Meanwhile, in preparation for seeing the Pacific Northwest and California forestlands for the first time, Roosevelt dashed off a note to Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the “lumber king,” known for his entrepreneurial acumen and zealous, ruinous de-timbering. Weyerhaeuser, who slurred his Edwardian w’s into Bismarckian v’s when speaking English, had emigrated from Germany at the age of eighteen to work as a day laborer in Erie, Pennsylvania. To him, America was the land of promises where the bold prevailed. He learned the lumber business from the ground up. He acquired his first sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1857, and began building a timber empire in the heavily forested Pacific Northwest. Determined to amass a fortune, he clear-cut every tree in sight without the slightest concern over deforestation. Obviously, he had never read Man and Nature. In his blinkered outlook, money mattered more than anything else in life. Where others saw a redwood tree or an old-growth hemlock, Weyerhaeuser saw boards and planks and, behind them, dollar signs.
In early 1903, Congressman Lacey had mentioned to Roosevelt that Weyerhaeuser was starting to come around, that he was becoming a forest reserve advocate of sorts, and that he was an untapped potential arborist. Intrigued, Roosevelt wanted to initiate a dialogue with Weyerhaeuser on the ticklish issue of reduced logging, and on the conservationist ethics of Southern Lumber Company: planting a tree for every one chopped down. “Could you come down here sometime next week so I can see you with Mr. Gifford Pinchot?” Roosevelt wrote to Weyerhaeuser on March 5. “I should like to talk over some forestry matters with a practical lumberman. I earnestly desire that the movement for the preservation of the forests shall come from the lumbermen themselves.”4
When Roosevelt wrote to John Burroughs about his forthcoming Great Loop trip that March, however, the letter was devoid cougar hunting in Yellowstone, or courting timber barons from Minnesota. Instead, Roosevelt said he wanted to “see,” in liberal measure, the elk herds and mountain goats. And he was eager to see the geysers in winter. This was slightly disingenuous of Roosevelt, and further evidence of how skittish the fiasco of the Mississippi bear hunt had made him. Somewhat defensively, however, Roosevelt raised the specter of hunting in his long letter to Burroughs. The novelist Charles Dudley Warner, best remembered for coining the term “gilded age” in a novel of that title cowritten with Mark Twain, had also written an American outdoors classic in the 1870s: The Hunter of the Deer and Other Essays. Because Warner—a longtime columnist for Harper’s Magazine and first President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters—had died in 1900, many of his earlier literary efforts were being reissued in his memory. When Burroughs told Roosevelt how excellent the Warner hunting essays were, the president unctuously doused his enthusiasm. “I think you praise overmuch for its fidelity to life Charles Dudley Warner’s admirable little tract on deer hunting,” Roosevelt wrote. “[It] was an excellent little tract against summer hunting and the killing of does when the fawns are young. It is not an argument against hunting generally, for as Nature is organized, to remove all checks to the multiplication of a species merely means that every multiplication itself in a few years operates as a most disastrous check by producing an epidemic of disease or starvation.”5
What triggered Roosevelt’s letter was a hard-hitting article that Burroughs had recently written in the Atlantic Monthly, “Real and Sham Natural History.” Twenty years before, Burroughs had pleaded in Scribner’s Monthly that poets stop depicting wildlife falsely; they should instead follow the romantic Whitman’s fine naturalist example.6 Now the usually mild-mannered Burroughs lit into Ernest Thompson Seton for completely fabricating bizarre species behaviors in Wild Animals I Have Known: Seton had claimed that foxes contemplated suicide, and that deer had sensitive humanlike feelings. What perturbed Burroughs was that Seton advertised his encounters with animals as nonfiction. This purported zoology book wasn’t natural history but fable. “There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record that match his,” Burroughs wrote. “Such dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows, as he has known, it is safe to say, no other person in the world has ever known.”7
Roosevelt, on reading this article, hurled himself into the fray. On the Executive Mansion’s letterhead, Roosevelt wrote Seton a punishing note, haranguing him and challenging him to cough up his facts for the Biological Survey.8 “Burroughs and the people at large don’t know how many facts you have back of your stories,” Roosevelt wrote to Seton. “You must publish your facts.”9 Seton, wanting no part of the “bully-boy” Roosevelt (at least in public), wisely stayed mute. Burroughs actually began to feel some pity for Seton, whose ego was shattered and whose literary reputation was taking a pummeling. And Seton, to his credit, took Burroughs and Roosevelt’s charges to heart; he later published the scrupulously accurate Life Histories of Northern Animals and Lives of Game Animals. Both are fine, highly readable zoological contributions to the American naturalist canon.10 Eventually, after bumping into Seton at an ostentatious literary party hosted by Andrew Carnegie, Burroughs decided he liked Seton. “He behaved finely and asked to sit next to me at dinner,” Burroughs wrote to his son. “He quite won my heart.”11
Another of Burroughs’s “nature fakers” was Reverend William Long, who had an advanced degree in divinity from Heidelberg University in Germany. Long, who believed in the power of pets to heal the tormented soul, was a popular pastor at First Congressional Church in Stamford, Connecticut, and the author of some celebrated children’s books, including Ways of Wood Folk and Fowls in the Air. A zealous anti-Darwinist, he held that animals’ knowledge was based on parental training within each species. Picking apart Long’s false descriptions about how robins feed their young, Burroughs called the pastor a deliberate liar. And robins were the least of it. Long also claimed to have seen a woodcock mend its broken leg by making a clay and grass cast for itself. “Why should anyone palm off such stuff on an unsuspecting public as veritable natural history?” Burroughs asked in the Atlantic Monthly. “When a man, writing or speaking of his own experience, says without qualification that he has seen a thing, we are expected to take him at his word.”12
Long came to his own defense that May in the North American Review, arguing that wildlife observation was inexact and diverse enough that no one man—not even le grand John Burroughs—had the status to say what was true or false with such arrogant definitiveness. Roosevelt was incensed beyond words by this rejoinder. He wanted to go to war, publicly, with both Seton and Long. He wrote to Burroughs a defense of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, which were labeled correctly as fiction. And he launched into an academic discussion with Burroughs that included his views on domestic dogs first introduced to a Pacific Island; differences between the Falkland and the artic fox; polar bears versus black bears; and Lewis and Clark meeting grizzlies. Roosevelt wanted to convey his support for his friend Oom John in this controversy. He ended the letter by asking Burroughs to accompany him to Yellowstone in April. “I would see,” the president wrote, “that you endured neither fatigue or hardship.” 13
Even though the idea of killing cougars to protect elks had a certain merit, it was a biologically naive practice, and a backward view of the predators’ role in the ecological order. Furthermore, Roosevelt was right to be concerned about damaging his reputation by hunting anything in Yellowstone. He himself viewed hunting as a pastime of great natural and spiritual value, but an increasing number of Americans saw it as a violent vacation. Moreover, the notion of the commander in chief as exterminator in chief at Yellowstone wasn’t going to play well with the president’s newfound “teddy bear” constituency.14 Realizing that the cougars weren’t a dire threat, Roosevelt decided that “the elk were evidently too numerous for the feed,” and the cougars were not “doing any damage.”15 Suddenly, Roosevelt’s philosophy became that the cougars in Yellowstone should be left alone. They were, after all, part of the natural balance. Most likely, Roosevelt had known all along that cougars weren’t a real problem in Yellowstone; he had just
wanted to hunt them for fun. To his credit, when this rationalization broke down, Roosevelt was intellectually honest enough not to hunt the cougars.
Nevertheless, it was becoming painfully obvious to the naturalist community—especially to those like Muir and Underwood, who respected Roosevelt’s Harvard training and his knowledge of species traits and coloration—that the president had a blood lust. For all of his promotion of Kodaks, Roosevelt preferred shooting a rifle to clicking a camera. And the president never really disputed this characterization, though he grew tired of continually having to explain himself to animal-rights types such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain.
Roosevelt, however, had little difficulty in justifying his seemingly paradoxical attitude toward wildlife. Yes, he revered the mountain lion, yet he thrilled to see one treed by his dogs. Roosevelt reconciled his own proclivities by drawing no distinctions between himself and any other forest predator. Nonhunters could indulge in the fantasy that they existed outside the biotic community, as either passive observers or omniscient masters. And yet, most of them ate meat. Hunters shattered this conceit by participating directly in ecological cycles of life and death. The act of hunting forced a re-reckoning of the relationship between the human and natural worlds, and in that sense it was more intellectually honest than all the bleatings of its vociferous critics. Nevertheless, Roosevelt’s penchant for the chase was troublesome to his friends in the preservationist community, and has made him a frustrating and somewhat equivocal figure in much of modern environmental history.16
II
On March 15 the New York Times announced President Roosevelt’s Great Loop tour, with a hint that he might hunt in Montana or Wyoming. From Washington D.C., Roosevelt would travel to Chicago, Milwaukee, La Crosse, Madison, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Sioux Falls, Yankton, Mitchell, and Aberdeen before reaching the town of Edgeley in his beloved North Dakota. In Fargo, he planned to deliver a major address on American policy toward the Philippines; it was a gift to his favorite state. On April 7 he would greet well-wishers in Jamestown, Bismarck, Mandan, and then Medora. With Burroughs at his side, he would then take the “Roosevelt Special”—six opulently appointed railway cars provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad—to the northern entrance of Yellowstone, where his party would camp from April 8 to 24. From Wyoming, he would backtrack to Saint Louis to dedicate the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Grounds in commemoration of the bicentennial of Jefferson’s acquisition from France. He would then head to the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles and Yosemite to be with Muir. Next he would make campaign-like appearances in a string of major cities along the Pacific Coast before finally returning to the White House. The conductor for the trip would be Roosevelt’s friend William H. Johnson, who had taken him to Mississippi in 1902.17
The following day the Times announced that John Burroughs had officially accepted the president’s offer to accompany him to Yellowstone. What intrigued Burroughs most about Roosevelt was that he envinced “radical Americanism” while being a “thoroughgoing naturalist”—nobody else was doing that.18 Because Oom John wouldn’t have tolerated a cougar hunt (it was supposed), the president quashed the idea altogether; he would instead act as naturalist in chief. Yellowstone’s superintendent, Major Pitcher, issued a stern statement declaring that the president’s gun would be sealed by the U.S. Army when he entered the park, just as with every other citizen.19 In 1903 the U.S. Army, not the Department of the Interior, ran Yellowstone. “I do not know when the trip will be,” Roosevelt said, “but I think it will be just as soon as the Senate adjourns. It is doubtful whether there will be any hunting.” 20
Word that President Roosevelt was headed to Yellowstone with the famous naturalist Burroughs drew a sharp backlash from the pro-timber crowd. Governor DeForest Richards of Wyoming denounced Roosevelt as a crazy forest reserve elitist, claiming that his state would work to undermine the president at the coming national Republican convention. (Richards, however, died a few weeks later of acute kidney disease.21) Westerners associated with the railroad industry never forgave Roosevelt for his conservation activism in the 1890s when the Boone and Crockett Club campaigned to make the park off-limits to commercial exploitation. But Senator Clarence Clark of Wyoming quickly came to Roosevelt’s defense: the colonel who had led a charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War would be welcome at Yellowstone anytime, night or day. “The people of Wyoming have the most implicit confidence, not only in President Roosevelt personally, but in the wisdom of his Administration,” Clark said. “They believe that he knows them, and has a personal interest in the welfare of the State.” 22
Roosevelt and Burroughs together at Yellowstone National Park.
T.R. and Burroughs near geyser. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Even before Roosevelt’s train left Washington, the newspapers were abuzz with gossip about his working vacation. In Washington state a silly tug-of-war developed over whether the president would speak in Seattle or Tacoma.23 By contrast, the machinists’ union in Kansas City asked that Roosevelt not come near their town, as he had done nothing in the White House to help their cause. A group of Texans lamented that Roosevelt was skipping Forth Worth and Amarillo on his way to the Grand Canyon. While Roosevelt was in Arizona, fifty Rough Riders planned to present him with a live black bear, captured in Mexico.24 The stockmen of the Front Range of the Rockies announced that when Roosevelt’s train arrived in Hugo, Colorado, he would be greeted by 200 cowboys in full range regalia shouting “Bully!”25 Administrators at Yosemite National Park planned to shoot fireworks into the night sky on the president’s arrival.26 Bored reporters took the time to calculate the impressive figures for Roosevelt’s trip: sixty-six days, 14,000 miles, averaging 212 miles a day. He would deliver more than 260 stump speeches and five major addresses. Roosevelt’s party would cross every mainland mountain range between the Poconos and the San Gabriels. “With the exception of a fortnight in the Yellowstone region and a few days in the Yosemite,” the New York Times noted, “he will be pretty steadily in motion.”27
As departure day neared, Roosevelt acted like a schoolchild anticipating summer vacation. Elated about visiting twenty-five states and showing Oom John the incomparable geysers of Yellowstone, Roosevelt was the happiest he had been in years, in truly high spirits. “I am overjoyed that you can go,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs. “When I get to Yosemite I shall spend four days with John Muir. Much though I shall enjoy that, I shall enjoy far more spending the two weeks in the Yellowstone with you. I doubt if there is anywhere else in the world such a stretch of wild country in which the native wild animals have become so tame, and I look forward to being with you when we see the elk, antelope, and mountain sheep at close quarters. Bring pretty warm clothes, but that is all. Everything else will be provided in the park.”28
III
Uninterested in lobbying Roosevelt for anything, Burroughs had accepted the president’s offer as a chance to better educate himself about Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain wildlife. “I had known the President several years before he became famous, and we had had some correspondence on subjects of natural history,” Burroughs wrote. “His interest in such themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see and study in its semi-domesticated condition the great game which he had so often hunted during his ranch days; and he was kind enough to think it would be an additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like myself. For my own part, I knew nothing about big game, but I knew there was no man in the country with whom I should so like to see it as Roosevelt.” 29
On April 1 the president’s train left Union Station with Burroughs on board, and headed for Pennsylvania’s famous Horseshoe Curve—near Altoona—in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. Just before his departure, Roosevelt had written to Dr. Merriam of the Bureau of Biological Survey asking for up-to-date information about the Shoshones, Sioux, Hopi, Apache, and other western tribes. Roosevelt said he
would be most grateful if Merriam could put together a box of books, articles, and reports on Native Americans. The esteemed biologist quickly complied with the president’s request. Knowing that Merriam was an Indian rights activist, Roosevelt hoped to educate himself about the shabby conditions on the reservations. “In cases where you can do so without interfering with your biological survey work, I should be glad to have you secure for me reliable information concerning the present condition, necessities, and treatment by Government agents of such Reservation and non-Reservation Indians as you may meet,” Roosevelt wrote. “Show this to any Government officials as your warrant for inquiry; I shall expect them to give you all possible facilities to find out the facts deemed of interest to me.”30
In essence Roosevelt seemed to be offering a quid pro quo to Merriam: Roosevelt’s chief biologist would provide him with pertinent information on Native Americans while he, in turn, sent status reports back to Washington, D.C., on the Yellowstone cougars, elks, and buffalo. The reports would contain no skins or claws, however: the president would not be exercising his powder finger. As Burroughs confirmed in his 1905 book Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt, the president refrained from hunting in or around Yellowstone, taking only field observations and photographs. That didn’t protect Burroughs from being teased by his friends. “The other night I met at dinner that fine old John Burroughs,” the novelist and editor William Dean Howells wrote to C. E. Norton that April, “whom I congratulated on his going out to Yellowstone to hold bears for the president to kill.” 31
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