The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [135]
Unfortunately, T.R. didn’t get to bask in the acclaim that Ranch Life received. That winter, to meet his publisher’s deadline, he was working overtime on The Winning of the West. Puffy-eyed, he burned the midnight oil nightly until three or four in the morning. Somewhat naively, he had promised G.P. Putnam’s Sons the first two volumes by the spring of 1889. Always tottering toward a physical breakdown, pushing himself beyond the usual human limits, whenever possible Roosevelt locked himself up at Sagamore Hill and wrote. His entire nervous system was strained. Desperately he tried blocking out both good and bad news. With two children to raise, Edith constantly worried that bills had to be paid. (She made sure all financial obligations were met.) Whenever the issue of financial insolvency was raised, however, Roosevelt’s blue eyes would darken in disapproval. His exuberance would be temporarily extinguished. Life for Theodore had become a pressure cooker of deadlines, commitments, responsibilities, and financial insecurity. Only the finances, however, made him irritable. His great consolation was that at least he hadn’t become a leech, or one of those fellows who always looked for other people to carry the load.
V
Although Roosevelt doesn’t mention it in An Autobiography, there may have been another impetus for creating the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. The previous year, anxious to professionalize mammalogy, Dr. C. Hart Merriam of the Department of Agriculture elevated the Economic Ornithology section at the Department of Agriculture into the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.40 In principle, the new division was intended to help farmers cope with pests. But in practice, Dr. Merriam was interested in the distribution of mammals across the United States. Owing to the creation of the Audubon Society and the American Ornithologists Union, birds were starting to be properly studied. Two exhaustive “bulletins,” in fact, were published in the late 1880s: W. W. Cooke’s “Bird Migration in the Mississippi Valley” and Walter B. Barrows’s “The English Sparrow in America.”41 But nobody was publishing similar high-quality bulletins about chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, gophers, ferrets, groundhogs, or dozens of other American mammals.
Merriam—short in stature, with a mustache that made him look like an otter—soon changed that. Merriam’s agriculture division began conducting general surveys of mammals (as well as birds), with a keen eye toward biotic community distributions. Using field reports and scientific results, he constructed life-zone maps. For the first time in American history a biological understanding of cougars’, wolves’, or bears’ ranges became available to the general public. Nobody had ever inventoried American wildlife quite like Merriam. A crucial component of his success was his uncanny ability to reach out to untrained, backyard naturalists and mammal collectors throughout America. In any given state or territory there was bound to be a local hunter who had preserved the skins of such diurnal species as rabbits and squirrels. “It was from such sources that many of his specimens came and he carried on a large correspondence,” the naturalist historian Wilfred H. Osgood recalled of Merriam in the Journal of Mammalogy, “promoting interest in mammals by purchasing specimens and, in some cases, by employing collectors or at least by placing standing orders.”42
A truly practical biologist, Merriam also pioneered in using a new trap for small mammals: called the Cyclone, it was made of tin and wire springs,