The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [19]
Nearly coinciding with the publication of On the Origin of Species, a Neanderthal skullcap was found three years earlier in Neander Valley, Germany. For anybody even remotely interested in the relationship between animals and man the discovery of the first pre-sapiens fossil was stunning news. Suddenly Thomas Huxley, a discerning British biologist with long, wild sideburns, began saying in his lectures that the skull was proof that man was a primate, a direct descendant of apes. Just as exciting was Huxley’s work on fossil fish, which he collected and classified with gusto. Although Huxley had been skeptical of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, the publication of On the Origin of Species changed that. As the introverted Darwin retreated to a more private life, spending time with family and friends, Huxley became the leading interpreter of Darwin, explaining the master’s theories and articles to rapt audiences all over the world. Determined to defend evolution to the hilt, Huxley declared himself “Darwin’s bulldog,” ably drawing gorillas on blackboards to explain to the old-school scientists how man evolved from them. Whereas Darwin was a field naturalist, his advocate Huxley practiced anatomy; together they constituted a nearly lethal one-two punch on behalf of modern biology.
Although Theodore couldn’t possibly have understood the intricacies of evolutionary theory as a young boy, the explicit fact that man had evolved from apes appealed mightily to him. As a naturalist Darwin was unafraid to cut into the tissue of a cadaver looking for clues to creation. Merely having the temerity to write that man, for all his nobility, still bore “in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin” made Darwin heroic to Roosevelt.13 “Thank Heaven,” Roosevelt wrote about his childhood a year before his death, “I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley.”14
Besides reading heavily illustrated wildlife picture books and hearing about the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Huxley from his family, Theodore gravitated to the Irish adventure writer Captain Mayne Reid. Generally speaking Captain Reid—a school tutor turned frontiersman on the Missouri and Platte rivers—wrote about the “Wilderness Out There” in a highly romantic way, as in a cowboy western.15 His seventy-five adventure novels and oodles of short stories are full of backwoods contrivance. In The Scalp Hunters (1851), for example, Captain Reid, with an air of superior wisdom, went so far as to declare that the Rocky Mountains region was a sacred place where “every object wears the impress of God’s image.”16 But Reid also appreciated evolution, filling his writings with sophomoric Darwinian analysis. He never missed a chance to describe birds, animals, and plants in vivid and apposite detail.17 Although Captain Reid never made much money with his hair-raising tales, he consistently milked his Mexican-American War military service for a string of successful plays. Strange wild locales were among Captain Reid’s specialties; for example, in The Boy Hunters (1853) he made the Texas plains, Louisiana canebrakes, and Mississippi River flyover seem like teeming paradises for any youngster interested in birds. There was, in fact, an able naturalist lurking underneath his often racist (even by mid-nineteenth-century standards) dime-novel prose.