The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [158]
Two Ocean Pass was a scenic wonder that left Roosevelt breathless. It was located on the Continental Divide (in what became Bridger-Teton National Forest in 1908). All around him were evergreen forests and eternal rock peaks with “grand domes and lofty spires.” Craggy ramparts pierced the sky in this vast mountainous region. Here was a sacred spot for sure. Some streams flowed westward into the Snake River and then the Columbia River, eventually emptying into the Pacific Ocean. Others descended eastward toward the Yellowstone River, which drained into the Missouri River before merging with the Mississippi River at the confluence north of Saint Louis; from there the Mississippi went straight to the Gulf of Mexico.106
To an American outdoors romantic like Roosevelt, the forlorn, wild valley of Two Ocean Pass epitomized the miraculous West. He was walled in by the raw, rugged Teton mountain chains, their flanks blasted and slashed by precipice and chasm. Carefully Roosevelt studied the fork of a stream where one branch headed toward the Oregon coast while the other flowed in the direction of Louisiana’s bayous. Clad in a buckskin tunic with leggings, Roosevelt was living out his fantasy of a voyage of discovery. Everything around him—mountain valleys; fields of goldenrod, purple aster, bluebells, and white immortelles—was unmarred by mankind. There were no surveyors’ stakes, mining shacks, or cattle trails to break the spell. Two Ocean Pass and the Tetons—the Grand Tetons—were becoming known as national treasures as surely as Yellowstone and Yosemite. A poet like Whitman could have written a hymn just by breathing in the crisp Wyoming air. “In the park-country, on the edges of the evergreen forest, were groves of delicate quaking-aspen, the trees often growing to quite a height; their tremulous leaves were already changing to bright green and yellow, occasionally with a reddish blush,” Roosevelt wrote in the essay “An Elk-Hunt at Two-Ocean Pass,” which appeared in The Wilderness Hunter. “In the Rocky Mountains the aspens are almost the only deciduous trees, their foliage offering a pleasant relief to the eye after the monotony of the unending pine and spruce woods, which afford so striking a contrast to the hardwood forest east of the Mississippi.” 107
CHAPTER TEN
THE WILDERNESS HUNTER IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
I
Ever since Roosevelt arrived in the Dakota Territory in 1883 to ranch cattle, the very idea of Texas enthralled him. Many of the Badlands cowboys he encountered spoke of the Hill Country as a hunter’s paradise teeming with big-bodied deer. So in the spring of 1892, as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, thirty-three-year-old Roosevelt hatched a plan. Officially, he was going to Texas to investigate the dismissal of a few U.S. postal employees solely for partisan political reasons. But he also arranged for a six-day collared peccary hunt in the South Texas Coastal Plain, which would enliven The Wilderness Hunter, the outdoors memoir he was writing. Furthermore Roosevelt was hoping to anchor future installments of The Winning of the West on Lone Star history. “The next volumes I take up I hope will be the Texan struggle and the Mexican War,” Roosevelt would write his friend Madison Grant. “I quite agree with your estimate of these conflicts, and am surprised that they have not received more attention.”1
Killing a peccary (or “javelina,” the term preferred in Texas) during the Gilded Age wasn’t easy. In addition to being elusive, peccaries were fierce fighters who traveled in packs, known to slash horses’ legs with their daggerlike tusks and stampede over dogs in dense thickets of chaparral and scrub oak. “They were subject to freaks of stupidity, and were pugnacious to a degree,” Roosevelt wrote. “Not only would they fight if molested,