The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  First by one bureaucratic trick, then by another, Roosevelt accomplished his overarching goal of protecting birds’ habitats. His cleverest tactic was to preserve a group of islets under a single name (for instance, Quillayute Needles in Washington state). Florida’s fishermen and its millinery industry accused Roosevelt of grabbing land. The many islands he saved were like a rash, they believed, breaking out wherever an honest land or water bounty might be had. Take Pine Island, for example—the refuge Roosevelt created on the southwest coast of Florida (north of Sanibel Island in Pine Island Sound) in the autumn of 1908. This federal bird reservation was actually three isolated islands inhabited by thousands of brown pelicans.51

  Roosevelt could have declared a number of refuges around Pine Island, but he didn’t. With the agility of a professional politician, and understanding the mental laziness of many uninvolved citizens, he was able to disarm his opponents (whose greed, he felt, was pitted against his own sense of public good). By not establishing multiple refuges, Roosevelt made the preservation seem slighter. His detractors now had to object to Pine Island as a single entity. If he had instead issued three separate executive orders, cries against such a “land grab” would surely have been heard throughout Congress instead of merely in the hamlets of Lee County, Florida. A single entity was also convenient. It took only one executive order—Number 939—to save Pine Island as a priceless marine ecosystem where wildlife could flourish. Only a decision by the Supreme Court could have reversed his order, which he issued on September 15. And Roosevelt had powerful allies in the Gulf Coast to make sure this didn’t happen.

  At Island Bay the Audubon Society’s game warden was Columbus B. McLeod—short, bad-tempered, and something of a hermit. His salary of thirty-five dollars a month was paid for by the National Association of Audubon Societies’ Thayer Fund. With his motorboat regularly plying the waters of Charlotte Harbor, McLeod also served as the deputy sheriff of Desoto County (present-day Desoto, Charlotte, Hardee, Glades, and Highlands counties), applying warrants and arresting poachers.52 McLeod—Paul Kroegel’s counterpart on the Florida Gulf coast—was almost sixty, unmarried, and an outdoorsman. He was a friend of the manatees but his primary purpose in life was to protect egrets and roseate spoonbills from extraction. Florida was a bird paradise, he believed, but if the plumer gangs weren’t broken up, even the white pelicans would vanish. Warden McLeod would fearlessly motor up to bands of illegal hunters and threaten to have them busted, drowned, run down, hanged, and marched off in shackles—all at once if need be—if they didn’t leave the Roosevelt administration’s rookeries alone. Some of his rows with these hunters should probably have been covered in the Tampa Tribune, but fisticuffs were part of daily life along the Gulf shore. “I protected the Sunset Island Colony for three years in my feeble way without a cent of compensation except the love I had for the wild, free birds and the pleasure it gave me to save the lives of every single bird that I could,” McLeod wrote in the fall of 1908, in a report to the Audubon Society. “Since that time you have engaged me as a warden for the Audubon Societies, with a salary and nice little boats, which allowed me to look after their [the birds’] interests more and give them better protection.”53

  McLeod received his mail on the island hamlet of Placida, but he actually lived on Cayo Pelau Island (116 acres of wetland mangrove and ten acres of uplands). With three sandy beaches and rare tropical hardwood hammocks to call his own, he was living the fleabitten life of an outback type. He was poor, but not as poor as the Seminoles. Sometimes he would take a canoe on the lower Peace River, in perfect harmony with his environment. Although biographical information about McLeod’s daily activities remains sketchy (he didn’t keep a diary as Kroegel sometimes did), he patrolled the Charlotte Harbor rookeries around Gasparilla Sound, chasing away poachers with his boat, badge, and gun. McLeod wrote an emergency report for The Auk in 1907, on protecting roseate spoonbills. As a wildlife warden, he worried that enforcement of the Lacey Act was too lax, that the good old boys of Florida simply spat at federal laws. At times, their arrogance made him weep in frustration and dismay. “No Trespassing” signs, he understood, didn’t mean much in the matted thickets of southwest Florida. But McLeod had the tough soul of an outdoorsman and lit out after hunters in both boat and prose. “Five years ago there was a fine flock of roseate spoonbills or ‘Pink Curlews’ that used and did their feeding in the northeast end of Turtle Bay,” he said; “only 18 are left now of the flock, and they have for the past two seasons done their feeding on my home island in the fall, and winter months. Hunters and tourists killed them, and there are but few left on the Gulf Coast of Florida.”54

  McLeod spoke in a short, curt, unflamboyant way. There was no philosophical complexity about him, and this simplicity added to his credibility. As an environmental activist, McLeod worked with the National Association of Audubon Societies and the Roosevelt administration to go after the illegal hunters in Charlotte Harbor. He was livid because the cold-blooded murderers of Warden Guy Bradley, using expensive lawyers, were never indicted. He complained about this often, calling it an abortion of justice. Herbert K. Job said the same. Regardless of the Lacey Act and the law of June 28, 1906, plumers, he said, were still killing birds for “wings, feathers, and mountings.”55

  Eventually, McLeod himself, while protecting the rookeries in northern Charlotte Harbor and the lower Peace River, became a victim of the “Feather Wars.” Shortly after Roosevelt’s executive order 939 regarding the west coast of Florida, he was murdered by local fishermen and plumers who were furious over federal island grabs. McLeod’s patrol boat No. 5 was discovered on November 30, 1908, sunk with sandbags. Blood was splattered all around, as if a can of red paint had exploded. Detectives, believing that McLeod had been hacked to death with an ax, recovered his blood-soaked hat, which had two gashes in the crown. Clumps of hair were also found. A struggle had obviously occurred before McLeod had died. Speculation was that his body had been tossed into the Gulf of Mexico, where sharks and other flesh-eating fish had devoured it. Presumably, this was meant as a message to the Florida Audubon Society that individuals who tried to interfere with the milliners would face dire consequences. The person or persons who killed McLeod were never found.* Once again, as in the murder of Guy Bradley, Job seethed with rage. Notices seeking information about the murder were posted on bulletin boards in fishermen’s hotels around the Charlotte Harbor region. The De Soto County Sheriff, however, claimed they couldn’t find proof: there were no fingerprints, no witnesses, and no confessions.

  McLeod’s death strengthened Roosevelt’s determination to further safeguard the rookeries and wildlife preserves in Florida. Roosevelt vowed to visit the federal bird reservations that McLeod had protected soon; he eventually did go to Pine Island Sound after his presidency, in 1914. And the National Association of Audubon Societies, undaunted, pleaded with citizens of Florida to “awake” and establish a game commission in order to see that the bird laws were enforced.56 In Bird-Lore, an illustrated bimonthly, the editor, Frank M. Chapman, credited McLeod with saving the white pelican colonies in Charlotte Harbor and lamented that the warden “had his head chopped open and his body sunk in the harbor by persons who did not approve of his zeal.”57 McLeod, at the time of his murder, had dutifully kept a bird count the way President Roosevelt had instructed field naturalists to do: he had tallied 1,000 white ibises, 500 pelicans, 250 cormorants, and 150 cranes.58

  The story of Audubon patrol boat No. 5 sent chills down the spines of those in the “citizen bird” movement. Two Audubon wardens—Bradley and McLeod, both approved by Roosevelt—had been murdered while on duty protecting seabirds. The week McLeod was murdered, conservationists had been lobbying the state legislature in Tallahassee to amend the Lacey Act by hiring state game wardens. Now the Audubon Society in Florida was demoralized. Misdemeanors be damned! Anybody who anchored at a bird rookery should be slapped with a felony charge! If tougher conservationist laws weren’t enacted soon, Florida would
be deforested, like Palestine or Spain, and bereft of birdlife!

  Many Floridians, however, simply didn’t want tax revenues used for birds.59 They’d rather let the landscape become barren than pay a single cent to preserve it. On the other hand, many newspapers proudly promoted avian protection in their editorials. “To proclaim a bird reservation without providing for its protection is a waste of words,” the St. Augustine Record pointed out. “The Audubon Society asks that citizens of Florida tax themselves by voluntary contributions to maintain wardens on these rookeries during the breeding season. If this be necessary, it is a confession of failure on the part of the State that should be resented. It is an invasion by the citizens of the domain of the State that shall be rebuked. To leave this matter in the hands of a society is to invite murder and will bring the name of Florida into disrepute.”60 And the magazine Outlook asked the key question: “Will the people of Florida sleep until it is too late?”61

  Columbus McLeod didn’t die in vain. In 1910, the New York State Assembly outlawed the commercialization of feathers with the passage and signing of the Shea-White Plumage Bill. In 1911, New York State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated attempts to weaken the law, thus essentially ending the domestic market for plumes.

  V

  A zoology book that Roosevelt read one evening in the White House was responsible for his keen interest in the gopher tortoises of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In 1907, after poring over the herpetologist Raymond Ditmars’s The Reptile Book—a beautifully written encyclopedia complete with dozens of vivid and affecting photographs—T.R. grew excited about sea turtles and tortoises of all kinds.62 “Impatient with the use of scientific language obscure in meaning to all but specialists, [Ditmars] wanted to tell about snakes in an understandable style that would awake the sympathy of the general public,” the biographer L. N. Wood remarks in Raymond L. Ditmars: His Exciting Career with Reptiles, Animals, and Insects. “It was part of his lifelong campaign to break down the widespread prejudice against reptiles.”63

  Mixing science with popular writing, The Reptile Book offered pages of anatomical detail about these slow-moving, solitary tortoises who seemed to be ambassadors from a prehistoric time. To President Roosevelt, this was thrilling Darwinian material, a biological extravaganza between handsome covers. What Pinchot was to trees, Grinnell to big-game, Hornaday to bison, and Chapman, Job, or Finley to birds, Ditmars was to reptiles. Legend has it that Ditmars’s office was crammed with more jars full of pickled snakes than anywhere else in the world. When the president fastened on a naturalist or a member of the animal kingdom, he didn’t just skim; he read and devoured every biological vagary and nuance. Taking a break from world affairs to ponder reptiles, Roosevelt relished learning about the differences between a tortoise carapace and plastron; about clutches; about terrestrial predilections; and about how “rolling beetles” or tumblebugs lived on their excreta. Roosevelt learned that gopher tortoises had an insatiable appetite for plants, feeding on 400 to 500 different kinds on Florida’s islands like Sanibel Island, Captiva Island, and Pine Island. And this figure didn’t include mosses or fungi. Clearly, the tortoises needed a lot of habitat to survive.

  Characteristically, Roosevelt wrote an exuberant note to Ditmars—a former reporter for the New York Times who served as curator of reptiles at the New York Zoological Park from 1899 to 1920 under the direct supervision of William Temple Hornaday. As with Hornaday, Grinnell, Burroughs, Muir, and others, Roosevelt marveled at how Ditmars—a meticulous man of science—“made the present and past life history of this planet accessible in vivid and striking forms to our people generally.” 64 Ditmars was clearly part of Roosevelt’s tribe. Calling The Reptile Book “genuinely refreshing,” even though at times a slog to read straight through, Roosevelt invited Ditmars to visit the White House or Sagamore Hill, saying it would be “a great pleasure if I could see you some time.” 65 The president wanted to discuss the fate of reptiles in North America with Ditmars, whom he considered the greatest herpetologist alive. “I have a very strong belief,” Roosevelt wrote, “in having books which shall be understood by the multitude, and which shall yet be true—in other words, scientific books written for laymen who have some appreciation for science—so that the books will be of value to all men who are interested in the subject. It seems to me that your volume exactly fulfills these requirements. Personally, I have long wanted to have in my library some good books on reptiles.”66

  After his presidency, Roosevelt spent a couple of fine afternoons studying gopher tortoises living on islets around Punta Gorda, Florida. “The burrow was shallow and we speedily dug out the occupant,” he reported for the American Museum Journal. “It was a fairly large specimen, weighing 11½ pounds, with a shell 13½ inches long, 9 inches wide, and 5¼ inches deep. (Later we secured a small specimen on Captiva Island, which weighed 4¾ pounds, was 8½ inches long, 6 inches wide, and 3½ inches deep). How this big tortoise got to the island is something of a mystery, as the species is entirely terrestrial; it must have been drifted out by some accident of flood or storm.”67

  A reptile Roosevelt did nothing to protect after reading Ditmars, however, was the alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). Alligators populated the swamps of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, 68 and Roosevelt encountered alligators when he journeyed to the South in 1907, but he never took one for a trophy at Sagamore Hill. An article by John Mortimer Murphy in Outing Magazine titled “Alligator Shooting in Florida,” didn’t endear the species to Roosevelt.69 Murphy compared baby alligators eating prey to a terrier shaking a rat, and Roosevelt’s southern notebooks recounted incidents of humans being bitten by alligators along sandbanks and in mudflats. “In the lakes and larger bayous we saw alligators,” Roosevelt wrote in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter. “One of the planters with us had lost part of his hand by the bite of an alligator.”70 When he traveled to Panama aboard USS Louisiana in November 1906—becoming the first U.S. president to visit a foreign country during his term of office—he wrote to Kermit about what he thought was a cunning gator with a carnivorous mouth. “There are alligators in the rivers,” he reported. “One of the trained nurses from a hospital went to bathe in a pool last August and an alligator grabbed him by the legs and was making off with him, but was fortunately scared away, leaving the man badly injured.”71

  Here is a very rare example of Roosevelt misidentifying a species. Alligators weren’t found in Panama. Instead, the nurse was probably attacked by the common caiman (Caiman crocodilus). There is no good explanation why Roosevelt was so sloppy with this field observation. Later, when he was traveling in both Africa and Brazil, Roosevelt’s disdain for crocodilians of any kind and his utter revulsion regarding their biological traits became obvious. Traveling down dark rivers he would contemptuously shoot at these creatures as if they were rats on a garbage heap. What disgusted Roosevelt most about crocodilians was their insatiable appetite and bizarre digestive system. Abandoning any pretense of objective Darwinian analysis, Roosevelt deemed them evil monsters that destroyed ecosystems (crocodilians, especially alligators, actually protected egrets by feeding on their predators, such as raccoons and snakes). Knifing open a shot Nile crocodile in Africa, for example, Roosevelt was nauseated by the varied contents of its stomach. “The ugly, formidable brute had in its belly sticks, stones, the claws of a cheetah, the hoofs of an impalla, and the big bones of an eland, together with the shell plates of one of the large river-turtles.” 72

  That Roosevelt had little use for swamps in general becomes clear from his response to a ridiculous scheme for draining the Everglades as part of a program by the U.S. Reclamation Service. Despite all his good work for “citizen bird” in the southern latitudes, Roosevelt almost made a serious blunder in the Everglades: he directed the Reclamation Service to investigate the possibility of draining them. “Turn-of-the-century conservationists stopped the annihilation of the birds of the Everglades,” the reporter Michael Grunwald of Time wrot
e in The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. “But they had no problem whatsoever with the drainage of the Everglades.” 73 Just as Roosevelt allowed Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite to be flooded for the sake of San Francisco’s water supply, he wanted the Everglades drained so Miami could grow southward into affordable housing villages—a forerunner of suburbia.

  The initiator of the Everglades scheme was Dr. John Gifford of Coconut Grove, the first American to earn a doctorate in forestry. As editor of the magazine Conservation, Gifford vigorously promoted the wise use of natural resources. Gifford insisted that conservationism meant “reclamation of swamplands and the irrigation of deserts.” In 1901 he wrote the important Practical Forestry, which made it clear that swamps tangled with palmetto didn’t impress Gifford like birch, oak, and elm. Yet, ironically, Florida—as Gifford’s narratives The Everglades of Florida (1911) and Billy Bowlegs and the Seminole War (1925) attest—was his lifelong passion as a conservationist.74 As the chief promoter of saving Puerto Rico’s Luquillo National Forest, Gifford was all for preserving vast patches of jungles for eco-tourists to use. He was also an advocate for “citizen bird.” Eventually, he became a professor of tropical forestry at the University of Miami, where he promoted various uses for the cypress, maple, and pine. Gifford’s articles regularly appeared in the magazine Tropics. Unlike Henry Flagler, who was involved in railroads, hotels, and real estate in Florida, Gifford considered that some of wild Florida had to remain. But the Everglades? A 200-square-mile alligator swamp? To Gifford, the Everglades were a putrid wasteland. So he concocted plan after plan to drain the great swamp. After all, Washington, D.C. had been a straggling village until its swampland was drained; now it had theaters and museums and was the finest capital in the western hemisphere.75 Gifford’s most improbable scheme entailed importing sacks full of cajeput (melaleuca) seeds from Australia. He hoped that these water-absorbing trees would thrive and dry up the Everglades.76