The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [142]
Coues’s major books were edited, but even so, only Roosevelt himself (and perhaps a few others) could publish at that book-a-year pace. Roosevelt felt Coues, along with Burroughs, was doing the most important work of any U.S. writer or intellectual in the 1890s by editing these six treasured classics of western expansion for future generations to appreciate. When Coues died in 1899 at age fifty-seven, Roosevelt considered it a terrible loss to ornithology, zoology, and frontier history. Coues, he believed, had awakened the popular consciousness to the epic of American exploration.34 (And then there were Coues’s ornithological works.) For the remainder of his life Roosevelt used Coues’s Key to North American Birds (which went through six editions) as his central reference work regarding classification.
At the Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt continued his war against the entrenched spoils system, a war he’d been waging since he joined the New York state assembly in 1883. Now he had a national platform from which to preach against the epidemic of corruption. Almost as much as “Bad Lands Cowboy,” the label “Civil Service Reformer” soon became attached to Roosevelt in the minds of the American people. Over the next six years, serving both presidents Harrison and Cleveland (the latter won the 1892 presidential election, returning to the White House for a second nonconsecutive term), Roosevelt prosecuted dishonest government officials from coast to coast. Fraud at the U.S. Post Office was his particular focus. He also tried to help the nongovernmental Indian Rights Association (IRA) improve living conditions on territorial reservations in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.35 “The spoils system was more fruitful of degradation in our political life than any other that could have possibly been invented,” he would write late in his tenure. “The spoil monger, the man who peddled patronage, inevitably breeds the vote-buyer, the vote-seller, and the man guilty of malfeasance in office.”36
No nook or cranny was off-limits when it came to Roosevelt’s determination to eradicate illegal profiteering from the federal government. Fellow Republicans were aghast that Roosevelt doggedly investigated his own party’s members, but he believed both parties were unacceptably full of money skimmers. His targets included not only customs officials in New York City but even William Henry Harrison Miller (President Harrison’s former law partner in Indianapolis). From that moment, the taciturn president disliked the flamboyant Roosevelt, barely listening when his commissioner pontificated about crooked Wyoming developers determined to carve up poor Yellowstone National Park, or about a new investigation of the U.S. Post Office, or about graft in the Indian Agency. The old general—the grandson of America’s ninth president, William Henry Harrison—would tap his finger, bite his lip, and stare straight ahead with a marble face. Roosevelt wasn’t oblivious of the icy treatment, writing to his daughter Alice that the five-foot-six-inch Harrison was a “little runt of a President.”37 Often, Roosevelt called the president “Little Ben” behind his back.
Although Roosevelt used Sagamore Hill as his home base that summer of 1889, he often traveled to historic U.S. sites of western expansionism. Greatly encouraged by G.P. Putnam’s positive reaction to the first two volumes of The Winning of the West, Roosevelt pressed on, doing research in archives in Canada (Ontario), Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky. To Roosevelt entering each archive was like entering a mine—he never knew what gem or nugget it might contain.38 “If nothing else, The Winning of the West stands as another monument to Roosevelt’s preternatural energy