The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [119]
When Grinnell was seven, his family had moved to Audubon Park in upper Manhattan, the thirty-acre estate that had served as the great ornithologist’s last home. The hallways there were cluttered with overhanging elk and deer antlers, “which supported guns, shot pouches, powder flasks, and belts.”36 The grounds were full of wild animals for Audubon to study and draw. The walls of Audubon Park, in fact, groaned with paintings and hunting trophies once belonging to the great Audubon.37 A close friendship developed between the young Grinnell and Audubon’s widow, Madame Lucy. The old barn was filled with ornithologists’ collections of skins and specimens, and Grinnell absorbed Audubon’s influence. The nearby Hudson River became his bird-watching laboratory. “In winter the river was often very full of ice, and eagles and crows were constantly seen walking about on the ice, no doubt feeding on refuse and the bodies of animals thrown into the stream north,” Grinnell wrote in a partially unpublished memoir. “The crows used to roost on a cedar-covered knoll north of the Harlem River in what is now the Bronx, not very far from Highbridge, and each morning they flew low among the tree tops.”38
As an undergraduate at Yale, Grinnell had the same problems in the classroom that Roosevelt would have at Harvard. He was too enamored with the idea of following in the footsteps of his idol to sit still in the classroom. Grinnell’s life mission crystallized when he read Audubon’s 1843 account of traversing the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. A passage Audubon wrote in his journal, a lament about the buffalo slaughter on the Great Plains, was seared into Grinnell’s mind and became, in a sense, a mission statement. “What a terrible destruction of life,” Audubon wrote, “as it were for nothing…as the tongues only were brought in, and the flesh of these fine animals was left to beasts and birds of prey, or to rot on the spots where they fell. The prairies are literally covered with the skulls of the victims.”39
Then Audubon had fired off a verbal challenge that would launch the modern conservation movement. “This cannot last,” Audubon said of the buffalo slaughter. “Even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.”40
Those last six words—“surely this should not be permitted”—galvanized Grinnell. With the encouragement of Professor Othniel C. Marsh (no relation to George Perkins Marsh), the leading paleontologist in the United States, Grinnell volunteered to work on a Yale-sponsored Great Plains dinosaur dig in 1870, writing that he was “bound for a West that was then really wild and wooly.” 41
Grinnell had read every one of Mayne Reid’s books as a boy, so the American West beckoned to him like the star of Bethlehem. While collecting fossils at Antelope Station in Nebraska, Grinnell encountered buckskin scouts, drifters, gold-seekers, Christian farmers, itinerant preachers, and Plains Indians. It was just the first of many trips west, during which he befriended such legendary figures as Charley Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, and Frank and Luther North. By the time he reviewed Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips in July 1885, he not only had been part of the Marsh Paleontological Expedition but had made scientific discoveries in support of Darwinism, had accompanied Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to the Black Hills in 1874 when gold was discovered, and had joined Captain William Ludlow of the Army Corps of Engineers the next year in surveying Yellowstone.42 And nobody alive wrote about duck hunting with more authority than Grinnell.43 Believing that Native Americans had been “shamefully robbed” by the U.S. government, Grinnell worked side by side with Plains tribes, 44 inspiring enough trust and confidence that many of the Indian bands gave him a special name: to the Pawnee, he was “White Wolf,” an honorary member of the tribe;