The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (126 page)

Ridding Sagamore Hill of English sparrows wasn’t the only hunting Roosevelt had in mind that spring. While last-minute legal maneuvering was taking place in the Department of the Interior to establish Natural Bridges in Utah and Wheeler in Colorado as national monuments, Roosevelt began planning a post-presidential safari to British East Africa. His romantic notion was that he would leave civilization in favor of the roar of the lion and the pleasant odor of buffalo. Roosevelt was going to invite two celebrated trophy hunters whom he highly admired—R. J. Cunninghame and Frederick Courtney Selous (both of whom collected big game specimens for the British Museum)—to join him. Selous would later dedicate his
African Nature: Notes and Reminiscences
(1908) to Roosevelt. Roosevelt also struck up a lively correspondence with the British hunter-explorer Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, about possibly seeing the great African fauna and flora, rhinoceros, gnu, water buffalo, and giant eland. Roosevelt actually looked forward, he wrote, to being served up as “food for ticks, horseflies, and jiggers.”
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A veteran of the Boer War, the well-bred Patterson had written an adventure saga,
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
, in 1907. (Decades later, it was made into two Hollywood movies.) With narrative verve and vividness, Patterson’s book told of his quest to track down and kill two male lions that had eaten approximately 140 railroad workers over the course of nine months in the Tsavo province of Kenya. During the 1890s, rinderpest (a bovine disease) had killed millions of buffalo, zebras, and gazelles, the primary food source for lions. Their food supply thus limited, the starving maneless lions turned to humans as prey. Inspired by Patterson’s action-filled prose, particularly his references to weapons like the Martin-Enfield double-barreled rifle and the .303 Lee Enfield, Roosevelt now wanted a lion head for his library wall at Oyster Bay. (Roosevelt, in fact, worked behind the scenes to eventually help the Field Museum of Chicago acquire the stuffed Tsavo lions and put them on permanent display.
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) “A year hence I shall leave the Presidency, and, while I cannot now decide what I shall do, it is possible that I might be able to make a trip to Africa,” Roosevelt wrote to Patterson on March 20. “Would you be willing to give me some advice about it? I shall be fifty years old, and for ten years I have led a busy, sedentary life, and so it is unnecessary to say that I shall be in no trim for the hardest kind of explorer’s work. But I
am fairly healthy, and willing to work in order to get into a game country where I could do some shooting. I should suppose I could be absent a year on the trip.”
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While Roosevelt hastened to assure Patterson that he wasn’t a “butcher,” he nevertheless hoped to acquire a multitude of specimens for American museums, entering Africa in the Mozambican port of Mombasa and boating down the Nile with shotgun in hand. Roosevelt arrived in Mombasa in April 1909, and departed for home from Khartoum in March 1910. This was no bear hunt in Mississippi and no holiday in Louisiana’s canebrakes. He would be away from the United States for over a year. That letter of March 20, in fact, started an epistolary exchange between the two men that would continue throughout 1908. The president interrogated Patterson repeatedly about the prospects of bagging specimens of zebras, giraffes, and cheetahs. As the tenor of his letters made clear, he could hardly wait to be armed to the teeth and free from the shackles of the White House. The Smithsonian Institution had been eager to officially sponsor Roosevelt and his party in obtaining all types of specimens, from the diminutive Kenia dormouse to the colossal white rhinoceros, for its collection. With a retinue of hundreds, Roosevelt would fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting Kenya and Uganda in the heart of British East African safari land.
*

There was nothing odd about Roosevelt’s desire to hunt big game in Africa. Only the Boone and Crockett club’s taxidermist, Carl Akeley, who had constructed the world’s first habitat diorama in 1890 at the Milwaukee Public Museum, had begun to biologically inventory the wildlife along the Nile River with seriousness of purpose. Working out of the Field Museum in Chicago, Akeley had developed a new technique for taxidermy, which did a better and truer job of preserving texture and musculature. Roosevelt truly admired the way Akeley displayed wild-life in a group setting. The gorilla and the elephant were his specialties. Roosevelt thought Akeley could make a very distinctive contribution to the annals of scientific exploration by collecting with him in Africa. Roosevelt and Akeley would risk their lives for the right gorilla. Poets called nature a mother, but Roosevelt knew it was also a grave. Regardless of his worries about exertion by a middle-aged man in the heat, and about sleeping sickness (the primary concern), with proper funding Roosevelt believed he could revolutionize the African exhibits at all of America’s top museums.

It was strange, though, that he was planning to disappear from the American political scene for virtually a full year. In considering Roosevelt’s maverick conservationist agenda of 1908–1909, it is important to remember that the president didn’t foresee a future political career. Having already won a Nobel Peace Prize for diplomacy, Roosevelt increasingly envisioned his postpresidential role in part as being a global spokesperson for big game animals, wildlife protection, and natural resources conservation. Didn’t South Africa need antelope preserves? Shouldn’t India find ways to protect its tigers? Couldn’t China develop its own fish hatcheries? This had always been Roosevelt’s hope for the Boone and Crockett Club—that it would go global with its preservationist and conservationist message and ideas. Akeley, a new club member, actively promoted this global approach. And Roosevelt was about to write his first non-American centric book, even though the content was about an American naturalist expedition traveling in the so-called dark continent. “I speak of Africa and golden joys,” Roosevelt later wrote in
African Game Trails
. “The joy of wandering through lonely lands; the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary, and the grim.”
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III

The success of Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 had gotten Roosevelt extremely interested in the Four Corners states and territories: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Guided by Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt had read about Montezuma Castle, El Morro, and other prehistoric ruins of the Southwest. And at some point Roosevelt also read an article in
National Geographic
magazine titled “The Colossal Natural Bridges of Utah,” which had piqued his curiosity.
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Pinchot’s U.S. Forest Service—at the time, a branch of the USDA—was in charge of Utah’s two national forests, Sevier and Manti. And Utah also had many more spectacular wonders. Word had reached the White House that southeastern Utah had the largest number of natural bridges in the world. The novelist Edward Abbey later wrote rapturously about the three bridges, which retained their original Hopi names. The first, Kachina, meant “spirits that had lightning snake symbols on their bodies” the second, Uwachomo, signified “flat rock mound” the third, Sipapu, meant “place of emergencies.” The bridges, the largest of which was 222 feet high, had been formed by streambed erosion (unlike many other arch formations in Utah, which were created by wind, rain, and ice). Surrounded by piñon forest, Anasazi ruins, and a gorgeous slickrock canyon, Natural Bridges met every criterion for national monument status.
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Priding himself on knowing
everything
about the West, Roosevelt started reading every book he could find on Hopi and Navajo culture, and later contributed an essay about the southwestern tribes of the Four Corners region in his
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
(1916).
⁴⁰
Ultimately Roosevelt was taking a tricky line: preserving Hopi-Navajo culture in the southwest while also encouraging soldiers, agents, missionaries, and traders to Americanize these peoples. Roosevelt never hesitated to promote the education of Native Americans, and he seemed unaware of the humiliation being inflicted on tribes by the imposition of the Bible and reservation life. “The Indian should be encouraged to build a better house,” Roosevelt wrote of this policy, “but the house must not be too different from his present dwelling, or he will,
as a rule
, neither build it nor live in it.”
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On April 16, 1908, Roosevelt signed into existence Natural Bridges National Monument, his first such designation in Utah. These three natural sandstone bridges, spanning a desert canyon and isolated from any town or hamlet, met Roosevelt’s scientific qualifications for monument status because they were “extraordinary examples of stream erosion.”
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Over the decades, Natural Bridges National Monument became a popular hiking and camping destination, especially for families. Together with
National Geographic
, Roosevelt helped launch the movement to save Utah’s splendid canyons from private development.

Certainly, Roosevelt’s heavy-handed federalism angered people besides corporate bigwigs and disgruntled ranchers. Many westerners had long felt that businessmen on the east coast had treated the West like a colony, extracting wealth and resources without giving anything back. They were tired of the east coast stuffed shirts telling them what to do. As the episodes involving the Grand Canyon National Monument showed, they could also turn their blistering ire on the federal government. But as the historian G. Michael McCarthy argued in
Hour of Trial: The Conservative Conflict in Colorado and the West, 1891–1907
(1977), there were plenty of westerners who approved of federal regulation of resources. At a public lands convention in Denver in 1907, for example, many of the attendees favored the Roosevelt administration’s deployment of rangers to protect national forests from wildfire throughout Colorado. They understood that Colorado was special because of its mountains, forests, and water resources.
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The president of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Dr. George F. Kunz, also backed Roosevelt’s national monument initiatives every step of the way. Kunz and Roosevelt had been allies
since the battle of 1899–1901 to preserve the Palisades cliffs in New York, and Roosevelt thought that Kunz was among the most cogent voices for protection of American scenery. One might almost name an American site at random—from Yellowstone to the Catskills, from Watkins Glen to Bunker Hill—and find that Kunz had fought hard for its scenic integrity. Scholarly, clear-minded, and committed to the cause, Kunz considered all significant ruins as part of the cultural heritage. He had been offended by Oscar Wilde’s offhand comment that the United States “had no ruins.” Whether Wilde had spoken out of ignorance, arrogance, or flippancy, Kunz knew better. The United States had Mesa Verde, Montezuma Castle, Chaco Canyon, the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and numerous other “ruins.” But Wilde was right in one respect: most Americans did not value their ruins as Europeans did. Rome, for example, celebrated its ancient ruins, such as the Colosseum, whereas by contrast, it had taken a small group of Colorado women, fighting tooth and nail, to protect the stunning cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde—and their battle had taken place largely unnoticed by America’s newspapers.

According to Kunz, there were hundreds of antiquities sites, both natural and architectural, that needed preservation—places filled with arrowheads and pottery shards whose designation as monuments wouldn’t disrupt commerce in the slightest. Grateful to Roosevelt for raising the nation’s consciousness on this issue, Kunz became his strongest public defender, countering criticisms of the president’s conservationist and preservationist agenda. “Niagara Falls, Letchworth Park, the Hudson River, the Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon and the Colorado, the Agatized Trees, the Giant Redwoods, the Columbia River, and the prehistoric remains of the Southwest, are the poetry of our possessions,” Kunz wrote. “What nation is rich without a poet, and what country has such grand natural objects to inspire the poet as ours?”
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Roosevelt and Kunz were deeply suspicious of anyone foolish enough to register any kind of concern about the creation of national monuments like Pinnacles or Natural Bridges. Legal and constitutional objections, Roosevelt was convinced, gave false legitimacy to a much baser desire: protecting entrenched interests. “The very luxurious, grossly material life of the average multimillionaire whom I know, does
not
appeal to me in the least, and nothing would hire me to lead it,” Roosevelt wrote to Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice on April 11. “It is an exceedingly nice thing, if you are young, to have one or two good jumping horses and to be able to occasionally hunt—although Heaven forfend that anyone for whom I care should treat riding to hounds as the serious business of life! It is an
exceedingly nice thing to have a good house and to be able to purchase good books and good pictures, and especially to have that house isolated from others. But I wholly fail to see where any real enjoyment comes from a dozen automobiles, a couple of hundred horses, and a good many different houses luxuriously upholstered. From the standpoint of real pleasure I should selfishly prefer my old-time ranch on the Little Missouri to anything in Newport.”
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Medora, North Dakota, wasn’t a village to Roosevelt anymore, but an entire world unto itself, a time and place of magic. Memory is selective, and Roosevelt’s seemed to fasten on the pleasant shade, tranquil skies, and meadowlarks of summer, and to excise the long, cold Dakota winters. In fact, Roosevelt was arguably as proud of his exploits at Elkhorn Ranch as he was of any other chapter in his biography. After killing a buffalo in Montana, he had rushed home to New York City to cofound the Boone and Crockett Club along with his friend George Bird Grinnell. According to
Forest and Stream
, that was the opening salvo of the conservation movement. Now, in mid-May of 1908, President Roosevelt was scheduled to hold a summit at the White House on conservationism, with most of America’s governors present (a few states, including Texas, sent their lieutenant governors instead). To clear his mind of clutter, and prepare himself for the challenging conference ahead, Roosevelt, together with Edith, escaped to Pine Knot. Usually, at this retreat, Roosevelt liked to live strictly by himself with Edith. But now the Roosevelts’ houseguest—the only nonrelative ever invited to sleep at the cabin in Albemarle County—was Oom John. It had been a last-minute invitation, and Burroughs had accepted.