The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [165]
The situation seemed clear: either the Boone and Crockett’s constitution would have to be rewritten or the sixty-nine-year-old Bierstadt would have to be expelled from the club. But Roosevelt found a third way to handle the problem. He adeptly edited the story to make it seem as if Bierstadt had, in fact, bagged the animal himself. This “benign deception,” as two scholars later called it in the New England Quarterly, was uncharacteristic of the usually up-front Roosevelt. By recasting the death scene in the passive voice—“This bull was killed”—he excised the Indian guide’s marksmanship.39 Initially, Roosevelt’s creative edit achieved his overriding goal of preserving Bierstadt’s integrity by allowing this story to be published in American Big-Game Hunting while also adhering to the club’s constitution. However, Bierstadt wouldn’t agree to these artfully truthful but misleading edits. If he accepted Roosevelt’s solution, his article would, in fact, have degenerated from nonfiction to fiction. The painter suggested a compromise—the Boone and Crockett Club could publish his essay without using his byline or signature.
Unwilling to compromise any farther, Roosevelt now balked. As civil service commissioner, he was busting lying scoundrels right and left. If the press discovered his cover-up of Bierstadt’s story, it would have a field day at his expense. He wasn’t going to risk what reporters call a blind item for the sake of somebody else’s problem. “Grinnell and I both feel that it would not do to put in any non-editorial article unsigned, and moreover that when we get a piece of yours it ought to be purely yours, and without emendations from us,” Roosevelt wrote to Bierstadt on June 8 from Washington, D.C., unburdening himself of the whole ordeal. “So I shall have to trust to the hope that for our second volume we may persuade you to write a piece needing no emendation, over your own signature.”40
There were some wonderful pieces in American Big-Game Hunting. Grinnell’s one contribution, “In Buffalo Days,” is arguably the most elegant meditation on buffalo ever written. Truly worried that the species was headed toward extinction, Grinnell expressed his love for the animal by describing every twitch and tail flap he had ever noticed as a naturalist. “It was in spring, when its coat was being shed, that the buffalo, odd-looking enough at any time, presented its most grotesque appearance,” he lovingly wrote. “The matted hair and wool of the shoulders and sides began to peel off in great sheets, and these sheets, clinging to the skin and flapping in the wind, gave it the appearance of being clad in rags.”41
Among the other prominent contributors to American Big-Game Hunting were T.R.’s old Harvard friend Owen Wister (“The White Goat and His Country”). Living in Philadelphia but writing about the West, Wister had become a member of Boone and Crockett Club at Roosevelt’s invitation. After Harvard the two enthusiasts of the West grew close, frequently discussing the Rockies, buffalo repopulation, and the frontier cowboys. In 1893, Wister had visited Yellowstone and met Frederic Remington there. He and Remington decided to help in Roosevelt’s crusade to protect wildlife at Yellowstone. Known for encouraging rows, launching into diatribes, and harboring a sycophantic admiration for Ulysses S. Grant (of whom he published