“The fact that I had won the friendship of the president in such a short time,” Abernathy later recalled, “naturally raised great popular interest.”55 Unfortunately, Burnett and Waggoner grew more and more envious of Abernathy. They kept muttering half-comical innuendoes at his expense. Ignoring these gibes, the president kept showering Abernathy with attention. Although the press was not present for the wolf-coursing, Lambert was on hand to photograph the catches. When other members of the hunt tried to pose with the president for a photo, Roosevelt waved them off. “I want this picture with just Abernathy and myself in it,” Roosevelt said. The loyal Lambert, sensing the value of the publicity, said to Roosevelt excitedly, “You can say that this picture was snapped about a minute from the time Abernathy started the chase and made the catch.”56
The plains and its sentinels had once again captured Roosevelt’s imagination. The more harrowing the encounter, the happier the president was. A six-foot rattlesnake had lunged at Roosevelt four times before he killed it with his eighteen-inch quirt.57 Even the god-awful sound of a gray wolf being tackled by Abernathy seemingly calmed his nerves. On day three of the hunt, Quanah brought his three wives along for the fun, accompanied by his son and baby daughter. Self-sufficient and uncomplaining, Quanah and his family had their own wagon. With temperatures in the low seventies and bright sunshine turning the prairie grasses different hues of green and blue, Roosevelt was in his element. For lunch he enjoyed eating beef strips by hand, all reeking from wood smoke. He kept blurting out bully. In this land where sound preceded sight, Roosevelt was happy that there wasn’t a lamppost for miles. “The air was wonderfully clear, and any object on the sky-line, no matter how small, stood out with startling distinctness,” he wrote. “There were few flowers on these dry plains; in sharp contrast to the flower prairies of southern Texas, which we had left the week before, where many acres for a stretch would be covered by masses of red or white or blue or yellow blossoms—the most striking of all, perhaps, being the fields of the handsome buffalo clover.”58
Fascinated by wolves, Roosevelt here ponders one caught by Jack Abernathy.
T.R. with a roped wolf. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Just in case the taxpayers thought President Roosevelt was on a naturalist adventure at their expense—which he was—he once again invoked the Biological Survey. Roosevelt sent a minutely detailed scientific report to Dr. C. Hart Merriam about the weight and coloration of more than a dozen coyotes. With a uniform collecting technique that would have made Spencer Fullerton Baird proud, Roosevelt recorded facts about Oklahoma’s coyotes that are still used for reference. Doing some on-the-spot calculations, Roosevelt wrote to Merriam that the average weight of a coyote in the Wichita Mountains region was thirty pounds. Skulls, skins, and paws were likewise shipped from Fort Sill to Washington, D.C., for the Biological Survey to properly analyze. “All but one are the plains coyote, Canis nebracensis,” Merriam informed Roosevelt. “They are not perfectly typical, but are near enough for all practical purposes. The exception is a yearling pup of a much larger species. Whether this is frustor I dare not say in the present state of knowledge of the group.”59
What prevented Roosevelt from considering the whole experience perfect, however, was the absence of buffalo. They were gone—and sadly, even the white-tailed deer were vanishing. A wilderness not abounding in game was a contradiction in terms. All Roosevelt could do was ride the buffalo trails, the great highways of Oklahoma, which were the easiest route to water, and imagine the Old Days. Francis Parkman had caught the tail end of them in the summer of 1846 with the Oglala band of Sioux. If you wanted to see a wild buffalo in North America in 1905, Yellowstone and the northern woods of Alberta were your only bets.60 For now, Roosevelt studied the ancient buffalo herds’ well-worn paths. He wore cowboy leggings and felt superior for having left his silk shirt behind in a closet in the East Wing.
Once again Roosevelt was playing the “great natural man.” While talking with Quanah one evening at Star House, Roosevelt mentioned Baynes and Hornaday’s idea of a bison refuge. “Grandfather wanted to entertain Roosevelt just so-so,” Quanah’s granddaughter Anona Birdsong Dean recalled of the evening. “He had a table that sat thirty people. Each woman had a job. Mother went to see if the table was set properly. She found goblets filled with wine setting next to each plate. Grandfather, who never drank, had gotten wine somewhere and told one of the women to fill big glasses with the wine. Mother said, ‘Why did you do that?’ Grandfather explained that when he went to Washington, Roosevelt served wine in small glasses and he wanted to be more generous than Roosevelt.”61
But now Roosevelt was truly offering buffalo! Quanah realized that Roosevelt was a generous man at heart, and the very notion of the Wichita Forest Reserve repopulated with buffalo brought tears to his eyes. Although Quanah spoke several dialects and was fluent in English and Spanish, he was nevertheless speechless.62 Could his peyote vision be becoming true? Could a boyhood dream he had on the lonely Llano Estacado now be reality? Would Oklahoma—or at least a portion of its most scenic terrain on the western side of the Cross-Timbers in the Indian Territories—become a bison refuge?
A few days after that historic dinner, Quanah hung an autographed photo of Roosevelt on his dining room wall. To him, Roosevelt truly was the “Great White Chief.” More than any other white man, Roosevelt had his heart in the right place, and Quanah knew that few Americans had ever loved the Wichitas–Big Pasture as Roosevelt did. He and Roosevelt smiled when rattling off the colorful names of the Twin Territory’s towns as if they were superior to anyplace Queen Victoria had ever seen: Arapaho, Bowlegs, Etowah, Hydro, Oologah, Talihina. Side by side on horseback, snacking on pecans, the two warriors spoke of black-tailed prairie dogs, armadillos, bald eagles, and the rare black-capped vireo.
Besides bird-watching and wolf hunting Quanah spent time teaching Roosevelt how to properly track horse thieves. Roosevelt, in turn, gave him a thick porcelain cup. Both men enjoyed being conspicuously attired and talking nonstop. In Washington, D.C., the press corps called Roosevelt the “cowboy president.” Quanah knew better: Roosevelt was the “buffalo president.” As if a spell had been cast over him, Quanah told the Comanche that Roosevelt loved the beauty of southwestern Oklahoma like someone born and raised along the Red River. Roosevelt, in turn, wished that the chief had been a Rough Rider. It had been rumored that William “Buffalo Bill” Cody had offered Quanah $5,000 to perform in Europe with the legendary Wild West Show. Quanah said no. “I’m afraid I would be put in a little pen,” Parker informed Roosevelt. “And I no monkey.”63
In 1901, when President McKinley created the Wichita Mountains as a forest reserve, nobody imagined that it would become the focus of a federal buffalo reintroduction program. But Roosevelt was always thinking and listening. Some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had come from the Wichitas area and had been full of stories about the landscape’s lyrical, magnetic charm. Now, in 1905, as Roosevelt rode amid the strange rock formations with Quanah, he learned why the area was considered sacred by the Comanche, Kiowa, and other tribes. For example, there was a magnificent rock formation 2,464 feet high, designated by the U.S. Army as Mount Scott. Quanah told Roosevelt that a Kiowa medicine woman had prophesied that all the Great Plains buffalo, after being chased by murderous American hunters, had disappeared down Mount Scott’s summit in single file. They descended farther and farther, into the earth’s core. Inside this safe haven, everything sparkled for the buffalo; the world was “green and fresh” and rivers “ran clear, not red.”64 Someday, the Kiowa medicine woman prophesied, the buffalo would return to the plains from the top of Mount Scott, erupting like a volcano. A gregarious herd would trot out happily, resurrected and with a fierce unity of purpose, for a new day on the Great Plains.65
Roosevelt, of course, didn’t subscribe to this prophecy, but he nevertheless enjoyed hearing the legend. And he had to admit that the elegant pyramidal sentinel that stood w
atch at the eastern gate—like an island in the sea—was the energy source of the entire Wichita preserve.66 For 70 million years, ever since mammals eclipsed reptiles as the dominant vertebrates in Oklahoma, Mount Scott was the home of buffalo or their ancestors. Roosevelt understood the importance of their return. “The extermination of the buffalo,” he had lamented, “has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”67 Now, at Mount Scott, they were going to make a stand with the help of buffalo men. Roosevelt spoke to the Wichita Forest Reserve rangers—who operated out of a little white clapboard hut with cedar posts—about the imminent prospect that the park would become America’s first National Game Preserve for buffalo and deer. A wooden archway was soon built in an attempt to keep poachers out; it gave the reserve a legal feel.
Not since his youth had Quanah Parker been so excited about anything as he was about Roosevelt’s repopulation scheme. Before long Roosevelt received public support for the idea from the Boone and Crockett Club and the League of American Sportsmen (of which Hornaday was vice president). Hornaday also worked hard to find exactly the right spot in Winter Valley, with grasses and with canyons to provide shelter from the winter weather. Daily, a typical bison herd foraged on vegetation over a two-mile radius, so the acreage of the reserve had to be fairly large. If everything worked according to plan fifteen buffalo—a nucleus herd of breeding cows and young bulls—would be shipped by train to the Wichita reserve in 1907. Hornaday, biologically cautious, selected the buffalo from numerous bloodlines to avoid inbreeding. There was only one chance to get it right.68
V
Following the Oklahoma hunt Roosevelt, as a courtesy, asked to meet Mrs. Abernathy and the five children. Approving of their pioneer stock he enjoyed them immensely. The six days at Big Pasture had been bully, a brief return to the heroic days before the Indian Wars. Roosevelt extended an open invitation to the entire Abernathy family to visit him in the White House. Clearly, Roosevelt honored Abernathy even though other Texans might consider him a court jester. “The petty rivalry of which I had been the object during the course of the wolf hunt in the Big Pasture was but a small incident in comparison with the experience that was awaiting me when I was now unexpectedly drawn into public life,” Abernathy wrote, “as a result of my new friendship with President Roosevelt.”69
Now that the hunt was over the Washington Post cast it in glowing terms. Seldom, if ever, had the Post been so enthusiastic about a president. Even Roosevelt’s secretary, Loeb, might have blushed at reading the copy. “Mr. Roosevelt acquired in the Indian country a complexion that would do credit to an Apache warrior,” one article read. “He is now as brown as a berry and in fine spirits, and the warming up of the past few days has put him in a good trim for the more exciting and hazardous sport which he will experience in Colorado, where for the next four or five weeks he will make life miserable for members of the cat and bear family that happen to come his way.”70
When Roosevelt arrived in Colorado Springs following a speech in Clayton, New Mexico, with plans to climb Pikes Peak, reporters were still covering his every move. Love him or hate him, Roosevelt made good copy. Once again he used hunting as his hook, arousing a burst of regional western pride. For three weeks he would dwell with the blood of bears, boots in the stirrup, stubble on his face. For Roosevelt the Rockies were always the Alps without handrails, and he promoted them as such. Not since Andrew Jackson had America had a president who was such a celebrity. Wherever Roosevelt went now, he would wave a bandanna to express solidarity with the crowds. But speaking in front of 10,000 people gathered at the Santa Fe station in Colorado Springs, Roosevelt pleaded with both well-wishers and the press to allow him uninterrupted privacy in the wild. “One thing you cannot do on a hunt, and that is to carry a brass band,” Roosevelt said. “You cannot combine hunting bears with your Fourth of July celebrations. I am going to beg the people of Colorado to treat me on this hunt just as well as the people of Oklahoma treated me on the wolf hunt.”71
Roosevelt shelved world affairs and domestic policy while in the Rockies, preferring a wintry saddle blanket to wire reports, and only one major news item seized his attention. The celebrated U.S. Senator from Connecticut, Orville H. Platt (not to be confused with Thomas Platt of New York), had died at age seventy-seven. The last time Roosevelt had seen his Republican friend—best known in history for the Platt Amendment of 1901, which offered Cuba self-determination after the Spanish-American War—Platt’s face was alarmingly drawn and gaunt, and a rattling cough had somehow caused his complexion to lose its luster: his skin was sepia-tinted. When Platt had tried to laugh, there was only a faint sound, and Roosevelt had known he wasn’t long for this world. “It is difficult to say what I think of Senator Platt without seeming to use extravagant expression,” Roosevelt had said of Platt at a dinner earlier that year. “I do not know a man in public life who is more loved and honored, or who has done more substantial and disinterested service to the country. It makes me feel really proud, as an American, to have such a man occupying such a place in the councils of the Nation.”72
Deeply saddened, Roosevelt wanted to create a living memorial for Platt. In the Wichitas, he had heard about a system of freshwater and mineral springs south of Oklahoma City, less than two hours north of Dallas.73 In 1902 the Chickasaw and Choctaw had ceded the best 640 acres of these freshwater springs to the Roosevelt administration. As at Hot Springs National Park (in Hot Springs, Arkansas), the gateway town of Sulphur, Oklahoma—otherwise a nothingville—had built hotels, hoping to attract tourists to the curative waters. The community, however, had a problem with sinking wells and hoped the federal government would someday come to the rescue.74
Roosevelt now decided that the so-called Seven Springs area would make a terrific national park. He refused to wait until Oklahoma became a state, with large acreage carved out for Indian reservations, and there was little political disadvantage to naming the springs after Platt, even though the senator had never visited south-central Oklahoma (he had been a member of a committee on Indian Affairs, however). On June 29, 1906, Roosevelt (through a special act of Congress) declared the Seven Springs area Platt National Park—his latest park after Crater Lake, Wind Cave, Sully’s Hill, and Mesa Verde.75 At a deliberate pace, the U.S. government added infrastructure to the Seven Springs area, including the Lincoln Bridge (completed in 1909). Besides featuring the springs, the park was surrounded by undisturbed grasslands.76 (In 1976 the National Park Service renamed Platt the Chickasaw National Recreation Area. But as a lasting memorial, a Platt District in Sulphur was designed to recognize Platt National Park’s seventy-year history.77)
On April 24 the New York Times reported “The President’s Return.” Worried about difficulties with the Panama Canal, labor riots in Chicago, anarchy, and high tariffs, Roosevelt had decided to shorten the Colorado leg of his holiday by five or six weeks. The Times lamented that Roosevelt, “the hardest working man in the country,” couldn’t enjoy the Rockies longer. Most presidents are criticized for taking vacations because they may be caught off guard by an unexpected international crisis or a domestic crisis such as a strike. But Roosevelt was immune from such criticism. In fact, the Times (and other newspapers) thought he needed more time to enjoy himself, catch coyotes, and hunt grizzlies.78
Of course, Roosevelt didn’t slip out of Colorado in the dead of night. The state threw a huge open-air revivalist meeting in Glenwood Springs to honor him on his departure. With the Old Blue Schoolhouse as a backdrop, ranchers who had ridden in to Glenwood Springs from Newcastle, Rifle, and half a dozen other nearby towns said adios. It was quite a pageant. Instead of sprucing up for the farewell, Roosevelt wore filthy blue jeans, a slouch hat, a soiled bandanna, a sheepskin jacket, and a blue cotton workman’s shirt. Because it was Sunday, Roosevelt asked that services be held under God’s blue sky with the green grass serving as pews. The sunshine in the upper air, the president maintained, was more inspiring than light filtered through stained-glass windows. An organ was roll
ed out onto the schoolhouse porch, and old-time hymns such as “Rock of Ages” were sung. A Presbyterian minister asked Roosevelt to say a few words to the God-fearing men and women of the Rockies. Thereupon, Roosevelt unleashed a sermon about the strenuous life, peppering his speech with cowboy jargon. At the end of this oration he announced that he would shake every hand offered him in Glenwood Springs. “There are a many of you,” he said, “so don’t stampede or get to milling.”79
A week later, on May 7, Roosevelt hosted a good-bye dinner in Glenwood Springs. This was the final good-bye. All Roosevelt could do, however, was talk on and on about Colorado’s bears. Lambert had captured some of these bears with a Kodak camera, but other bears weren’t so lucky. Roosevelt had been routinely bringing his bear skins to a local taxidermist, Frank Store, who mounted them in record time. Interestingly, Roosevelt requested that his half dozen or so bears be stuffed closed-mouthed. He had these trophies shipped as quickly as possible to Dr. C. Hart Merriam in Washington, D.C., where casts were also made of the bears’ footprints, so that the Biological Survey could glean precise scientific data from the samples. As usual, Roosevelt wrote up his outdoor notes to accompany the trophies.
Although Roosevelt did not bring back a grizzly cub to Alice (as promised), he did adopt a small black-and-tan terrier named Skip, whose new home would be the White House. Skip was a gift from Jake Borah to the president during his last few days in Colorado. Roosevelt and the dog, which never barked, had become inseparable friends. To Roosevet’s delight, Skip actually climbed trees to go after chased game.80 While Roosevelt read books in Colorado for relaxation, sometimes going for three or four hours straight, little Skip would obediently sit in his lap, petted as the pages were turned.
“Archie simply worships Skip, who is developing into a real little boy’s dog and accepts with entire philosophy being carried around by Archie in any position,” Roosevelt wrote after he returned to Washington. “He has won the hearts of all the family except Mother, who I think resents his presence a little as a slight upon Jack. Yesterday she praised him—you know the kind of praise I mean—‘Yes, he is a cunning little fellow and friendly, of course. In fact, he is friendly with everyone.’”81
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