The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  What a thrill it was for President Roosevelt to see his Maltese cabin at the North Dakota display at the fair! Although it was just an ordinary log cabin, it had been carefully dismantled, shipped to Saint Louis, and then reconstructed to look exactly as it did from 1883 to 1886. Two pairs of Sunday trousers, an old straw hat, and high hunting boots once belonging to Roosevelt were put on display. Tourists came to study the ranch brand burned onto one of the logs. Capitalizing on Roosevelt’s famous Badlands hunts, expertly hammered onto the side of the cabin were perfectly mounted speciments of the deer, elk, eagle, fox, and owl. Besides his own frontier house, a childhood cabin of Lincoln and a dwelling constructed by Grant before the Civil War had also been erected as attractions at the fair; this was exactly the Republican presidential company Roosevelt liked to keep.60

  During the four-month wait between his reelection in November 1904 and the inaugural ceremony in March 1905, Roosevelt, who reaffirmed his belief in the Monroe Doctrine in tough words, also stayed busy with conservation. President Charles William Eliot of Harvard University, for example, had published John Gilley, Maine Farmer and Fisherman for the Christmas season, and Roosevelt promoted it enthusiastically. Gilley was in the rough-hewn American tradition, like Seth Green, Paul Kroegel, and William Sprinkle—so Eliot had produced the very type Roosevelt wanted to hire to defend forests, wildlife, natural wonders, scenic vistas, and waterways.61

  Roosevelt also meditated, that holiday season, on deer and wolves. Predictably, he had an explicit desire to hunt bear on the outskirts of Yellowstone now that its bear population was increasing. When a discussion turned to national parks Roosevelt, drawing on his 1903 trip with Burroughs, objected fiercely to ever allowing “sheepmen, cattlemen, or any other transgressors” into them.62 Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s old ranchhand Bill Merrifield came to see him at the White House one afternoon, shedding his ranchman garb in favor of “a severely correct frock coat, cravat, and top hat.” The two men swapped stories for hours about 1880s North Dakota; Roosevelt’s chief concern was that this simple, humble plainsmen felt comfortable as if in the “people’s house.”

  New animals were continually being added to the Roosevelt family menagerie, and to lull his children to sleep at night the president would read them The Deerslayer out loud. An expansive renovation was also under way at Sagamore Hill: Grant La Farge was helping the president redesign the house to look like a Kenyan hunting lodge.63 And Roosevelt began strategizing about how best to save the Alaskan seal rookeries from British and Japanese fur hunters in the Bering Sea. Every time he read of entire seal colonies being slaughtered, pain struck his heart. The secretary of state, John Hay, was doing his best to get Britain to forgo seal hunting within a sixty-mile radius of the Pribilof Islands and to shorten the hunt seasons. Unfortunately, Hay’s negotiations weren’t going well.64 Roosevelt began haranguing the specially formed Bering Sea Tribunal to ban “seal killing” during the spring breeding season. How could Great Britain consider itself a civilized country, Roosevelt fumed, when Britons slaughtered “nursing mother seals on the high sea?”65

  One of President Roosevelt’s first significant postelection acts was to transfer the federal forest reserves from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry on February 1, 1905. This had been Gifford Pinchot’s dream since 1898. On March 3, with Inauguration Day approaching, the Bureau of Forestry was renamed the Forest Service. Roosevelt had two major reasons for going along with Pinchot’s transfer plan: the GLO was filled with pro-business appointees who knew nothing about scientific forestry, and the centralization of the GLO caused long delays in issuing grazing, mining, and lumbering permits to regional reserve users.66

  Unlike his boss, Roosevelt, Pinchot was interested in forest administration rather than wildlife protection per se. Wise use of timber resources was his objective. Pinchot, in fact, was extremely hesitant to regulate game animals on the forest reserves (which were yet again renamed National Forests in 1907) for fear of infringing on states’ rights and giving western critics such as Senator Mitchell of Oregon reasons to disband the reserves by congressional legislation. This utilitarian attitude regarding forests made Pinchot the bane of Roosevelt’s friends who favored wildlife protection, such as Muir, Burroughs, Hornaday, and Finley. According to Pinchot’s “The Use Book”—rules and regulations for rangers to follow—the Forest Service offices would “cooperate with game wardens of the State or Territory in which they serve.” A couple of years later Pinchot made this perfectly clear by means of a provision in the Agricultural Appropriations Act of 1907: “hereafter officials of the Forest Service shall, in all ways that are practicable, aid in the enforcement of the laws of the States or Territories with regard to…the protection of fish and game.”67 Yet Roosevelt didn’t believe only in Pinchot’s notion that national forests were to be mainly conserved, not preserved. For Roosevelt, always interested in animals, the forests were also “cradles of wildlife.”68

  V

  As Inauguration Day, March 4, neared, Roosevelt received the best gift imaginable from sixty-seven-year-old John Hay (still serving as secretary of state), short of saving Alaska’s seals or naming yet another elk after him. Hay, who was seriously ill, presented Roosevelt with his precious Lincoln hair-ring. The connotations of this gentlemanly gift brought Roosevelt to tears, especially since Hay had sometimes belittled him. Hay, who was a friend of Roosevelt’s father, had also been Lincoln’s loyal personal assistant. When Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth and was brought across the street to the Petersen House, the attending doctor had clipped locks of hair from the dying president’s head. Hay somehow inherited them and made a special ring with the hairs set like a diamond. “Please wear it to-morrow,” Hay had written Roosevelt in his presentation note; “you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.”

  Moved by Hay’s gesture, Roosevelt wrote back that he was wearing the ring and would do so when taking the oath of office on March 4. (Later, Roosevelt claimed to have encountered Lincoln’s ghost a few times in the White House corridors.69) The ring was a farewell gesture. On July 1 Hay died at his summer home in Newbury, New Hampshire, from what doctors believed to be a pulmonary embolism. His death was harder for Roosevelt to absorb than the assassination of McKinley. Without delay, however, Roosevelt appointed the intensely loyal Elihu Root to be Hay’s replacement at the State Department. It was an inspired choice, for in the coming years Root would successfully remove the consular service from the “spoils system” by placing it under the direction of the Civil Service, maintain the “open door” policy in the Far East, help create the Central American Court of Justice, and eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912.

  Roosevelt’s inauguration parade of March 4, 1905, was quite a spectacle. In the presidential stand 1,200 dignitaries from all over the world sat arm-to-arm. A light blanket of snow was draped over the White House, creating a fine, calming white hush. The half inch of snow wasn’t enough to create serious problems.70 In fact, a mild front had blown into town, making Washington pleasant though still cold. Once again, Roosevelt was lucky. Acting as the impresario for his own inauguration, he had imported the heroic staff figures from the Saint Louis world’s fair representing colorful pioneers, plainsmen, and scouts.71 At his request, thirty Rough Riders strode next to him as his special guard throughout the day. Representatives from every state and territory participated in Roosevelt’s gala parade. Bands blared and boys’ glee clubs sang. More than 2,000 American flags were handed out by the War Department so they could be waved by onlookers as the parade went by. A cold northwest wind swept through Washington, but throngs of sunburned cowboys from Texas and Oklahoma arrived to cheer Colonel Roosevelt.

  At Roosevelt’s request $2,000 from the inaugural planning committee’s kitty had been appropriated to bring six renowned Native Americans to participate in the parade. They were the chiefs Geronimo (Apache), Buckskin Charlie (Ute), Little Plume (Black
foot), America Horse (Brule Sioux), Hollow Horn Bear (Rosebud Sioux) and Quanah Parker (Comanche).72 Quanah, in a traditional costume, saluted the president flatteringly as the “Great White Chief,” initiating a lifelong friendship. Roosevelt promised Quanah—whom he admired greatly—that they would soon hunt wolves together in Oklahoma’s Big Pasture–Wichita Mountains. But for the time being, Roosevelt hoped the six chiefs would enjoy themselves in their capital city.

  Old Seth Bullock—“the Captain”—Roosevelt’s conservationist protector of the Black Hills forest reserve, arrived in Washington, bringing with him the best broncos from Nebraska and cayuse ponies from South Dakota to march in the grand event. From Bullock’s perspective Roosevelt was the only president to understand the American West. For people from the rangelands, riding in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade had replaced Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as the highest honor. Cleverly, Bullock had asked the cowboy star Tom Mix to ride at his side, causing the girls in the audience to scream with delight. Roosevelt was so naturally close to Bullock that they “spoke” in sidelong looks, understanding everything in a mere glance. Following the parade Roosevelt appointed Bullock the U.S. marshal for South Dakota.73 “Seth Bullock is really a big fellow,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted. “He belongs to the Viking age just as much as Harold Hardraade, or Olaf the Glorious, or Gisli Soursop. If ever I went to war I should want him as colonel of a rough rider regiment.” 74

  Perhaps the most fitting symbol of the inaugural parade wasn’t on the official itinerary. A few Washingtonians, it turned out, had gathered tree limbs and branches from nearby woods in Maryland. Setting up souvenir stands along the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route, these “big sticks” went for ten cents apiece, complete with an inaugural verification card. They sold briskly, revelers waving them in the air to express solidarity with Roosevelt, as they listened to the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves marching down the grand boulevard.75 Meanwhile, for three and a half hours Roosevelt stood on the reviewing stand, doffing his top hat to the thousands who paraded past him. As the New York Times reported, “Old timers agree that in point of picturesqueness, variety, and general interest no inaugural procession in many years” equaled Roosevelt’s parade of 1905.76

  People poured into Washington, D.C., from far and wide to be part of history on that cold March day. More than 35,000 Americans took part in the procession. Most were wearing topcoats and scarves. Not since Andrew Jackson muddied the White House furniture with his “corn liquor” crowd had there been as much fun at an inaugural. People came from the lake regions of the Midwest, and the high plains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Old-style Rocky Mountain guides from west of Denver suddenly experienced East Coast civilization for the first time. Coal miners from West Virginia arrived by railroad from mountain hollows not even on maps. There were the Scotch-Irish from Kentucky and fishermen from the Georgia Sea Islands. Self-proclaimed cornhuskers ventured into the alien town from the grouse-hunting lands of Illinois and Iowa which the president had first tramped in 1880. Members of the Boone and Crockett Club, proud of their founder, sat together shouting “Roos-e-velt!” “Roos-e-velt!” like children at P. T. Barnum’s circus. As one reporter observed, the entire navy base from Norfolk had come to see the author of Naval War of 1812 in his moment of triumph. A Pennsylvania cavalry regiment played “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” causing Roosevelt to applaud wildly; it was considered a risqué number. A comical note was struck whenever Roosevelt tried to shout out to a parader and the wind blew his glasses-cord into his mouth.

  Cultural diversity was a predominant theme in Roosevelt’s unusual parade. Eager-faced African-American students from Virginia and Pennsylvania were asked to participate in the parade; so too were Puerto Ricans and Filipinos, who wore earmuffs to combat the cold. Socialites, carrying canes, arrived by the trainful from Beacon Hill, the Upper East Side, the “gold coast” of Long Island, and Philadelphia’s East Falls. It almost seemed as if representatives from every bump, knoll, and stretch of America were present to cheer Roosevelt. The entire event was like the kind of murals Thomas Hart Benton would later paint: no region, epoch, or local type was left out. This was Roosevelt’s own Buffalo Bill production, an amazing explosion of Americana choreographed in a way that matched the Saint Louis world’s fair.

  This time Roosevelt took his oath of office by pledging on a Bible, the same one he had kissed on January 2, 1899, when he was sworn in as New York’s governor.77 Of all the guests Roosevelt received, it was Robert B. Roosevelt, standing on the same platform, who most strongly plucked the president’s heartstrings.* Surely he remembered coughing his way through his Manhattan childhood, with his father trying to open the Museum of Natural History and Uncle Rob lobbying to create New York’s fish hatcheries. Until 1905 President Roosevelt had always seen his Uncle Rob as a political liability and was disinclined to be photographed with him—stories about his uncle’s flirtations and romances with women served only to hurt his own claim to high personal morality. But Uncle Rob had led the way in the conservation movement—he was, after all, the “Father of Fishes”—and his nephew seemed relieved to welcome the black sheep back into the family. No longer did he have to meet Uncle Rob clandestinely at Lotus Lake to discuss shad or eels. With no future political concerns to worry about, the president now let down his defensive guard. “Dear Uncle Rob,” Roosevelt wrote on March 6: “It was peculiarly pleasant having you here. How I wish Father could have lived to see it too! You stood to me for him and for all that generation, and so you may imagine how proud I was to have you here.” 78

  At the time of his inauguration, as if presenting himself with a gift, Roosevelt saved yet another North Dakota birding roost near Devils Lake.79 Stump Lake was ten miles long and two and a half miles wide and teemed with migratory waterfowl. On four islets in the lake, thousands of ducks bred during the nesting season. White pelicans, in particular, bred in the wetlands ecosystem. Unlike brown pelicans, known for diving, the American white pelican, which flocks in a V, feeds by dipping its bill into a lake for fish.80 Roosevelt knew that Stump Lake was a popular spot for oologists, a subgroup of ornithologists who focus on collecting and analyzing bird eggs. Anxious to put the oologists (that is, those not affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution or the American Museum or some similar scientific outfit) out of business, Roosevelt had an executive order prepared for signing. Thousands of eggs were being stripped from Stump Lake, and two generations were killed off in a “hit,” as the theft was called in Grand Forks and Fargo. Secretary of Agriculture Wilson had written a letter to Roosevelt suggesting that the North Dakota islets be preserved. “In view of the fact that the season is close at hand when ducks will return to Stump Lake to breed,” Wilson wrote on March 5, “I respectfully recommend that the reserve be created at an early date, in order that ample time may be given to make the preparations necessary to afford the birds full protection during the breeding season of 1905.”81

  Four days later, on March 9, Roosevelt declared Stump Lake his third federal bird reservation, placing it on the “same footing” as Pelican Island and Breton Island.82 Part of his rationale for creating Stump Lake—and Sully’s Hill, for that matter—was his sad realization that Canada reared most of North America’s wild fowl while the United States did the slaughtering. His thinking would prove to be prescient. Around this same time, encouraged by Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt began envisioning a coordinated system of bird reservations from Lake of the Woods to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Aleutians of Alaska to Nihoa Island in Hawaii.

  The bird protection movement was gaining momentum. Pelican Island, Breton Island, and now Stump Lake had been created. Many others were on the agenda. Birds were also being saved in Roosevelt’s national forests. And Roosevelt was just getting started with his other preservationist ideas for the territories of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE OKLAHOMA HILLS (OR, WHERE THE BUFFALO PRESIDENT ROAMS)

 
; I

  Following his inauguration in March 1905 Roosevelt became focused on hunting gray wolves (or coyotes) in Texas and Oklahoma. Removed from the rigors of campaigning, he wanted to see the so-called Spirit Trail of the Wichita Mountains and watch the sun drop beyond long reaches of flatlands known as the Big Pasture (a part of the Kiowa-Comanche reservation in southwestern Oklahoma south of the Wichita Mountains and north of the Red River of the South). The time to reinvent himself, during the spring, had again come. As an added incentive, bones of ancient elephants—mammoths—were rumored to have been found around Domebo Canyon in Oklahoma; perhaps he’d be able to inspect a few. Working through Colonel Cecil Andrew Lyon—the chairman of the Texas Republican state executive committee, known for his quick laugh and his lack of artifice—Roosevelt was primarily concerned about not repeating the Mississippi bear hunt. Because in 1905 Texas had no Republican U.S. congressmen or senators—El Paso to Beaumont being hard-core Democratic territory—Lyon was asked by the Roosevelt administration to recruit good Republicans to enter state government posts; the party couldn’t completely fold its tent. A shared love of hunting was the brick of Roosevelt and Lyon’s relationship; their shared party affiliation was the cement.1