The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (99 page)

After Roosevelt’s brief speech about Oklahoma’s statehood, the Monroe Doctrine and Indian rights, his hunt party went to the Big Pasture. Roosevelt was genuinely enamored of the open range of scrub weeds and tall grasses. About fifteen tents were set up as base camp at Deep Red Creek,
a little tributary of the Red River of the South, eighteen miles from Frederick. Roosevelt shared his tent with Lambert. Chuck-wagon food was readily available. A calf with the Four Sixes brand had been slaughtered, and a famished Roosevelt ate from a hindquarter. The first night, the coyotes came up closer to camp to do their howling than Roosevelt had expected. This was the land of broken treaties where cowboys slept in their hat crown; Roosevelt felt right at home as the moon set on the prairie. As a gesture to the Comanche who didn’t speak English, the president used pidgin, and a fumbling sign language. That first evening at camp, however, the president was travel-fatigued and went to bed early. Roosevelt matter-of-factly told Abernathy, Burnett and Waggoner and the cowboys that he was spent.

IV

On Sunday morning Roosevelt woke at the crack of dawn. It was going to be a fine day for an outing. There was a breathless hush to Oklahoma’s light winds of April, which was invigorating. Air wafting up from Old Mexico, warm, sea-scented, almost tropical, filled his nostrils, and he felt at one with the land. Most of his early observations were of the prarieland, shaded by the occasional ash, pine, elm, or black walnut. Intrigued by the Big Pasture and Wichita Mountains ecosystems, Roosevelt inventoried his surroundings: rustling cottonwoods, black-tailed jackrabbits, white-tailed deer, wild turkey, stunted mesquite, tiny swifts, pecan groves, and grasshopper swarms. Around Deep Red Creek alone there were more than fifty mammals and 800 plant species.
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It didn’t take him long to notice that
Didelphis marsupialis
—the ubiquitous Virginia opossums—were everywhere; pretty soon they’d be waddling down Fifth Avenue in New York. Some animals—like opossums—simply knew how to adapt and survive in the face of mankind’s intrusion. And Roosevelt’s note-books were quickly filled up with bird sightings. “Cardinals and mockingbirds—the most individual and delightful of all birds in voice and manner—sang in the woods,” he wrote; “and the beautiful, many-tinted fork-tailed fly-catchers were to be seen now and then, perched in trees or soaring in curious zigzags, chattering loudly.”
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Mostly, that first sunshiny day was spent shooting rabbits for supper. As they sat around the fire that Sunday night, sharing wild game, Abernathy was amazed to hear the president talk like a zoologist who had paddled the Red River from the Texas Panhandle to the Mississippi River. It was all firewood and snuff stories, told with the sophistication of a Harvard man. Somehow Roosevelt made even the barest incident
interesting. “I was amazed at the President’s knowledge of wild animals, snakes, and even the smallest of reptiles and insects,” Abernathy recalled in a memoir. “He told of the vinegaroon, the most deadly of the poisonous creatures in Texas and Old Mexico; many of those old time hunters present had never even heard of such a reptile.”
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Clearly, Roosevelt wasn’t just a stiff-kneed politician. He came as advertised: a Rough Rider.

Unfortunately, Roosevelt never published his campfire stories. With meat in the pot and log flames jumping high and low, on these outdoor outings Roosevelt would recount moments from the strenuous life with cliff-hanging suspense. There were accounts of sumo-wrestling with a 300-pound Japanese man; tramping toward the Missouri River headwaters, boxing with the heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan, and encountering rattlesnakes in North Dakota. Holding his audience’s attention with theatrical gestures, Roosevelt made it seem as if he had strode over the Alleghenies and down the Ohio River valley with Daniel Boone. When Frederick Jackson Turner told stories of western expansion, the farmer was the hero. By contrast, Roosevelt glorified men who had channeled violence into grand deeds such as hunting or boxing. His favorite camp-fire stories dealt with the ritualistic tradition of hunting grizzly bears: man pitted against beast. What made Roosevelt’s stories about grizzlies more interesting than anybody else’s was the way he personalized the bears without sweetness: for example, Big Foot Wallace in Wyoming, Old Mose in Colorado, and Old Ephraim in Idaho. And he always spoke of these bears with reverence.

The Wichitas truly were a biotic crazy quilt, Western trees grew in the range that didn’t exist even a mile east of Fort Sill. Rounded domes and jagged granite peaks seemed to erupt out of the ground. Here the western meadowlark sang with its counterpart, the eastern meadowlark. As the Oklahoman historian Edward Charles Ellenbrook once put it, this was
the
demarcation line of biological America. Only in the Wichitas could one of John Burroughs’s beloved dark-blue eastern bluebirds be seen hopping around with the azure Rocky Mountains bluebird. And Roosevelt, a dedicated Auduboner, hoped to clap his eyes on one of America’s most unsociable birds: the Mississippi kite. Oh, what a delicious place the Wichitas were for a naturalist! And they didn’t offer just birds and small mammals. Besides collared lizards there was an odd assortment of poisonous snakes, broad-banded copperheads, western diamondback rattlers, prairie rattlers, and western massasaugas among them. The Bronx Zoo’s new herpetologist, Raymond L. Ditmars, needed to do field collecting in the Wichitas.

Although Roosevelt wrote an article about his plains hunt, titled “Wolf-
Coursing,” for
Scribner’s Magazine
that summer, he often used the term “coyotes” while he was in Oklahoma. To Roosevelt the pageantry and novelty of catching a wolf alive were intoxicating. What he admired most about gray wolves and coyotes was their survivalist behavior. Even their cowering had a certain nobility. The reason was fairly simple. During the great slaughter of buffalo by the U.S. Army, wolves and coyotes had prospered. After skinners finished cutting up the buffalo for robes and meat, the canids soon rushed up to the carcass to devour the entrails. With such an abundance of free food, they quickly multiplied throughout the Great Plains. A new breed of hunter—the wolf exterminators—replaced the buffalo hunters in Texas and Oklahoma. These were considered a lowly type in the hunters’ pecking order. “A wolfer could manage with just a pack horse, a gun, a bedroll, and a bottle of strychnine crystals, but more often he had two pack horses, or a team pulling a small cart or wagon,” the historian Francis Haines noted in
The Buffalo
. “He followed after the buffalo hunters, and at each kill poisoned every carcass within a mile or so of his central point. Then he went away for a few days to let the wolves and coyotes have plenty of time to eat their fill and die.”
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This breed of hunter had two objectives: obtaining wolf furs and being paid by local ranchers.

Roosevelt immediately took a shine to Abernathy (and for that matter to Abernathy’s father, a former Confederate soldier, whom he met). There was a softness in Abernathy’s eyes that belied his hell-on-wheels reputation. He was like a live coal. Initial conversations between Roosevelt and Abernathy centered on the greyhounds brought along for the hunt. Roosevelt had never seen a breed of dogs so sleek and eager. By contrast, the Mississippi hunt hounds seemed lifeless. “By rights there ought to have been carts in which the greyhounds could be drawn until the coyotes were sighted, but there were none, and the greyhounds simply trotted along beside the horses,” Roosevelt wrote. “All of them were fine animals, and almost all of them of recorded pedigree. Coyotes have sharp teeth and bite hard, while greyhounds have thin skins, and many of them were cut in the worries.”
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The wolf hunt, led by Abernathy, began in earnest on Monday, April 10. The sun was now hot—a fireball low to the ground, causing all the men to change shirts three or four times during the course of the afternoon. The wind was seldom stiff. All the soldiers from Fort Sill and the Texas Rangers assigned to protect the president were surprised that Roosevelt could ride at such breakneck speeds up hills and down gullies. They hadn’t expected such equestrian skill from a man in his forties. By high noon the Roosevelt party had caught three wolves. After a lunch of
cooked calf, the president finally asked Abernathy to show off his wolf catching. The appointed hour had arrived for Catch ’Em Alive Jack to put up or shut up.

To Roosevelt, watching Abernathy ride a horse was exhilarating: he was an athlete in top form, and there wasn’t the faintest hesitation about him. Roosevelt had never before seen such an able rider, even in the Dakotas. Riding beside Abernathy invariably meant falling behind, pulling up the reins breathless. But Roosevelt did pretty well at keeping up. In the East, everybody was obsessed with money and power. Abernathy, although not opposed to either of these, nevertheless seemed organically a part of nature. He had a homegrown quality that Roosevelt associated with authenticity.

Dispatches from Oklahoma about President Roosevelt’s grand hunting tour with forty dogs were so colorful that readers might be forgiven for questioning their veracity. Readers were exhilarated. Realizing he had a huge audience for his antics, Roosevelt banged the kettledrum so loudly for Oklahoma’s statehood that his congressional enemies said he was pretending to have been born on a carpet of grassland. Roosevelt, it seemed, was acting like an Oklahoman high-plains drifter who understood the bioregional history of the territory from dinosaur fossils to modern dust storms. For its residents—who had an inferiority complex with regard to Kansas and Texas—this presidential gesture was greatly appreciated. When the
New York Times
ran a front-page headline, “President in Foot Races: Also Chases a Wolf Ten Miles and Is In at the Death,”
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Oklahomans welcomed the national publicity. Roosevelt’s animated hunt was far better than grim stories of blasphemy, land steals, and droughts.

What the
Times
didn’t tell its readers was that these prairie wolves (unlike the timber wolves of Minnesota) were quite small. Still, they were ferocious when attacking Oklahoman cattle or deer, they had long teeth, their bite was feared (though erroneously) to be poisonous, and a wolf bite did cause throbbing pain, suppuration, and high fever. On the other hand, these wolves were very scared of humans and would slink off and disappear into the brush when humans came into sight. The Kiowa thought these wolves were a trickster spirit because of the way they appeared and then disappeared, like a mirage. Too cunning to be trapped, gray wolves could, however, easily be chased down by fast dogs and fast horses; this is where Abernathy’s skill came in.

Secretly, Roosevelt admired coyotes because they were an enemy of the sheep industry. The cowboy in him just couldn’t stand sheep. George Bird Grinnell used to say that wolf-coyotes were the smartest animals of
all, the only ones who could creep up close to men and not be detected.
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Whenever camps were abandoned, prairie wolves would soon scavenge around the dying fires and devour the refuse. They wouldn’t, however, eat meat if it stank (as a human carcass does) for more than twenty-four hours. The Comanche, who also admired coyotes, often called them “barking wolves” because their evening howls resembled those of dogs. But to Oklahoman cowboys, coyotes were four-legged vultures, varmints to be eradicated. No matter what dire measures ranchers took, however, the adaptable coyotes thickly populated the prairie. Often, ranchers in Oklahoma hung dead coyotes on fences, a grotesque warning to the others to leave the livestock alone. “After nightfall they are noisy,” Roosevelt wrote, “and their melancholy wailing and yelling are familiar sounds to all who pass over the plains.”
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Another reason cowboys in Oklahoma loathed wolf-coyotes was that some were infected with rabies and might therefore lunge at humans. The disease around Fort Sill was more feared than dysentery. The phrase “mad coyote,” in fact, was common around Fort Sill. A local told Roosevelt that one night when he slept under the stars a rabid coyote had attacked him. Roosevelt soon learned that this disease was more feared in Oklahoma than in any other place in America. Poisoned bait was set out from Beaver to Greer counties by gentle-faced farmers who felt forced to be exterminators. Strychnine was sprinkled onto rabbit and deer carcasses throughout the prairie; one taste, and the coyotes died instantly.
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The Biological Survey’s Animal Damage Control Unit assisted with the poisoning, handing out burlap bags of strychnine (a skull and bones was printed on each bag). But it still didn’t work on the coyotes, though it did kill border collies and other types of work dogs. So, just as some dirt farmers reject modern chemicals in favor of scarecrows, many Oklahomans continued festooning fences with coyotes.

Roosevelt enjoyed chasing down the wolves with Abernathy and the boys at his side. With the game dogs taking the lead, the Roosevelt party rode behind at breakneck speed over low crested hills and river bottoms, across shallow washouts and the treeless prairie. As a general rule, if the greyhounds didn’t corner or tackle a wolf after two or three miles, it would escape. Abernathy had all this down to a science. He never even seemed to perspire. Prairie dog holes were the primary obstacle to his “catch ’em alive” trade. Fortunately, the best horses in the region had acquired a sense for avoiding them. On a beautiful roan cutting horse, Roosevelt raced hard around the Big Pasture–Wichita Forest Reserve, never more than a quarter of a mile behind the greyhounds and some
staghounds. For all of their self-assurance, neither Burnett nor Waggoner could keep up with Abernathy on his fast white horse Sam Bass. As a rider, Abernathy had amazing dexterity. Because Roosevelt was so impressed by Abernathy, the ranchmen’s envy increased by the hour. They began denigrating Abernathy as a professional attention-hog. Burnett, in particular, wanted to bond with the president; instead, Abernathy had stolen the show. In
Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter
, Roosevelt wrote a virtual dissertation on Abernathy’s wolf-coursing techniques but gave barely a word to ranchmen, Lyon, or even General Young. Instead of raising his glass of grape juice (his chosen beverage) to the ranchers, he toasted Jack Abernathy, Sam Bass, and a greyhound “blue bitch” with the speed of a cheetah.
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