The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [168]
In The Wilderness Hunter Roosevelt no longer focused on “manly” bird sounds like eagles’ screams, loons’ cries, or owls’ hoots. There was a softening of presentation in this new book that harked back to the surging memories of his boyhood diaries. He was downright pastoral about celebrating land where the horses didn’t boss the streets. “The remarkable and almost amphibious little water wren, with its sweet song, its familiarity, and its very curious habit of running on the bottom of the stream, several feet beneath the surface of the race of rapid water, is the most noticeable of the small birds of the Rocky Mountains,” he wrote. “It sometimes signs loudly while floating with half-spread wings on the surface of a little pool.”54
On August 6, 1893, a red-letter day, the New York Times hailed The Wilderness Hunter as a five-star delight. Roosevelt’s western hunting stories, filled with picaresque and sometimes gory detail, were written, the anonymous reviewer said, from a genuine love of the outdoors, told “without romance and with admirable clearness.”
The Hay-Adams circle may have scoffed at Roosevelt’s obsession with wildlife, but to the Times this biophilic enthusiasm sprang from the same American grain as the Transcendentalists. The reviewer even applauded the influence of Whitman and Miller on the book (unaware that Burroughs was the secret lurking muse). Being a cheerleader about bison and beaver in an age of species eradication, the Times implied, was a good thing. “The Americanism of Theodore Roosevelt is not that of the old-fashioned Fourth of July orators,” the review noted. “He is a sound-hearted, sound-minded patriot who has realized that in the present day there is no lack in his country of men of learning and influence always too keenly alive to the most trivial faults of our social and governmental systems and ever ready publicly to deplore them, and has wisely set for himself the opposite task of stimulating a love of country in the rising generation. Americanism is not a good-looking word, and it is one that has been sadly misused. Yet we can think of none better to apply to Mr. Roosevelt’s creed and practice.”55
That the review concluded with this approving recognition of Roosevelt’s vision—equating the western wilderness with nationalism—must have bolstered his self-confidence immeasurably. Without an iota of equivocation, Roosevelt instructed the outdoors community in The Wilderness Hunter that the killing of a female moose or deer was reprehensible. Over and over again, Roosevelt maintained that real hunters honored the game they shot, and that the opposite attitude (“butcher spirit”) was evil incarnate. Empty-headed hunters, Roosevelt insisted, those who shot wildlife just to kill, were to be rejected by their communities as pariahs. Forest and Stream, in a largely positive review, likewise pointed out that Roosevelt was unique among big-game hunters because the “blood and the killing” weren’t central to his wilderness reportage. “We can get enough of that,” the magazine sniffed, “by interviewing an employee at a slaughter house.”56 Even The Youth’s Companion, a widely popular boy’s magazine, praised Roosevelt’s book for lashing out at cold-blooded market hunters who shot moose stuck in snowdrifts, taking the fair chase out of the hunt and making it one-sided.57
Besides overlooking his inherent conservationist attitude in The Wilderness Hunter, recent environmental historians have mocked Roosevelt as a weekend warrior, an urbanite with money to burn who bought himself a ticket to the wilderness for a few weeks and then returned home. At face value this analysis is true. But from the perspective of 2009 Roosevelt’s desire to connect with nature to rejuvenate himself has proved ahead of its time. Today only 1.9 percent of Americans