The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [136]
Although Merriam’s shop was officially the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, Roosevelt called it the Bureau of Biological Survey (which is what it officially became on March 3, 1905, the day Roosevelt was inaugurated as president in his own right). The Geological Survey mapped the topography of America after the Civil War, and Roosevelt envisioned the Biological Survey doing the same for the classifications of plants, birds, and animals. The Biological Survey, with Merriam at the helm, proved that temperature extremes were partially responsible for how wildlife was distributed. Although only about five or six crackerjack naturalists were ever on his official payroll, Merriam established a grassroots network of specimen collectors from all over America, a particularly notable achievement in an era when there were no telephones, let alone the Internet. He published a pathbreaking study of the San Francisco Mountain Region and Desert of the Little Colorado, Arizona establishing from summit to base six life zones in the flora of the mountains: Lower Sonoran (Sonoran Desert plants); Upper Sonoran (Colorado pinyon and juniper woods); Transition (Ponderosa pine forest); Canadian (Rocky Mountain Douglas fir and white fir forest); Hudsonian (tree line forests of Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine and Engelmann spruce); and Arctic-Alpine (alpine tundra).*
A founder of the National Geographic Society, Merriam joined the American-British fur seal commission determined to save the great herds of Alaska from extinction, in the same way that Roosevelt and Grinnell were protecting the buffalo. By the time Merriam became president of the Biological Society of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. in 1891, he was considered the greatest authority on applying Darwinian theory to American species and topography.43
Writing reports from Arizona and saving seals constituted the fun part of Merriam’s job at the Biological Survey. As an administrator he had to find ways for wildlife and humans to coexist in America. Everything from poisoning ground squirrels with barley and strychnine to promoting lime and sulfur wash to prevent rabbits from attacking orchards fell under his job description. Anxious to save the beaver from being over-hunted, Merriam became a supersalesman on behalf of muskrat fur as an alternative. Starting in 1886 he also oversaw publication of the Annual Reports of the Biological Survey. He also made sure U.S. Department of Agriculture “bulletins” were printed and disseminated all over the country.44 If you were a farmer in Mississippi or Arkansas, for example, constantly shooting raccoons as varmints, Merriam was the national voice that would say, “Not a good idea.” Raccoons fed on crayfish, which infested leveled embankments; so the raccoons were actually providing a pest-control service by destroying the potentially destructive crustaceans. Such pragmatic solutions to wildlife control are why Roosevelt respected Merriam so much. When it came to wildlife protection, Merriam was a living instruction manual.
CHAPTER NINE
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK WITH JOHN BURROUGHS AND BENJAMIN HARRISON
I
It is strange now to picture them meeting for the first time in March 1889 at the Fellowcraft Club at 32 West Twenty-Eighth Street in New York. With a membership of around 200 sophisticated newspapermen, writers, and artists, the Fellowcraft had the kind of leather-chair ambience preferred by the literary-minded aristocrats of the gilded age. The thirty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was one of the club’s younger