The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [145]
IV
In the fall of 1889, Edith moved the three Roosevelt children—Alice, Ted, and Kermit—from Sagamore Hill to a rented house at 1820 Jefferson Street in Washington. (The house, just off Connecticut Avenue, was one-tenth the size of Sagamore Hill.) Theodore, who called his children “bunnies,” hoped his family would grow even more.55 (He would soon get his wish: Edith gave birth to Ethel in 1891 and to Archibald in 1894.) Considering the constraints on his time, Roosevelt was a good, loving father to all five children. Enjoying the hurly-burly of the household, he instructed his brood at a young age how to identify songbirds and insects. In the nation’s capital, Theodore was usually more mannered, acting like his own father, determined to teach his children the Ten Commandments, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare. At Sagamore Hill, however, he encouraged mayhem, coaxing them to swim in the bay and play in the Long Island woods. Dull moments were frowned upon.56 “Every evening I have a wild romp with them,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother-in-law, Gertrude Elizabeth Carow, “usually assuming the role of ‘a very big bear’ while they are either little bears or a ‘racoon and a badger, papa.’”57
Over Thanksgiving 1889 Roosevelt began planning a “grand holiday” during which he would bring Edith, Bamie, Robert Munro Ferguson, Corinne (and her husband, Douglas Robinson), and Henry Cabot Lodge’s sixteen-year-old son George (nicknamed Bay) to the Badlands and Yellowstone. They would travel by pack train to pristine parts of the upper Rocky Mountains. Because Theodore talked incessantly about the Elkhorn Ranch, it made sense for his wife to see the Medora magic firsthand and then head to Yellowstone. Over the next nine months, as he prepared for this expedition, he devoured every aged calf-bound book ever written about exploration in Yellowstone. Theodore was thrilled to learn that all the Rocky Mountain big game he loved, except the mountain goat and caribou, were to be found in Yellowstone National Park. According to Arnold Hague, a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, deer—both mule and white-tailed—populated the Gallatin Range valleys in high numbers, dashing up hillsides and grazing in meadows. An impatient Roosevelt could barely wait to see the enchanted herds for himself.58
And he was likewise eager to show off his scientific knowledge to his family—to explain why some owls nested in prairie dog holes and to describe the mating rituals of elk. Playing geologist, he could explain to Edith the significance of the 2-million-year-old lava on Huckleberry Ridge tuff and how Specimen Ridge had one of the world’s largest petrified forests. More and more, he saw himself as an interpreter of both American triumphalism and Darwinian species variation as they related to western U.S. history. In fact, after delivering an address on westward expansion at the American Historical Association’s year-end meeting, Roosevelt was acclaimed by his colleagues as the leading proponent of the “new school” of western historians.59 “I know of no one in the East, besides yourself, who has any conception of Western history,” William Frederick Poole, the association’s president, wrote to Roosevelt. “You have entered a fresh and most interesting field of research, and I predict you great success.”60
In January 1890, encouraged by the positive response from the American Historical Association, Roosevelt once again fantasized about quitting the U.S. government so he could be a full-time western historian. He wondered how best to blend his historical research with his conservationist beliefs. Realizing that the myth of American abundance was a national curse, Roosevelt set about to change attitudes about saving wildlife and preserving habitat. There was in America what his friend William T. Hornaday, chief taxidermist of the National Museum (the Smithsonian), called an