The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [174]
The rational explanation lies in Roosevelt’s belief that it was only proper to treat a defeated people with dignity. A true nineteenth-century gentleman, he put his faith in the hope that education, assimilation, and the example of white Americans would improve Native Americans’ lot in the near future. In fact, he envisioned the day when high-quality men like Luther Standing Bear and Few Trails would dine in the White House. Regardless of which side was the real Roosevelt, his ideas intersected in a singular way: he consistently saw the Indians’ future in North America in stark Darwinian terms. Once U.S. federal government graft, skimming, and unconstitutional injustice were removed from the reservations, Roosevelt argued, it would be up to individual Indian tribes to survive. He had high hopes for the Cherokee and Pawnee, less so for the Sioux. “We must turn them loose,” Roosevelt wrote in one report, “hardening our hearts to the fact that many will sink, exactly as many will swim.”84
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BRONX ZOO FOUNDER
I
In the autumn of 1894, Roosevelt began collaborating with Madison Grant, a lawyer and explorer, on the creation of the New York Zoological Society. With his waxed handlebar mustache, Yale pride, penchant for bow-ties, and habit of always talking with his hands clasped as if in prayer, Grant was a preeminent figure in the world of zoology, credited with discovering several North American subspecies of mammals (a species of Alaska caribou was named Bangifer granti in his honor).1 That very year he had written for Century an article entitled “The Vanishing Moose,” which Roosevelt loved.2 Now both wildlife protectionists would turn their attention to the vanishing buffalo as part of their ambitious scheme for a new American zoo.3
This zoo would be situated in the Bronx, then a rural section of New York City. Roosevelt and Grant had been disappointed by the European zoos they visited. Little educational information was disseminated to visitors about species variation or habitat, and most zoological parks emphasized the freakishness and oddity of their collections. Such come-ons as a six-legged deer in Berlin and a two-headed turtle in London sickened Roosevelt. Worse yet, the animals in European zoos paced back and forth in tiny cages, like prisoners waiting for the end of a lifetime sentence. This kind of backward zookeeping had to end. As Roosevelt envisioned it, their modern New York zoo would be built “on lines entirely divergent from the Old World zoological gardens.”4 The animals would have more room, in open-air exhibits where possible, and broadsheets would be created specifically for schoolchildren explaining the principles behind wildlife preservation and Darwinian evolution. And while the Bronx Zoo wasn’t as showy as a production by P. T. Barnum or Buffalo Bill, the Chicago Exposition had taught Roosevelt to think outside the box when it came to devising a tourist attraction that would bring throngs to see wildlife up close. A subway stop, in fact, was slated to open at the southeastern entrance to the zoological park.
In planning this zoo, Roosevelt and Grant included a singularly ambitious goal: they would breed buffalo in captivity there and eventually would turn them loose throughout the Great Plains and upper Rocky Mountain region. This so-called