The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (77 page)

The only recorded houseguests to Sagamore Hill in 1887 were Bamie, the Douglas Robinsons, and Cecil Spring Rice. Roosevelt’s happiness in being remarried and settled at last
en famille
warmed them all, and sent them away glowing. Spring Rice went back to Washington vowing that he liked Theodore “better every day I see him.”
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By late summer Roosevelt had worked himself into a state of such nervous excitement over
Morris
, and Edith’s approaching confinement, that he was felled by a surprise recurrence of asthma. The arrival of an eight-and-a-half-pound baby on 13 September seems to have shocked him back into health. Later that day, in a letter announcing the birth, he proudly added the word “Senior” to his signature.
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In October the hunting season got under way. Roosevelt pounded energetically after Long Island fox, but a longing for nobler game soon overwhelmed him. It had been more than a year since he had killed anything substantial. His herds in Dakota offered a convenient pretext for another trip West. Early in November, therefore, he set off with a cousin and a friend for five weeks’ ranching and shooting in the Badlands.
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Ten days of “rough work” on the range were enough for his two companions, who hurried back to New York on 14 November. He was not sorry to see them go. “As you know,” he wrote Bamie, “I really prefer to be alone while on a hunting trip.”
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Little is known about his wanderings during the next three weeks. One can only speculate, but during that solitary period some shock seems to have awakened a long-dormant instinct in Theodore Roosevelt—prompting him to take certain actions immediately after returning East.

The speculation is that as he rode farther and farther afield, he found the Badlands virtually denuded of big game—although he did manage, by an extraordinary fluke, to kill two black-tailed deer with one bullet.
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Even in 1883 he had been hard put to find any buffalo this side of Montana; a year later the elk and grizzly were
gone. In 1885 he had complained that bighorn and pronghorn were becoming scarcer, and in 1886 noticed that some varieties of migratory birds had failed to return to the Little Missouri Valley.
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All this was due to the white man’s guns and bricks and fences. Roosevelt had regretted the loss of local wildlife, but he took the conventional attitude that some dislocation of the environment must occur when civilization enters a wilderness. One day, perhaps, a new balance of nature would be worked out.…

Now, in November 1887, it was frighteningly obvious that both the flora and the fauna of the Badlands were facing destruction. There were so few beavers left, after a decade of remorseless trapping, that no new dams had been built, and the old ones were letting go; wherever this happened, ponds full of fish and wildfowl degenerated into dry, crack-bottomed creeks. Last summer’s overstocking, together with desperate foraging during the blizzards, had eroded the rich carpet of grass that once held the soil in place. Sour deposits of cow-dung had poisoned the roots of wild-plum bushes, so that they no longer bore fruit; clear springs had been trampled into filthy sloughs; large tracts of land threatened to become desert.
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What had once been a teeming natural paradise, loud with snorts and splashings and drumming hooves,
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was now a waste of naked hills and silent ravines.

It would be hard to imagine a sight more melancholy to Roosevelt, who professed to love the animals he killed. For the first time he realized the true plight of the native American quadrupeds, fleeing ever westward, in ever smaller numbers, from men like himself. Ironically, he had always been at heart a conservationist. At nine years old he was “sorry the trees have been cut down,”
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and his juvenile hobby of taxidermy, though bloody, was in its way a passionate sort of preservation. His teenage slaughter of birds had been scientifically motivated; only as a young adult had he learned to kill for the “strong eager pleasure” of it.
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Even then he always insisted that a certain amount of hunting by responsible sportsmen was necessary to keep fecund species from multiplying at the expense of others.
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But by 1887 the ravages of “swinish game-butchers” (and could he, in all conscience, exclude himself from that category?) were plain to see; the only thriving species in Western
Dakota were wolves and coyotes.
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Roosevelt was now in his twenty-ninth year, and the father of a small son; if only for young Ted’s sake, he must do something to preserve the great game animals from extinction.

H
E ARRIVED BACK
in New York on 8 December, and lost no time in inviting a dozen wealthy and influential animal-lovers to dine with him at 689 Madison Avenue. Chief among these was George Bird Grinnell, editor of
Forest and Stream
, and a crusader against the wanton killing of wildlife on the frontier. He had become Roosevelt’s close friend after printing a complimentary review of
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman;
the two men had already spent many evenings together discussing “in a vague way” the threat to various American species. But, as Grinnell afterward explained, “We did not comprehend its imminence and the impending completeness of the extermination … those who were concerned to protect native life were still uncertainly trying to find out what they could most effectively do, how they could do it, and what dangers it was necessary to fight first.”
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Roosevelt now decisively answered these questions. His twelve dinner guests must join him in the establishment of an association of amateur riflemen who, notwithstanding their devotion to “manly sport with the rifle,” would “work for the preservation of the large game of this country, further legislation for that purpose, and assist in enforcing existing laws.”
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The club would be named after Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, two of Roosevelt’s personal heroes, and would encourage further explorations of the American wilderness in their honor. Other objectives would be “inquiry into and the recording of observations on the natural history of wild animals,” and “the preservation of forest regions … as nurseries and reservations for woodland creatures which else would die out before the march of settlement.”
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From time to time the club would publish books and articles to propagate its ideals.

The proposal was approved, and in January 1888 the Boone & Crockett Club was formally organized with Theodore Roosevelt as its president. It was the first such club in the United States, and,
according to Grinnell, “perhaps in any country.” Membership rapidly grew to a total of ninety, including some of the nation’s most eminent scientists, lawyers, and politicians. Through them Roosevelt (who remained club president until 1894) was able to wield considerable influence in Congress.
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Among his first acts was to appoint a Committee on Parks, which was instrumental in the creation of the National Zoo in Washington. He ordered another committee to work with the Secretary of the Interior “to promote useful and proper legislation towards the enlargement and better government of the Yellowstone National Park”—then a sick environment swarming with commercial parasites. The resultant Park Protection Act of 1894 saved Yellowstone from ecological destruction. Still other Boone & Crockett committees helped establish zoological gardens in New York, protect sequoia groves in California, and create an Alaskan island reserve “for the propagation of seals, salmon, and sea birds.”
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When he was not working on these committees himself, Roosevelt joined forces with Grinnell in editing and publishing three fat volumes of wilderness lore, written by club members.
American Big-Game Hunting
(1893),
Hunting in Many Lands
(1895), and
Trail and Camp-Fire
(1897) won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and prompted the establishment of Boone & Crockett-type clubs in England and various parts of the British Empire.
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A glance at Roosevelt’s own contributions as an author shows that he by no means lost his relish for blood sports. It remained strong in him through old age, although an apologist claims “he then no longer spoke of hunting as a pleasure, rather an undertaking in the interest of science.”
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Roosevelt was a complex man, and, as will be seen, his complexity grew apace during the middle years of his life. But as founder and president of the Boone & Crockett Club, he was the prime motivational force behind its conservation efforts.
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The most significant, from his own point of view as well as the nation’s, was to do not with animals but with forestry. Roosevelt had a profound, almost Indian veneration for trees, particularly the giant conifers he had encountered in the Rockies.
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Walking on silent, moccasined feet down a luminous nave of pines, listening to
invisible choirs of birds, he came close to religious rapture, as many passages in his books and letters attest. Hence, when the American Forestry Association began its struggle to halt the rapid attrition of Western woodlands, Roosevelt threw the full weight of his organization behind it. Thanks to the club’s determined lobbying on Capitol Hill, in concert with other environmental groups, the Forest Reserve Act became law in March 1891. It empowered the President to set aside at will any wooded or partly wooded country, “whether of commercial value or not.”
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The time would come when Theodore Roosevelt joyfully inherited this very power as President of the United States. One wonders if he ever paused, while signing millions of green acres into perpetuity, to acknowledge his debt to the youthful president of the Boone & Crockett Club.

A
BOUT THE SAME TIME
that Roosevelt sat discussing big-game preservation with his dozen dinner guests, President Cleveland dumbfounded Congress with the first Annual Message ever devoted to one subject. The tariff bulked even larger than Civil Service Reform as a political issue in those last days of 1887; as will be seen, the two major parties were diametrically opposed in their attitudes toward it. To provoke a similar division of opinion in the electorate, as Cleveland did by publicly coming out against the tariff, was in effect to decide the result of the next national election, still eleven months off. Republicans reading the text of his message reacted with incredulous joy, while Democrats wondered privately if the Big One had gone mad.
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Simply described, the tariff was a system of laws, hallowed for decades by successive Republican administrations, which levied high duties on imported goods in order to protect American industry and provide revenues for the federal government. So vast were these revenues (about two-thirds of the nation’s income) that a surplus had been building up in the Treasury every year since 1879. It now waxed enormous,
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and President Cleveland believed that it posed a malignant threat to the economy. To spend excessive money was wasteful; yet to hoard it, when it could have been in healthy circulation, was even more so. Cleveland, having silently pondered
American tariff schedules for two years, decided that they were “vicious, inequitable and illogical.” Congress was instructed to reduce most rates, and abolish others altogether: wool, for example, should be allowed to come in free. The tariff, wrote Cleveland, would be “for revenue only” and not for protection.
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By his unfortunate use of the word “free” the President thus laid himself open to charges that he was a Free Trader, while by attacking Protection he identified that comfortable doctrine with the Republican party. “There’s one more President for us in Protection,” crowed James G. Blaine,
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leaving few observers in doubt as to which President he had in mind. A wave of optimism spread through the party as bells across the country rang in another election year.
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