed a lot of notice. The New York Times ran a feature story about Roosevelt’s tame lioness, Josephine, reporting that the colonel might raise the big cat at Oyster Bay.85 Edith staunched that plan, however, and instead, Josephine was carted off to tour the West as an icon of the Spanish-American War and as a big-top attraction. Unfortunately, in Chicago Josephine got loose or was stolen and was never seen again.86

  The eventual fate of Teddy the golden eagle was just as disappointing. Quite sensibly Roosevelt had donated the eagle to the Central Park Zoo, where he became a popular tourist attraction. Everything went well for Teddy during his first nine months at the zoo. But in May 1899 two bald eagles from Brooklyn—nicknamed the “heavenly twins”—were brought into Teddy’s cage to keep him company. Holy hell broke out. The feisty Teddy, presumably in an act of territorial protection, attacked one of the bald eagles, molesting the newcomer with his claws and beak. A few days later, the heavenly twins ganged up on Teddy, battering him severely. Within hours Teddy keeled over, dead. The zoo superintendent, John B. Smith, told the press that Teddy had died of a “broken heart,” having lost his “prestige” to the bald eagle. The body of the Rough Riders’ mascot was shipped to Frank M. Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History, where he was stuffed and put on display.* 87

  The story of Cuba, at least, had a happy ending. Corporal Jackson, after being quarantined at Montauk, headed back to Flagstaff with Cuba at his side. Because he was a footloose type, unable to take care of a pet, he gave the celebrated dog to a family man, Sam Black, who had been a ranger in Arizona Territory. For sixteen years Cuba lived in the lap of luxury, catered to by the Black family. When Cuba eventually died of natural causes, he was buried along the scenic Verde River fifty miles southwest of Flagstaff, having been given a proper military funeral in recognition of his service to his country.88 Cuba was also given a special pet cemetary memorial at Sagamore Hill.

  On August 20, Colonel Roosevelt was allowed to leave quarantine to return to Oyster Bay for five days. By the time he arrived at Sagamore Hill, there was a groundswell of support for his gubernatorial candidacy. From Buffalo to Brooklyn, Roosevelt had become public property, a war hero celebrated as a favorite son. All around Oyster Bay, he was greeted with shouts of “Teddy!” (which he hated) and “Welcome, Colonel!” (which he loved). Not for a minute did he suffer from the aftereffects of war; it was as if he had psychologically inoculated himself against trauma. “I would rather have led this regiment,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “than be Governor of New York three times.”89

  Cleverly, Roosevelt had kept diaries in Cuba, jotting down exact dialogue and stream-of-consciousness impressions. His editor at Scribner, Robert Bridges, worried that if Roosevelt ran for governor, the war memoir they’d been discussing would have to be postponed. “Not at all,” Roosevelt told him, “you shall have the various chapters at the time promised.”90 And there were always his biophilic notes, sent to his children from Cuba. “There is a funny little lizard that comes into my tent and it’s quite tame now,” read one, “he jumps about like a frog and puffs his throat out. There are ground doves no bigger than big sparrows and cuckoos almost as a large as crows.”91

  Once back at Camp Wikoff, Roosevelt wandered around Montauk Point, taking care of his golden eagle and leading little Cuba on long walks. (The dog greeted many of the Rough Riders from dockside as they returned to the United States.) Roosevelt seemed like a changed man, disconcertingly calm, studying the undercarriage of wigeon as they flew overhead. Sometimes, particularly when reporters were around, he rode his horse up and down the beach with the fervor of a plainsman.92 Having “driven the Spaniard from the New World,” Roosevelt could relax—he had been relieved of the burden of of his father’s buying his way out of Civil War service. With nothing more to prove, he could excel as a powerful politician, soapbox expansionist, true-blue reformer, naturalist writer, and conservationist. After his “crowded hours” avoiding whizzing bullets and tropical diseases, he turned to studying the shorebirds of Long Island. As always, Roosevelt wanted to be the master of his own backyard, even as he prepared to run for governor of New York.

  Just how much Roosevelt identified himself with the American West was evident at the send-off his regiment gave him on September 13. A bugle called, and all the Rough Riders dutifully assembled into formation. In front of them was a card table with a blanket draped over a bulky object. Roosevelt was inside his tent, writing letters, when the troop requested his presence outside; he immediately concurred. The First Volunteer Cavalry had a parting gift for their humane and courageous colonel. After some moving words, the blanket was lifted to reveal a bronze sculpture of 1895 by Frederic Remington, Bronco-Buster. (“Cowboy” was the western term for a cattle driver. A “bronco-buster” broke wild broncos to the saddle.93) Tears welled up in Roosevelt’s eyes, his voice choked, and he stroked the steed’s mane as if it were real. “I would have been most deeply touched if the officers had given me this testimonial, but coming from you, my men, I appreciate it tenfold,” Roosevelt said. “It comes to me from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me; who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none; and who shared with me your blankets when I had none to lie upon. To have such a gift come from this peculiarly American regiment touches me more than I can say. This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than I do th
e weapons I carried through the campaign.”94

  The Rough Riders had given Colonel Roosevelt the best gift possible. Remington’s bronze was far superior to a gold-plated pistol or signed group photograph. It summed up Theodore Roosevelt well: a fearless western cowboy, stirrups flying free, determined to tame a wild stallion by putting the spurs to it, a quirt in his right hand and a fistful of reins in the other. Like much of Remington’s finest pen-and-ink work, Bronco-Buster, his first venture into sculpture, was charged with kinetic movement and free-floating energy. At fast glance the horse, forelegs held high, practically jumps to life.95 Roosevelt had succeeding in transforming his sickly childhood in New York City into a frontier saga worthy of Captain Mayne Reid. “The men of the West and the men of the Southwest, horsemen, and herders of cattle, have been the backbone of this regiment,” Roosevelt wrote, “as they are the backbone of their sections of the country.”96 A Remington casting of Bronco-Buster is now permanently housed in the White House Oval Office as a table centerpiece. And in the Roosevelt Room hangs an equestrian portrait of T.R. as Rough Rider by the Polish artist Tade Styka.

  After the Spanish American War, Roosevelt and his commanding officer, Leonard Wood, became close personal friends. Together the two veterans would hike Rock Creek Park discussing everything from immigrants’ assimilation into America to the intolerable sanitary conditions in Cuba. Sometimes they brought young people with them on these outings. “Colonel Roosevelt especially made these walks of the greatest interest to the children,” Wood recalled. “He transmitted to them something of his own keen interest in nature, his love of birds, his interest in woodcraft, and in a thousand ways attempted to instill in them an interest in and an understanding of God’s world as he saw it, to implement healthy tastes, and to build up a love for a wholesome outdoor life. At the same time he was full of stories of men and animals, stories which tended to build up a love for birds and animals and of wholesome outdoor life for the woods and the fields at a time when it was easy to lay the right foundation and to plant seed which would bear good fruit. He had a wonderful fund of information about birds and animals which he was continually passing on to the youngsters in a way they could understand.”97