The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Besides birds and books at Sagamore Hill there were, of course, trips to be taken. Determined to get road dust on his shoes, he escorted Edith that May to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and went back to Colorado on his own to deliver a speech and gather more information about cougars for Merriam. There was also a side trip to give a lecture in Minnesota, where he sneaked some Mississippi River bird-watching into the itinerary. Basically, Roosevelt was trying to stay out of President McKinley’s way, avoiding the front page, presenting himself as a loyal lieutenant, not a usurper. He was cognizant that he might be able to run for president in 1904, and it was extremely important that he didn’t appear hungry for power. Roosevelt’s muse throughout these months was the always blunt Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted him to cool down the cougar-hunting heroics; they had the deleterious potential of making President McKinley think he was grandstanding in the Rockies for future western votes.

  Roosevelt spent some of the summer writing essays on deer, cougar, and other North American big game. And then, time permitting, there would even be a Minnesota-Wisconsin series on wood animals like wolverines or badgers with sharp claws and flesh-eaters’ teeth that were difficult to tame. Having time on his hands, Roosevelt made arrangements to study law after the Senate reconvened in the fall, and he started collecting walking sticks as a hobby. “I have very ugly feelings now and then,” Roosevelt wrote to William Howard Taft that April, with a straight face, “that I am leading a life of unwarrantable idleness.”74

  That summer Roosevelt also started boning up on Vermont’s enlightened conservationist laws. Although President McKinley was only moderately interested in conservation, Roosevelt—with the loyal Secretary Bliss at his side—believed he could increase America’s forest reserve acreage at the rate of something like three Delawares a year. Reserves aside, Roosevelt also wanted America to have the same strict game laws as Vermont. In early September, just when the apple orchards were bearing fruit, Roosevelt went up to the Green Mountains of Vermont on a fact-finding trip. He had never before visited Vermont in an official capacity. Basically he wanted to get places like Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming to adopt Vermont’s admirable standards of natural resource management. Ostensibly speaking for his dinners, Roosevelt was also on a fact-finding mission.

  Much of Roosevelt’s first day in Vermont was consumed with making speeches on topics ranging from the Civil War to naval policy. On September 6, however, Roosevelt attended a big-tent luncheon of the Vermont Fish and Game League on Isle LaMotte in Lake Champlain.75 The league had been highly successful in reintroducing Adirondack white-tailed deer to the state, issuing fishing licenses (as a kind of taxation), and opening game reserves.76 Pleased that as governor of New York Roosevelt had adopted various of Vermont’s conservation ideas for his own state, the conservation league had elected him an honorary member.77 His primary host in Vermont was Frank Lester Greene, an ardent champion of forestry science who had served valiantly in the Spanish-American War. Harvard may have been America’s Darwinian laboratory and Yale the institution where forestry science took hold, but Vermont, owing to George Perkins Marsh’s legacy, was the birthplace of early conservationist thinking. There was a down-to-earth pragmatism about the way Vermonters like Greene were wise stewards of the lands. Dairy farmers and town merchants in Vermont understood that mangling woodlands was injurious to every aspect of good living. Roosevelt wanted to learn how Vermonters applied conservation and then implement it on a large scale.

  From the second Roosevelt was deposited on the lakefront dock from Seward Webb’s yacht Elfrida, he explored Isle LaMotte like a tourist. At his side was ex-Rough Rider Guy Murchie. A book had informed Roosevelt that the world’s oldest coral reefs existed around Isle LaMotte. The Chazy Reef was buried under the southernmost part of the island; its limestone was more than 450 million years old.78 Roosevelt couldn’t help marveling that Vermont—of all places—had once been under a tropical sea. There were other geological facts that probably intrigued Roosevelt and appealed to his insatiable curiosity about the island. Somehow, the few hundred residents of Isle LaMotte were able to quarry black marble limestone from the reefs without polluting the harbor. Some of the finest marble blocks ever discovered, in fact, came from Lake Champlain and were used as construction materials for the U.S. Capitol and Radio City music hall. There were other attractions on the island including a fish culture station said to be spawning more than 1 million eggs a week, incubated in a series of tanks, but he never got around to inspecting them, owing to a tragedy.79

  That evening of September 6, much of Roosevelt’s talk to his fellow conservationists centered on his recent cougar hunt in Colorado. Sitting in the audience was Philip Stewart, his hunting protégé and photographer, who gave him somebody to bounce his anecdotes off in a slightly humorous way. “Stewart took the hunt a shade less seriously than I did,” Roosevelt joked. “I wanted to shoot the lions but he wanted to Kodak them. He had a large and Catholic taste and wanted to Kodak everything. When the dogs treed the first lion I was riding ahead and had got within fifty yards of the tree and could see the animal in the tree snarling and spitting. I was immensely interested. Suddenly Stewart halted me in a tone almost agonizing in its earnestness, as though a pack of mountain lions was upon us when he proceeded with the air of a villain in melodrama to take a picture of a rabbit on a stump.”80

  After the speech Roosevelt repaired to the grand estate of Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk, next door to where the Fish and Game League’s banquet had been held. He was going to talk off the record to various conservationists in a little while. Back in 1897 President McKinley had stayed at the mansion, where he claimed a cane chair as his own. Now Roosevelt, as a courtesy, was given the same chair. Roosevelt had anticipated having a delightful evening because the novelist Winston Churchill (the author of Richard Carvel) was on hand, along with Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont. Together they were sure to provide lively debates on politics and literature. At five-thirty that evening Roosevelt was called away from the veranda to the telephone, one of the few on the island. He was informed that President McKinley had been shot twice at point-blank range while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Burying his head in his hands, Roosevelt was heard to gasp “My God!”

  To think that a wretched little anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, had tried to snuff out America’s twenty-fifth president set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge. Securing the only telephone line on the island for hours, Roosevelt was able to get a message to the hospital in Buffalo. Word of McKinley’s dire plight spread throughout the Fish and Game League crowd and everybody was aghast. Senator Redfield Proctor made a formal announcement which had the effect of nauseating the shocked conservationists even more. “Friends,” he said, “a cloud has fallen over this happy event.”81 A short while later another call arrived, telling Roosevelt that the president was “resting quietly” and that recovery was likely. “Good!” Roosevelt exclaimed, his face relaxing.82

  Announcing the positive news to the guests at the banquet, who listened with bated breath to Roosevelt’s every word, the vice president asked to be excused from the event. Roosevelt’s friend Dr. Webb, who owned the Elfrida, was going to take him to Arrow Point on the mainland near Burlington, where he could take a special train (Engine 108), which pulled the private car of the president of Rutland Railroad to Buffalo. When Roosevelt was asked by a local reporter about the attempted assassination, his face became impassive. Staring straight ahead, with utter stillness as if he were a statue, he said, “I am so inexpressively grieved, shocked, and horrified that I can say nothing.”83

  Nobody knew what Roosevelt thought as his night train traveled across New York state. There are no accounts to describing him as serene or anxious or melancholy. Oddly, this is one of the few historic moments in his life that he himself never recounted. Probably his heart had sunk into his boots, and his mind was reeling like the discord of untuned fiddles, for a collective ominousness held sway over America that e
vening. Had yet another president been killed in his prime? Not since a bullet struck President Garfield twenty years earlier had the nation’s nervous system been given such a jolt. President McKinley’s wound was quite serious; the bullets had penetrated his abdomen, damaging his stomach and pancreas. McKinley had been rushed to Exposition Hospital for immediate surgery. He was then moved to the home of John G. Milburn on Delaware Avenue to rest.

  Arriving in Buffalo in the hush of dawn, catching a morning chill, Roosevelt hurried to McKinley’s bedside where, more or less, he stayed for the next three days. By September 10, President McKinley’s health had vastly improved. The situation didn’t look fatal; it seemed that the president was going to pull through. A very relieved Roosevelt didn’t want to hang around Buffalo any longer (like one of those Cuban land crabs or vultures circling the dead) so he said good-bye and headed for Oyster Bay and then the Adirondacks to reconvene with Edith. Everybody deals with tragedy differently, and Roosevelt now felt the urge to climb Mount Marcy. (Probably the ascent had already been planned and he was getting his itinerary back on track.) Roosevelt knew life was short and he didn’t want to miss his home state’s glorious peak, which had tugged at him since those long-ago campfire readings of Last of the Mohicans. To Roosevelt it was wrong for a governor of New York not to have climbed the great summit. Even though Burroughs had written extensively about his 1863 trek to Mount Marcy, the “sage of Slabsides” had never made it to the top; Roosevelt would do it for him.

  For the first time since Yellowstone Edith agreed to climb a mountain with her husband, exited to see the virgin groves of birch, pine, spruce, and fir. Two of Roosevelt’s eager children—Kermit and Ethel—were also going to make the climb and go swimming in Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. (Alice and Quentin were ill and couldn’t join the family outing.) Roosevelt’s conservationist friend James McNaughton had a hunt club near Mount Marcy in the hamlet of Tahawus which was going to serve as the Roosevelts’ base camp. His family was waiting for Roosevelt at the Tahawus Club when he arrived wet from the rain; the forest was cast in a blue gloom. Clearly, the hike wasn’t going to be a picnic. “The Adirondacks,” Edith complained, “is probably the wettest place in the world.”84

  Two ranger guides had volunteered to lead the Roosevelt family from the Tahawus Club up to the summit dome, where there was a spectacular view of the divide between the Hudson and Saint Lawrence rivers. Also accompanying the Roosevelt party were McNaughton, a governess, and two law students from Harvard. Their first day on the Calamity Brook trail started out golden but turned to slate-gray as they boarded canoes and paddled toward Lake Colden at an elevation of 3,500 feet. There, at lakeside, they lodged in two cabins with, as Edith put it, “miserable little cots.” The next morning, September 13, a pall of fog hung in the air so thick that it was hard to see five yards ahead. The ledges were getting slippery. At this juncture Edith and the children bailed out of the expedition. Theodore had a ranger take them back down to the Tahawus Club. With his family out of harm’s way, Roosevelt, clutching a walking stick, waving the other men forward, grew more determined than ever to reach the summit. If Pinchot could pull it off in a blizzard, surely he could make it in a damp September rain.

  As his correspondence bears out, Roosevelt was in a deeply reflective mood during those grim days since the attempted assassination of President McKinley. Like a falling barometer or a dropping temperature, Roosevelt’s mood had sunk low in Buffalo. He had written Jacob Riis a cryptic letter about losing his youth, saying that at age forty-two he felt a “shadow” coming over him like a dark shroud. Perhaps reaching the summit of Mount Marcy with his companions would help renew his optimistic spirit. After all, how could he not feel uplifted by the sight of wild New York unfurled beneath him, a blanket of green forestlands and long valleys and a pattern of blue lakes for as far as the eye could see. At that high an elevation, where only balsam fir and a few stunted spruce thrived, he could think in an unmuddled way.

  The mountain climber Jon Krakauer, in Into Thin Air, wrote about the out-of-body sensation encountered when one is rubbing up against the “enigma of mortality,” finally reaching a summit after days of difficult climbing. Krakauer’s reward was a glimpse across the “forbidden frontier” of death.85 Somehow 360-degree views from mountaintops, staring at the horizon in a cyclorama, remained the closest humans could get to comprehending the afterlife before the advent of modern aviation. Some climbers have called it a “rush.” To others it’s a “little taste of heaven.” To Roosevelt it was another moment of perfect clarity like the one he had on Mount Katahdin as a young man. For hours he basked in his own romantic profile; he was the explorer hero, at one with the backwoodsman on the trail in a Leatherstocking story at one with Audubon and Thoreau, Boone and Crockett, breathing fast, wondering what had happened to McKinley in Buffalo. He made a personal pact to become a habitué of Mount Marcy—the summit was that inspiring. “Beautiful country!” Roosevelt kept repeating, while standing on a great gray rock at the edge of an anorthosite cliff. “Beautiful country!”

  Once the spell lifted, Roosevelt, his head cleared, started making his way down the mountain with the others. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, President McKinley had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Quite suddenly the vice president was desperately needed in Buffalo; the odds were high that he’d be sworn in as the next American president. The only problem was that nobody knew how to find Roosevelt. The press reported that the vice president was “lost” in nature. The New York Times, for example, headlined its story that day “Hunt over Mountains for Mr. Roosevelt.”86 Only the park ranger who had escorted Edith and the children down the mountain had a true idea of his whereabouts. At one-twenty-five on Friday, September 13, Roosevelt—eating a sandwich while sitting at Tear-of-the-Clouds—was met by a hyperventilating Harrison Hall. He appeared to be waving urgent dispatches from Buffalo. Roosevelt intuited what the message said.87

  Racing down the mountain to rendezvous with his family, his combustible spirit restored, Roosevelt packed his belongings and then headed to the North Creek station. His drafts were now open and his chimney was drawing new air. Like a young giant he had sneaked Mount Marcy in just under the wire.88 Although McKinley had eminent physicians at his bedside, they had failed to detect a gangrenous infection. “For more than twelve suspenseful hours, the nation had no President,” the historian Margaret Leech noted in In the Days of McKinley. “Theodore Roosevelt was speeding on Saturday morning across the breadth of New York State.”89

  At every railroad depot—Albany, Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, and Syracuse—reporters mobbed Roosevelt’s train in search of a quote. He stayed mum. Roosevelt was soon going to be the new president. He arrived in Buffalo at one-thirty PM on September 13, lodging at his friend Ansley Wilcox’s colonial mansion on Delaware Avenue. Every labored last minute had been an hour of agony for poor William McKinley. Roosevelt’s usual good nature and high spirits weren’t on display. He had a distracted look on his face and seemed self-contained. At two-fourteen AM on the morning of September 14, eight days after being shot, McKinley died. For the third time in thirty-six years an American president had been assassinated. A solemn Roosevelt, dressed in a frock coat, a thin gold watch chain hanging out of a pocket, was immediately sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president; the time was three-thirty PM.

  At only forty-two years old Roosevelt had become the youngest president in American history. Oddly, when taking the oath, Roosevelt didn’t swear on a Bible; owing to the constitutional separation of church and state, nobody thought it was necessary. Perhaps his recent moments on top of Mount Marcy had brought him as close to God as he was going to get. And he waved off the military escort, claiming that a couple of mounted policemen were quite enough. An American president, he insisted, didn’t cower when something dreadful happened. Roosevelt, however, understood that the public needed to be reassured that the government was in stable and experienced hands. Immediately, he announced that
all of McKinley’s cabinet officers—John Hay, Lynam Gage, Elihu Root, Philander Knox, and Ethan Hitchcock among them—would be retained. The old McKinley administration would continue to provide all the springs to the government. “I wish to say,” Roosevelt told the press, “that it shall be my aim to continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy laid down by President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our beloved country.”90

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE CONSERVATIONIST PRESIDENT AND THE BULLY PULPIT FOR FORESTRY

  I

  Roosevelt’s wide, toothy smile took on a glint of extra assurance in the last days of September 1901 after he was sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president. Indeed, the forces of destiny seemed to have had a governing hand in his triumphant storybook career. All over Washington, the phrase being bandied about was “Roosevelt luck.” Nobody, it seemed, enjoyed being president more than T.R., even though he had reached the mountaintop of American politics because of an assassin’s gun. In a conversation with the diplomat William vanden Heuvel during the 1970s, Alice Longsworth, Roosevelt’s daughter, was asked about the circumstances of her father’s suddenly learning, in the desolate Adirondacks, about President McKinley’s imminent death. “That must have been a terrible moment of sadness,” vanden Heuvel said. Alice, knowing her father all too well, answered, “Are you kidding?”1