The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (56 page)

After the hot trenches of Cuba, the cool summer breezes on the Montauk peninsula were a welcome relief to Colonel Roosevelt, even though the makeshift barracks had no charm. There were ocean beaches and dunes, shrublands and tidal flats, brackish wetlands and salt marshes. As Roosevelt contemplated his political future, and as everybody clamored to shake his hand, the raccoons and white-tailed deer of Montauk brought balance to his newfound fame. There was even Nantucket Juneberry along the sand plains to meticulously study. One hundred years later, to honor the fact that the famous Rough Rider had lived at Camp Wikoff in 1898, the community of Montauk named a 1,157-acre wilderness area Roosevelt County Park.
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Much has been written about Roosevelt’s 137 days of service in the army, mostly blandishments in the style of
Heroes of American History
. The whole island of Cuba had been a theater to Roosevelt, and he was the lead actor. For more than fifteen years, Roosevelt had cultivated good relationships with reporters, and they delivered fresh copy of his dramatic charges with gusto in 1898. He even appeared on the cover of
Harper’s Weekly
. General Nelson A. Miles—who was famous for his part in the Indian wars of the West and had been in Cuba but never saw much action there—complained that Roosevelt had never actually charged up San Juan Hill. Miles was correct—Roosevelt’s skirmish was on Kettle Hill—but the misnomer was widespread, and it stuck. Why let a geographic mistake beset a powerful war story? The immodest Roosevelt even put in for a Medal of Honor for himself, only to be rebuked by Secretary of War Russell Alger. Although it took until 2001, Roosevelt, through the lobbying of his family, eventually won the Medal of Honor posthumously for his bravery during the battle for San Juan Heights.
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Every day that Colonel Roosevelt was at Montauk, the New York press, seemingly in concert, covered even his humdrum statements as if they were major news. There was no need to light the fuse of his celebrity, for he had already been hurtled onto the front page of every national newspaper. The mascots, in particular, grabbed a lot of notice. The
New York Times
ran a feature story about Roosevelt’s tame lioness, Josephine, reporting that the colonel might raise the big cat at Oyster Bay.
⁸⁵
Edith staunched that plan, however, and instead, Josephine was carted off to tour the West as an icon of the Spanish-American War and as a big-top at
traction. Unfortunately, in Chicago Josephine got loose or was stolen and was never seen again.
⁸⁶

The eventual fate of Teddy the golden eagle was just as disappointing. Quite sensibly Roosevelt had donated the eagle to the Central Park Zoo, where he became a popular tourist attraction. Everything went well for Teddy during his first nine months at the zoo. But in May 1899 two bald eagles from Brooklyn—nicknamed the “heavenly twins”—were brought into Teddy’s cage to keep him company. Holy hell broke out. The feisty Teddy, presumably in an act of territorial protection, attacked one of the bald eagles, molesting the newcomer with his claws and beak. A few days later, the heavenly twins ganged up on Teddy, battering him severely. Within hours Teddy keeled over, dead. The zoo superintendent, John B. Smith, told the press that Teddy had died of a “broken heart,” having lost his “prestige” to the bald eagle. The body of the Rough Riders’ mascot was shipped to Frank M. Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History, where he was stuffed and put on display.
*
⁸⁷

The story of Cuba, at least, had a happy ending. Corporal Jackson, after being quarantined at Montauk, headed back to Flagstaff with Cuba at his side. Because he was a footloose type, unable to take care of a pet, he gave the celebrated dog to a family man, Sam Black, who had been a ranger in Arizona Territory. For sixteen years Cuba lived in the lap of luxury, catered to by the Black family. When Cuba eventually died of natural causes, he was buried along the scenic Verde River fifty miles southwest of Flagstaff, having been given a proper military funeral in recognition of his service to his country.
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Cuba was also given a special pet cemetary memorial at Sagamore Hill.

On August 20, Colonel Roosevelt was allowed to leave quarantine to
return to Oyster Bay for five days. By the time he arrived at Sagamore Hill, there was a groundswell of support for his gubernatorial candidacy. From Buffalo to Brooklyn, Roosevelt had become public property, a war hero celebrated as a favorite son. All around Oyster Bay, he was greeted with shouts of “Teddy!” (which he hated) and “Welcome, Colonel!” (which he loved). Not for a minute did he suffer from the aftereffects of war; it was as if he had psychologically inoculated himself against trauma. “I would rather have led this regiment,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “than be Governor of New York three times.”
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Cleverly, Roosevelt had kept diaries in Cuba, jotting down exact dialogue and stream-of-consciousness impressions. His editor at Scribner, Robert Bridges, worried that if Roosevelt ran for governor, the war memoir they’d been discussing would have to be postponed. “Not at all,” Roosevelt told him, “you shall have the various chapters at the time promised.”
⁹⁰
And there were always his biophilic notes, sent to his children from Cuba. “There is a funny little lizard that comes into my tent and it’s quite tame now,” read one, “he jumps about like a frog and puffs his throat out. There are ground doves no bigger than big sparrows and cuckoos almost as a large as crows.”
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Once back at Camp Wikoff, Roosevelt wandered around Montauk Point, taking care of his golden eagle and leading little Cuba on long walks. (The dog greeted many of the Rough Riders from dockside as they returned to the United States.) Roosevelt seemed like a changed man, disconcertingly calm, studying the undercarriage of wigeon as they flew overhead. Sometimes, particularly when reporters were around, he rode his horse up and down the beach with the fervor of a plainsman.
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Having “driven the Spaniard from the New World,” Roosevelt could relax—he had been relieved of the burden of of his father’s buying his way out of Civil War service. With nothing more to prove, he could excel as a powerful politician, soapbox expansionist, true-blue reformer, naturalist writer, and conservationist. After his “crowded hours” avoiding whizzing bullets and tropical diseases, he turned to studying the shorebirds of Long Island. As always, Roosevelt wanted to be the master of his own backyard, even as he prepared to run for governor of New York.

Just how much Roosevelt identified himself with the American West was evident at the send-off his regiment gave him on September 13. A bugle called, and all the Rough Riders dutifully assembled into formation. In front of them was a card table with a blanket draped over a bulky object. Roosevelt was inside his tent, writing letters, when the troop requested his presence outside; he immediately concurred. The First Volun
teer Cavalry had a parting gift for their humane and courageous colonel. After some moving words, the blanket was lifted to reveal a bronze sculpture of 1895 by Frederic Remington,
Bronco-Buster
. (“Cowboy” was the western term for a cattle driver. A “bronco-buster” broke wild broncos to the saddle.
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) Tears welled up in Roosevelt’s eyes, his voice choked, and he stroked the steed’s mane as if it were real. “I would have been most deeply touched if the officers had given me this testimonial, but coming from you, my men, I appreciate it tenfold,” Roosevelt said. “It comes to me from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me; who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none; and who shared with me your blankets when I had none to lie upon. To have such a gift come from this peculiarly American regiment touches me more than I can say. This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than I do the weapons I carried through the campaign.”
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The Rough Riders had given Colonel Roosevelt the best gift possible. Remington’s bronze was far superior to a gold-plated pistol or signed group photograph. It summed up Theodore Roosevelt well: a fearless western cowboy, stirrups flying free, determined to tame a wild stallion by putting the spurs to it, a quirt in his right hand and a fistful of reins in the other. Like much of Remington’s finest pen-and-ink work,
Bronco-Buster
, his first venture into sculpture, was charged with kinetic movement and free-floating energy. At fast glance the horse, forelegs held high, practically jumps to life.
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Roosevelt had succeeding in transforming his sickly childhood in New York City into a frontier saga worthy of Captain Mayne Reid. “The men of the West and the men of the Southwest, horsemen, and herders of cattle, have been the backbone of this regiment,” Roosevelt wrote, “as they are the backbone of their sections of the country.”
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A Remington casting of
Bronco-Buster
is now permanently housed in the White House Oval Office as a table centerpiece. And in the Roosevelt Room hangs an equestrian portrait of T.R. as Rough Rider by the Polish artist Tade Styka.

After the Spanish American War, Roosevelt and his commanding officer, Leonard Wood, became close personal friends. Together the two veterans would hike Rock Creek Park discussing everything from immigrants’ assimilation into America to the intolerable sanitary conditions in Cuba. Sometimes they brought young people with them on these outings. “Colonel Roosevelt especially made these walks of the greatest interest to the children,” Wood recalled. “He transmitted to them something of his own keen interest in nature, his love of birds, his interest in woodcraft, and in a thousand ways attempted to instill in them an interest in and an
understanding of God’s world as he saw it, to implement healthy tastes, and to build up a love for a wholesome outdoor life. At the same time he was full of stories of men and animals, stories which tended to build up a love for birds and animals and of wholesome outdoor life for the woods and the fields at a time when it was easy to lay the right foundation and to plant seed which would bear good fruit. He had a wonderful fund of information about birds and animals which he was continually passing on to the youngsters in a way they could understand.”
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Roosevelt’s campaign for the New York governorship in the fall of 1898 did, however, face obstacles. Serious concerns were raised over whether the colonel was a resident of New York (he’d been paying taxes in Washington, D.C.).
⁹⁸
Even within the state Republican Party, there were some who refused to let this new hero of San Juan Heights forget his record as a dyed-in-the-wool reformist. At times, working hard at retail politics made Roosevelt feel like a draft animal. But once he took to the “Roosevelt Special,” a whistle-stop train in which he toured towns and cities, often with Rough Riders standing proudly at his side, the election was essentially secured. In Syracuse, for example, Roosevelt orated on his fortieth birthday from the back of a train with the ferocity of William Jennings Bryan, pounding his fist, spittle flying, speaking of the greatness of the American flag, and pronouncing that better days were just around the bend. It was quite a show. And on November 8, 1898, Election Day, Roosevelt rode triumphantly to victory, defeating fifty-two-year-old Judge Augustus Van Wyck by 17,794 votes (out of over 1.3 million cast).
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His election was a testament to his power as mythmaker of self. Roosevelt was once again prepared to take a city—in this case Albany—by storm just like in Cuba.

I

J
anuary 2, 1899—inauguration day—was bitter cold in Albany. A layer of snow coated the streets, and the temperature hovered around zero. Along the Hudson River the bucking wind had brought all vessels, even the icebreakers, to a halt. As governor-elect, Roosevelt headed to the state capitol as part of a parade, the trombones following him “froze in silence,” with only the drums keeping up a Sousa-like beat.
¹
Even the photographers refused to take pictures, for fear of damaging their expensive equipment. That afternoon, following swearing of the oath of office at the capitol, Roosevelt moved his family into the state executive mansion on Eagle Street. Typically, he refused to allow the inclement weather to extinguish his euphoria at becoming governor. Come spring, the entire front yard would be blooming with a variety of roses known as New Yorkers, plus hundreds of other indigenous plants from every county in the state. But now, as the seasonal cycle went, the lawn offered only bare elms and some evergreen shrubbery caked in frost.
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Becoming governor of New York was quite a historic achievement for Roosevelt. He was following in the larger-than-life footsteps of John Jay, Martin Van Buren, and Grover Cleveland. Back in 1891 Roosevelt had published
History of New York City
, for some quick money, anatomizing past governorships for anecdotal well-springs of raw courage.
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Indeed, Roosevelt understood that he was part of a very special club—the governorship of New York—whose antecedents ran from the Revolutionary War to the Spanish-American War. Seventeen years previously, he had come to Albany as an assemblyman: now he was running the state with the largest population in America. Roosevelt was no longer simply moving through history. He was poised to make it.
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That first evening in Albany, Roosevelt left Edith and his children in the executive mansion with a night watchman on duty and ventured outside into the vicious sleet. It wasn’t family-friendly weather. Dinner was being served at a friend’s house for society types of his own rank, a five-course meal worthy of Delmonico’s in Manhattan. He didn’t want to be late. Upon his arrival cocktails were handed out on specially engraved silver trays. At the dinner table the talk centered on current events. In an adjacent room a violinist played movingly, but Roosevelt talked over the
mellifluous music. All the hale-looking gentlemen, most with stylish mustaches, sat riveted as he held court over buttery foods. At eleven o’clock the governor-elect said good night to his hosts and was driven back to the executive mansion. Dismissing the carriage prematurely, Roosevelt walked across the veranda to the front door; it was locked. Three or four times he rang the bell, feeling slightly like a Cossack trying to get into the czar’s palace. Nobody came to his rescue—not Edith or the night watchman or an awakened child. Losing patience, worried he was going to turn as blue as a winter corpse, an east wind cutting through his topcoat, Roosevelt clutched his key ring as if it were brass knuckles and smashed his fist through the plate-glass window. Reaching through the hole, he flipped the catch and gained entrance for his first night’s sleep as governor. The following day the
New York Times
ran a whimsical headline: “Gov. Roosevelt Shut Out.”
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Theodore Roosevelt was governor of New York from 1899 to 1900.
Roosevelt as governor.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

That was the only time in Theodore Roosevelt’s two-year term as New York’s governor that the words “shut out” would appear next to his name. Starting with his first annual address, presented shortly after the inauguration, Roosevelt launched an activist reformist agenda. Sandwiched
in between discussion of roads and the economy was a section Roosevelt called “The Forests of the State.” The governor declared he would work against both the “depredations of man” and “forest fires” to keep parts of New York forever wild. He wanted to realign state government on behalf of conservation and natural resource management, demanding scientific answers to statewide environmental problems. (If Roosevelt had an overriding conceit in early 1899, it was that he thought in terms of geological time and in biological imperatives, whereas lesser politicians in Albany were part of the pettiness and crudeness of campaign cycles). The first annual message also declared that fish and game laws would be “more rigidly enforced.” The Adirondack Park, under Roosevelt’s watchful stewardship, truly would become a monument to “the wisdom of its founders.”
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What infuriated Governor Roosevelt about conservation and wildlife protection in his home state was its politicization, which led to inveterate inefficiency and callous disregard of nature. The state Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, for example, was packed with self-serving politicians who didn’t know flickers from juncos, who had never read Darwin’s
A Naturalist’s Voyage
or marveled at John James Audubon’s drawings of elegant egrets. Their uninformed anti-forestry views had spread like dermatitis over the state, he believed, negatively affecting the Catskills and Adirondacks. Whether he was taxing corporations, improving the Erie Canal, revamping mental hospitals, issuing new labor laws, or crusading on behalf of forestry, Roosevelt was well aware that his reformist policies would influence other states. Owing to his leadership of the Rough Riders, his national popularity was sky high. Reporters from Maine to California, understood that he made terrific copy. Widespread fame had brought him all its perks and degredations. “Everything he did,” the historian G. Wallace Chessman reflected in
Governor Theodore Roosevelt
, “would go into the record, to be used for or against him in the future.”
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From day one as governor, Roosevelt championed the hiring of biologists and scientific experts for the New York Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, preferably experts trained in the Ivy League, to replace the politicians—who were like bloodsucking ticks on the state’s resources. Too often they used their positions of power to promote sweetheart deals. An investigation of the commission, Governor Roosevelt threatened, was under way. Warily, Roosevelt sought to fire the politicians on the statewide game commission and replace them with independent-minded biologists, zoologists, entomologists, foresters, sportsman hunters, algae specialists, trail guides, botanists, and activists for clean rivers. In Ger
many this phenomenon was being called
Darwinismus
. “The state of New York is fortunate at present in having a Governor who is not only deeply interested in all matters of game, fish and forest preservation,” George Bird Grinnell noted in
Forest and Stream
in May 1899, “but also has so clear an acquaintance with these subjects that he can always be depended upon to act on them for the public good.”
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Grinnell believed that for all his Rough Rider’s machismo, in private Governor Roosevelt wasn’t a know-it-all. Constantly, as his own correspondence bears out, Roosevelt would seek advice from acclaimed zoologists and foresters. Which herpetologist was the expert on snapping turtles? Which forester knew about a new strain of invasive fungi? Shouldn’t George Perkins Marsh’s
The Earth as Modified by Human Action
be carefully studied before the state allowed a paper company access to Bear Mountain? Basically, Governor Roosevelt wanted the state bureaucracy reduced and cronyism purged from natural resource management. One good silviculturist or pisiculturist, he believed, was worth more than any number of politicians looking to have their palms greased. Governor Roosevelt, in fact, advocated changing the commission altogether: from having five members to having only one scientific forestry leader—an idea also enthusiastically promoted by Gifford Pinchot.
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Pinchot was only thirty-four years old in 1899 but had established himself as an independent progressive of some note. Although he had been born in Connecticut, he was uncommonly proud of his French ancestry.
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His father, James Wallace Pinchot, a broad-ranging intellectual, had been an intimate friend of the elder Theodore Roosevelt.
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A graduate of Yale University (class of 1889, summa cum laude), Pinchot played on its football team as a reserve and was a member of the campus-based YMCA and a regular volunteer at the Y’s Grand Street Mission in New Haven.
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Strong, handsome, and notable for his porcelain-blue eyes, Pinchot was in such fine pulmonary shape that he could read from
The Compleat Angler
while doing a one-armed push-up. After college Pinchot spent more than a year at the École Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France, studying forest conservation. As part of his education he toured the most ably managed ancient woodlands of France and Germany. Meteorology, botany, and even astronomy came easily to Pinchot; he took up anything that could help him decode the mysterious forests of the world. Pinchot’s father had been a mainstay of the American Forestry Association, strongly advocating conservation management. Inspired by his father, Pinchot decided in his early twenties to dedicate his life to forest conservation. As proof of his pro-forestry convictions, he helped transform the family estate, Grey Towers in Milford,
Pennsylvania, into a tree nursery, “the first forest experiment station in the nation to encourage the reforestation of denuded lands.”
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At the time Pinchot began foresting at Grey Towers, the United States had no university or college forestry program. He wanted to change that unfortunate situation. In 1892 he began the first serious systematic forestry work in American history at the timberlands of George Vanderbilt’s mansion, Biltmore, outside of Asheville, North Carolina.
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At the start nobody knew whether it was an advanced pilot program against catastrophism or a hillbilly boondoggle. Before long, however, this wasn’t a question: Pinchot’s forestry methods helped Biltmore prosper. In 1892 he opened an office in New York City, marketing himself as a forestry consultant. Pinchot wanted Americans to avoid the kind of horrific deforestation that had taken place in Europe ever since the industrial revolution oversaw the reckless wholesale destruction of the continent’s natural resources. Pinchot was a devotee of George Perkins Marsh, the pioneering Vermont conservationist who wrote
Man and Nature
, and he took seriously Marsh’s concern that parts of Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece, and Alpine Europe had been deforested to the die-off point of being as barren as a moonscape. “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness,” Marsh had written, “of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”
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The label applied to Pinchot time and again, borrowed from the Scottish philosopher John Stuart Mill, was “utilitarian.” In conservationist terms, this meant a believer in
wise use
of natural resources. But the label also unfairly minimized (and at times maligned) Pinchot’s lifetime effort to
preserve
and
expand
many of America’s most magnificent forestlands. He was a tireless crusader for both utilitarian forest preserves and wildlife protection. “The eyes do not look as if they read books,” Owen Wister wrote of Pinchot, “but as if they gazed upon a Cause.”
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Pinchot first came to Governor Roosevelt’s serious attention in 1896, when President Cleveland appointed the Yalie chief forester; however, they had dined together once, in May 1894. (Roosevelt, in fact, wrote Pinchot a quick note following the meal: “I did not begin to ask you all the questions I wanted to.”)
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By 1897, Roosevelt thought enough of Pinchot to nominate him for the Boone and Crockett Club.
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And in 1898, when Pinchot became President McKinley’s head of the Division of Forestry (renamed
in 1905 the United States Forest Service), Roosevelt roared his approval. Independently wealthy, using the family fortune to help promote western reserves, almost British in demeanor, Pinchot saw himself as the Exeter-and Yale-trained advocate, press agent, and spokesperson of a new forestry movement. His nickname was: “the Chief” (or “G.P.”) and his forestry associates were “Little G.P.s.” In his 1936 book
Just Fishing Talk
, Pinchot said that when he was a teenager, the Adirondacks had been his touchstone place, the woodlands where he learned to catch brook trout and painted turtles. As with Roosevelt, the Adirondacks had given Pinchot, a world-class fly-fisherman, “a new and lasting conception of the wilderness.”
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In early February 1899 Pinchot finally spent significant time with his idol and family friend. The governor had invited him to spend an evening in the Eagle Street mansion. Roosevelt had become something of a roadside attraction in Albany since inauguration day, with everybody wanting a moment of his time. Cognizant of Roosevelt’s new Rough Riders fame, Pinchot was grateful to have been included in Roosevelt’s frenetically full calendar. Accompanying Pinchot to the meeting was the architect Grant La Farge, the son of the famous painter and draftsman John La Farge (whose closest friend was Henry Adams).
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Roosevelt not only liked Grant La Farge—a fellow member of the Boone and Crockett Club whose face had a scrubbed Bostonian intellectual look—but named him the New York state architect during his first year as governor. The firm of Heins and La Farge, in fact, was commissioned by Roosevelt to build the Bronx Zoo. At Roosevelt’s recommendation La Farge also received the contract to design the first buildings at the State University of New York–Albany.
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