The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [189]
Out of all Roosevelt’s naturalist friends, only Merriam (and the botanist Asa Gray) took Darwinian pursuits such as cross-pollinating flowers—anthers and pistils—seriously. Merriam was like Roosevelt in that loafing wasn’t part of either man’s personality. For Merriam, every waking minute was sacred time for further scientific inquiry into the mysteries of life. He had become the workhorse of the U.S. Biological Survey. Besides publishing the definitive two-volume work The Mammals of the Adirondack Region, Northeastern New York, he had visited seal rookeries in Newfoundland, helped found the National Geographic Society, conducted collecting trips in the Mojave and Sonoran desserts, served on the American-British Seal Commission, and written a groundbreaking Darwinian interpretive text, “The Geographic Distribution of Life In North America, with Special Reference to the Mammalia” in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.66
At the time of his disagreement with Roosevelt about overspecialization or organisms, Merriam was organizing an expedition to 14,179-foot Mount Shasta, a dormant volcano in Siskiyou County, California, the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range. Groves of conifers on its slopes had already been recklessly denuded by a lumber company.* Raised in New York, Merriam was admired as a highly effective administrator by the East Coast aristocracy who frequented the gentlemen’s clubs—Metropolitan, University, Cosmos, and Century. The railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, for example, hired Merriam in 1899 to head a famous eight-week expedition to Alaska. Harriman’s primary personal goal was to hunt a brown bear. Paid a retainer, Merriam organized the travel arrangements, booked the best polar scientists for the voyage, and, most famously, hired John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell to come along. Once in Alaska, Merriam, for the sake of American natural science, hiked across Howling Valley in Glacier Bay, wrote on the volcanic island of Bogoslof, and pondered the fate of seals. Eventually he compiled “The Merriam Report,” a multivolume account everything learned on the expedition, for E. H. Harriman himself. A deskbound Roosevelt was envious because he hadn’t been able to go along on the historic expedition.
Considering the high level of mutual admiration, one suspects that what actually started the feud with Merriam was his encroachment into the study of bears, considered Roosevelt’s bread-and-butter area of expertise. Merriam stoked up a controversy regarding bears in 1896 by publishing (for the Biological Society of Washington) the paper “A Preliminary Synopsis of the American Bears.” Claiming that for fifteen years the classification of North American bears had been done with imperfections and unscientific contractions, Merriam wanted to challenge orthodoxy. Taxonomic revisions of various genera of bears, he said, owing to field research, were now needed. Having collected 200 to 300 bear skulls and skins as samples, he insisted that the results were crystal clear. There were many more bear species than previously known. That possibility seemed so fantastic, so incomprehensible to Roosevelt that he could barely absorb the assertion calmly. Merriam might as well have claimed to have discovered Sasquatch.
Calling for a comprehensive treatise on bears, Merriam admitted that “much additional material is coveted from North British Columbia, and the coast regions of Alaska south of the Alaskan peninsula.” Nevertheless, from studying so