The Wilderness Warrior
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Burroughs consistently defended Roosevelt as a naturalist first and a hunter second. “Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in the Park,” Burroughs wrote. “A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting, and hoped I would teach the President to love the animals as much as I did—as if he did not love them much more, because his love is founded upon knowledge, and because they had been a part of his life. She did not know that I was then cherishing the secret hope that I might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but this fun did not come to me. The President said, ‘I will not fire a gun in the Park; then I shall have no explanations to make.’ Yet once I did hear him say in the wilderness, ‘I feel as if I ought to keep the camp in meat. I always have.’ I regretted that he could not do so on this occasion.”32
Chicago was a highly successful first stop for President Roosevelt on his way to Yellowstone. More than 6,000 people crammed into a downtown Chicago auditorium that had only 5,000 seats. The Halley’s comet known affectionately as Teddy Roosevelt had arrived in the flesh and the Marconi wire was tap-tap-tapping to the world about his visit. Roosevelt passionately defended American hegemony in the Caribbean and an expanded navy, thunderous applause greeting his words.33 To Roosevelt the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t mere diplomatic ornamentation—it was enforceable policy. He received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Chicago, which was rapidly becoming one of the best schools in America.34 Afterward, Roosevelt met with a cheerful group of its students, who sang a specially composed “Dooleyized” song. One verse went:
There is a sturdy gent who is known on every hand:
His smile is like a burst of sun upon a rainy land.
He’ll bluff the Kaiser, shoot a bear, or storm a Spanish fort.
Then sigh for something else to do and write a book on sport.35
Roosevelt’s “sport” on this Great Loop tour was conservation, not hunting. Among the primary concerns on the first leg were the devastated buffalo herds. Soon, the Bronx Zoo would have a herd to return to the prairies, and the president was shopping for a proper geographical spot. Carefully, Roosevelt inquired about the remnant herd living in Yellowstone. Working closely with Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt was eventually able to appropriate $15,000 to help manage the Yellowstone herd; the improved management included shelter buildings. With Buffalo Jones updating him on bison grazing strategies, the president grew excited about the prospect of reintroducing his Bronx Zoo herd to an experimental range in Oklahoma. If the reintroduction worked, it might be possible to create bison ranges in Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, and Montana.
While Roosevelt appreciated Buffalo Jones’s firsthand knowledge of bison, he believed Jones’s report on elks “was all wrong.” Jones was a self-serving old reprobate whose opinions on Yellowstone’s wildlife were usually far off base.36 Accordingly, a determined Roosevelt tried to hand-count every elk in Yellowstone. He wanted near exact numbers. His “very careful” estimate was that there were more than 15,000 elks (a figure much higher than what Buffalo Jones was claiming). As for cougars, Roosevelt—after careful study—determined that they were actually providing a service in the park, keeping the elk herds thinned down to ideal numbers. “The cougar are their only enemies,” Roosevelt noted, “and in many places these big cats, which are quite numerous, are at this season living purely on elk, killing yearlings and an occasional cow; this does no damage; but around the hot springs the cougar are killing deer, antelope and sheep, and in this neighborhood they should certainly be exterminated.”37
In coming years Roosevelt would modify his harsh views about predator control in Yellowstone and elsewhere. He began seeing cougars and other predators as assets to the park’s natural balance. When word got back to the White House in 1906 that Buffalo Jones planned to hunt sixty-five cougars in Yellowstone, Roosevelt surprised Jones by nixing the idea. “I do not think anymore cougar (mountain lions) should be killed in the park,” Roosevelt wrote to the superintendent. “Game is abundant. We want to profit by what has happened in the English preserves, where it proved bad for the grouse itself to kill off all the peregrine falcons and all the other birds of prey. It may be advisable, in case the ranks of the deer and antelope right around the Springs should be too heavily killed out, to kill some of the cougar there, but in the rest of the park I certainly would not kill any of them. On the contrary, they ought to be left alone.”38 Before leaving the White House, in 1908, Roosevelt banned the killing of cougars in Yellowstone.39 (This didn’t stop him, however, from encouraging his sons and nephew to hunt cougars around the Grand Canyon when he was an ex-president in 1913.)
During the two spring weeks President Roosevelt was in Yellowstone, and the sheets of ice in the tree-lined rivers were cracking, he wrote a series of long reports to Merriam on how the springtime wildlife was faring. After hiking footpaths, Roosevelt made detailed zoological descriptions of antelope near Gardiner, Montana, and bighorn sheep in Yellowstone Canyon, Wyoming. As if trying to out-naturalist even Burroughs, Roosevelt made Audubonist studies of golden eagles and water ouzels. And while Roosevelt’s gun may have been locked up by the U.S. Army, nothing prevented him from collecting a meadow vole for the Biological Survey. These tiny rodents were among the world’s most fertile mammals; females were capable of producing three to ten pups every three weeks. Roosevelt, using his hat as a net, scooped one up and skinned it. Unfortunately, his arsenic can was back at Sagamore Hill. “I send you a small tribute, in the shape of a skin with the attached skull, of a microtus [pennsylvania], a male, taken out of the lower geyser basin, National Park, Wyoming, April 8, 1903,” the president wrote to Merriam. “Its length, head and body, was 4.5 inches, tail to tip, 1.3 inches, of which .2 were the final hairs. The hind foot was .7 of an inch. I had nothing to put on the skin but salt.”40
While Roosevelt was studying birds and animals (and even evidence of insects), Burroughs was analyzing Homo sapiens Roosevelti. Since leaving Union Station in the District of Columbia, and all through the Midwest, while Roosevelt was giving stirring speeches in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, a watchful Burroughs was keeping copious notes. What amazed Burroughs most was how cordial Roosevelt was to everybody he met, offering good fellowship, firmly shaking people’s hands as if he were a next-door neighbor handing out free Farmer’s Almanacs. His hail-fellow-well-met routine was paying dividends. The trip seemed less like a presidential tour than a triumphant homecoming for a native son. “He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he went,” Burroughs noted. “He could easily match their Western cordiality and good-fellowship.” 41
It seemed that Roosevelt treated the citizens of North Dakota especially warmly. Every old ranch foreman in the state was offered red-carpet hospitality. Roosevelt truly admired these rural folks. North Dakotans never complained about working long hours or giving a neighbor free help. And the unbounded hills and plains hadn’t been spoiled by industrialization. Somehow the children of North Dakota seemed purer than children back east, whose heads were filled with false ideas of what constituted success in America. To Burroughs, in fact, it seemed as if Roosevelt were from North Dakota, as if the yeomen planting crops and the village merchants selling wares were somehow his kinfolk.
As his constant companion, with time to while away, Roosevelt regaled Burroughs with stories about western characters he loved, including Hell-Roaring Bill Jones and Hash-Knife Joe. At Saint Paul, Seth Bullock joined the Roosevelt party for a few days of travel. Once they reached Yellowstone, Roosevelt borrowed a sure-footed gray Third Cavalry stallion while Burroughs, hampered by arthritis, rode in a carriage (or ambulance, as he jokingly called it) pulled by two mules. Burroughs had a wild ride because the team got spooked and took off running. Off they went to Mammoth Hot Springs, which Burroughs later described as “the devil’s frying pan.” Roosevelt sported khaki pants, puttees, a black jacket, and a tan Stetson hat. Burroughs still wore his dark suit—a fashionista from the Wh
itman catalog of refined dishevelment. Shedding the Secret Service and newspapermen, they explored caves, spied songbirds, inspected pinecones, and studied topographical aberrations. “He craved once more to be alone with nature,” Burroughs wrote, “he was evidently hungry for the wild and the aboriginal.”42
Burroughs understood that America had a lot of weather-vane politicians, but Roosevelt, particularly when it came to conservation, wasn’t one of them. He understood that natural resource management was the imperative! He understood why species needed to be saved, if only for aesthetic purposes! And nobody Burroughs had ever met knew more about birds. “Surely,” Burroughs wrote, “this man is the rarest kind of a sportsman.” When it came to conservation, Burroughs understood that Roosevelt was “the most vital man on the continent, if not on the planet, today.”43
One of the oddest aspects of Roosevelt’s trip to Yellowstone was the vigorously enforced ban against journalists. The president wanted sixteen days off from work to study the abundant wildlife without being pestered by reporters. Both Roosevelt and Burroughs wanting to be like old antelopes, straying from the herd of humans. Their headquarters were at Major Pitcher’s house, but several U.S. Army camps were also set up deep in the wilderness (but not too far from established roads) so Roosevelt and Burroughs could commune with the outdoors without signs of irritating civilization. Only matters of utmost national importance would be conveyed to Roosevelt through his personal secretary William Loeb, Jr. (whose railway car, Elysian, the “rolling White House,” had been unhitched in Cinnabar, Montana). Burroughs was suffering from a head cold, coughing and sneezing, but he gamely trooped onward into the wild with Roosevelt, sleeping in the springtime snow a few miles from Major Pitcher’s house.
On April 11, the Times, in a mistaken rush to judgment, ran a bogus story under the headline “President Kills Lion in Yellowstone Park” (presumably, he had killed it with his pistol).44 Because cougars weren’t protected in Yellowstone, the Times concluded that the president hadn’t violated any regulations; he had merely blasted a feline varmint. But the entire story was fabricated: a scoop-hungry reporter had used an unreliable source. When he heard of it, President Roosevelt was livid, because he had worked so hard to avoid giving the impression that he was hunting in Yellowstone. Instead, with Burroughs at his side, Roosevelt had hoped to emphasize his preservationist side. But he could hardly go after the New York Times. It was his hometown newspaper, and it had long promoted his political and literary careers. In an article titled “President on the Move,” the Times clarified the earlier story, explaining that Buffalo Jones—the apparent source—had offered to go cougar hunting with Roosevelt but the president had “declined the offer.” 45
Nearly every day thereafter, the Times, covering Roosevelt as best it could from Cinnabar, Montana, would assure readers that the president had “shot no game.” By not hunting, Roosevelt was showing that he was a reformed sportsman, that nature could be enjoyed for its own sake. In fact, all Roosevelt and Burroughs hunted for in Yellowstone were voles for the Biological Survey. They also explored the Yellowstone and Lamar rivers; analyzed the shaped balconies and terraces of porcelain-like travertine at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner; camped near Old Tower Fall Soldiers Station; pondered the great assemblage of petrified wood; rode sleighs to the Upper Geyser Basin; and even tried skiing around the Norris Hotel. What surprised Burroughs was the bizarre erosion to be studied in this patch of Wyoming: aeolian, biological, fluvial, lateral, and sheet were just some of the conditions. You needed a geological textbook to decipher the cycles of erosion, and to differentiate between piping (badlands erosion) and residual boulder (weathered in place). It was a little too much, so he turned to flowers. “I even saw a wild flower,” Burroughs wrote, “an early buttercup, not an inch high—in bloom. This seems to be the earliest wild flower in the Rockies. It is the only fragrant buttercup I know.” 46
Spending so much time hiking together, the two naturalists talked about Merriam, who, for all of his God-given talent, had yet to produce a first-rate American zoological book. But Roosevelt believed that gossip was a black art, akin to blasphemy. If one talked badly about friends behind their back, then one had an obligation to tell them to their face. That was the honor code, he believed, of a “real” man. Therefore Roosevelt’s letter to Merriam on April 22 can best be classified as tough love, and a long-deferred goad, putting his thirty-year friendship with the biologist on the line:
Both John Burroughs and I agree that it is very lamentable that you will not produce a really big book. John Burroughs gives me permission to quote him. He says—I entirely agree with him—that you are in danger of taking your place among those men of great natural power and enormous industry, who collect innumerable facts but are somehow never able to do the work of generalization and condensation—that is, to build a structure out of the heap of bricks. It is an awful thing to generalize hastily, and not to pay proper heed to the need of accumulating masses of material. But where one meets a genuine master in his profession—and such I esteem you—it is a loss to the world if he fails to put his discoveries in durable, in abiding, form. This is exactly what I fear will be the case with you. To publish quantities of little pamphlets is merely to take rank with the thousands of small and industrious German specialists. You have it in your power to write the great monumental work on the mammals of North America, including their life histories. If you put it off too long, you will never do it. And if you wait until you are sure you have exhausted the resources of trinomial nomenclature on very obscure shrew or fieldmouse from Florida to Oregon, you will also have to postpone your work indefinitely; for I firmly believe that after you and I are dead there will still be ample opportunity for industrious collectors to secure “new forms” and “probably valid species” from almost any region which it is thought worth while minutely to investigate. But the labors of ten thousand such would not equal one production of a book by you on the lines I have indicated.47
IV
Roosevelt’s visit to Yellowstone culminated on April 24, when he laid the cornerstone for a basaltic stone railroad archway near the Northern Pacific Railroad depot at Gardiner, Montana. Architecturally similar in style to the Old Faithful and Canyon hotels, the Roosevelt Arch, as it became known, was twenty feet wide and thirty feet high. It looked as if it belonged on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Carved above the keystone was a phrase Roosevelt fancied: “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People.” Smaller plaques read “Yellowstone National Park” and “Created by Act of Congress March 1, 1872.” Approximately 3,500 people were on hand for the dedication, inducing a group of local Masons, who presented him with a Montana gold nugget mounted on a plaque.48 In the cornerstone, the Masons also deposited their grand lodge papers, some local newspapers, a handful of rare coins, photos, a King James Bible, and a brief history of Yellowstone.49
“The Yellowstone Park,” Roosevelt said in his dedication, “is something unique in this world, as far as I know. Nowhere else in any civilized country is there to be found such a tract of veritable wonderland, made accessible to all visitors, where at the same time not only the scenery of the wilderness, but the wild creatures of the Park are scrupulously preserved as they are here, the only change being that these same wild creatures have been so carefully protected as to show literally astounding tameness.”50
With John Burroughs and Major Pitcher sitting behind him on the platform, Roosevelt offered his own impromptu reflections on the American West, and thanked locals for his tremendous “two-week holiday” in Yellowstone. In what the historian Aubrey L. Haines described as a “rambling speech,” Roosevelt talked about buffalo breeding, forest protection, water conservation, and the geological sites that made Yellowstone unique. With a palpable sense of urgency, he warned coming generations to protect Yellowstone from the scars of ore pits and mine tailings—also, forest fires had to be prevented, or fought when they did occur. Flattering the crowd, Roosevelt conveyed his full confidence in
their stewardship of a glorious natural setting straight from the hands of God. He praised Montanans, Idahoans, and Wyomingites for their wise protectionist ethics. “I like the country,” Roosevelt said in a crowd-pleasing line reported in the Times. “But above all I like the men and women.”51
A few weeks later, Forest and Stream magazine published Roosevelt’s speech in its entirety. In his talk, Roosevelt had driven home the point that national parks were “essential democracy” at work. America’s treasures, like Yellowstone, had to be safeguarded from vandals and exploiters. Here was a place for city dwellers to restore themselves. The president lamented that Europeans were flocking to see Yellowstone more excitedly than Americans. He said that the United States needed to become “awake to its beauties.” And he praised the successes of the wildlife protection movement in the park.
“Here all the wild creatures of the old days are being preserved,” he said, “and their overflow into the surrounding country, means that the people of the surrounding country, so long as they see that the laws are observed by all, will be able to insure to themselves and to their children and to their children’s children, much of the old-time pleasure of the hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter of the wilderness.”52
It was a bittersweet occasion for Roosevelt when, bound for Saint Louis, he had to say good-bye to Montana and part company with Oom John (who was going to Spokane for a prearranged lecture) at the Gardiner arch on April 25.53 Their wonderful times together in the open air were over. As a parting gesture, Roosevelt rallied to Burroughs’s defense against a cheap shot at him in the latest issue of Forest and Stream. Either in a fit of jealous pique for having been excluded from the Yellowstone trip or, more likely, simply as a result of editorial misjudgment, George Bird Grinnell had run a cruel, devastating personal attack on Burroughs in the magazine. Angrily, Roosevelt responded that Burroughs was a true man, a saint of the woods, a human being of breathtaking sincerity and a naturalist of unparalleled skills. Whitman had once said that Burroughs was “in a sense almost a miracle.” For weeks, Roosevelt and Burroughs had observed deer, elk, wild geese, wild mice, chickadees, and red squirrels. Together they had laughed at the jargoning Canadian jays (or camp robbers, as Burroughs called them) in the mornings and watched the sun set over the Yellowstone River gorges at dusk. They had inhaled the fragrance of scattered pines and had been silenced for hours by the beauty of secluded valleys. Now, in Grinnell’s magazine, in an article written by someone in New Hampshire who wrote under the name “Hermit,” slammed Burroughs—of all people—as a bad naturalist.*54