The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [159]
Roosevelt had imagined Uvalde, Texas—where his friend John Moore ranched—to be a temperate prairie like North Dakota. But the area’s proximity to the Gulf of Mexico meant there was a wide range of varied habitat to study. Three different types of rail—King, Clapper, and Virginia—were found in the brushlands. Around giant cypress trees or pecan groves Roosevelt discovered uncommon species such as greater pewee and Rufous-capped warbler. Bustling insectivorous redbirds and flycatchers, moving together in concert, abounded. Around wild fruit fields were frugivorous birds, including many whose genera Roosevelt was uncertain about.3
After discovering no peccaries along the Frio River, the Roosevelt paty headed south along the Nueces River toward the oak-motte prairies of the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. The spring air was mild at Choke Canyon, and Roosevelt was delighted to see so much unexpected greenery. Little brown swifts dashed in front of his horse at regular intervals as they moved seaward avoiding the stinging ants. The horseflies were the biggest he had ever seen. The insects were such a serious problem for Texas settlers that screens covered house windows and smoking coils were lit to ward off the swarms. Those in shacks smoked fern rollups to ward them off. Roosevet copiously noted the lilac-colored flowers and wide bands of purplish wildflowers that carpeted the unobstructed Texas prairie. “Great blue herons,” he wrote, “were stalking beside these pools, and from one we flushed a white ibis.”4
Once Roosevelt had absorbed the Nueces River area in exacting detail, the expedition went onward with trophy-hungry determination. At sunrise the hunt party was greeted by the Texas nightingale (the mockingbird) and at sunset by the howls of coyotes. But no javelinas. Just when the hunting looked bleakest of all, however, Roosevelt suddenly stumbled upon his mark. A sow and a long-tusked boar turned their huge heads toward the Roosevelt party, grinding their teeth so loudly it produced a sound like Mexican castanets. Their needle-sharp eyes had that dark, calmly menacing look of a great white shark as it circles prey. Roosevelt shot them both at point-blank range.5
That evening the hunt party feasted on peccary and Roosevelt shipped his trophy heads back to New York. More than anything else, it seemed, Roosevelt thoroughly enjoyed the tough-talk style of his Texas compa-dres. Like a mynah bird, Roosevelt had picked up a lot of sayings and brags which he now constantly repeated back in Washington. He admired, for example, the story of a Texan who carefully studied a tenderfoot’s 32-caliber pistol and said: “Stranger, if you ever shot me with that, and I know’d it, I would kick you all over Texas.” As a corollary, Roosevelt decided that when it came to peccary hunting, guns weren’t the armament of choice. “They ought to be killed with a spear,” Roosevelt wrote his British friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice. “The country is so thick, with huge cactus and thorny mesquite trees, that the riding is hard; but they are small and it would be safe to go at them on foot—at any rate for two men.”6
Texas put a ruddy color back in Roosevelt’s cheeks; and his brow, though creased, now showed few traces of stress. The fresh air had once again purged his bureaucratic fatigue, and the open country had given him time to relax and think. The spare campfire meals had thinned him down quite a bit. Once back in Washington, he remained so enchanted with Texas cowboy lore, in fact, that he made plans to visit Deadwood in August to see with his own eyes where Wild Bill Hickok died. (He went and deemed it “a golden town.”7)
That journey to the Black Hills of South Dakota, however, had a civil service objective: to investigate graft and inhumane conditions on various Sioux reservations following the massacre at Wounded Knee. Roosevelt rode to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where more than 7,000 Sioux lived, largely in squalor, to investigate what had happened twenty months earlier when the