The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [195]
Later, when Roosevelt became president, he lashed out at the novelist Jack London for not writing accurately about wolves in Call of the Wild. Roosevelt’s expertise on this matter stemmed largely from firsthand observation and from reading “Wolves and Wolf Nature.” Somewhat incongruously, Grinnell’s essay also served as an impetus for Roosevelt to go wolf coursing in Oklahoma a few years later with Captain Jack “Catch ’Em Alive” Abernathy. However, Roosevelt took issue with Grinnell’s depiction of how gray wolves brought down prey, insisting in his essay “On the Little Missouri” that they attack prey at the hindquarters, feasting first on the flanks. “It will be noticed that in some points my observations about wolves are in seeming conflict with those of Mr. Grinnell,” Roosevelt wrote, “but I think the conflict is more seeming than real; and in any event I have concluded to let the article stand just as it is. The great book of Nature contains many passages which are hard to read, and at times conscientious students may well draw up different interpretations of the obscurer and least known texts. It may not be that either observer is at fault; but what is true of an animal in one locality may not be true of the same animal in another, and even in the same locality two individuals of a species may widely differ in their habits.”90
Roosevelt was now embracing the very criticism Grinnell made of T.R.’s first book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, as his own clear-headed scientific statement of purpose. Just why Roosevelt felt compelled to have these frays with Merriam and Grinnell is open to speculation; but one can probably attribute it to a mixture of egotism and his belief that he was correct. As a target of Roosevelt’s attacks, Grinnell, unlike Merriam, never let the jabs bother him. Supremely self-confident, Grinnell had, in fact, learned how to use Roosevelt for his own conservation cause in Forest and Stream, unleashing the feisty reformer’s combative personality at his own will.91
Grinnell and Roosevelt agreed on the precepts of conservation for the West: repopulating it with the buffalo and the elk, saving its natural wonders, and helping Native Americans there reconstitute their heritage. Two days before Christmas 1897, Roosevelt wrote to John A. Merritt, the third assistant postmaster general in the McKinley administration. All those holiday stamps he had licked for Christmas cards had given him an idea. Why not promote the West by issuing new stamps? When Merritt replied asking for specific recommendations, Roosevelt suggested a Cheyenne warrior with a bonnet of eagle feathers, a prairie schooner, a Remington cowboy illustration, and (if a real person could be used) an image of Kit Carson—Roosevelt always promoted Carson at every chance possible. Those were fairly safe choices. But, Roosevelt wrote, if the U.S. Post Office was truly interested in presenting the American West in a stamp series, it should focus on the region’s wildlife and wondrous natural sites. “By all means have one of those postage stamps with a buffalo on it,” Roosevelt instructed. “The vanished buffalo is typical of almost all the old-time life on the plains, the life of the wild chase, wild warfare, and wild pioneering. If any bit of scenery were taken I should suggest your going up to the Cosmos Club or to the Geological Survey and examine three or four of their photographs of the boldest [Arizona] canyon walls, or of Pike’s Peak.”92
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ROUGH RIDER
I
Starting in January 1897 William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World began reporting zealously on the Cuban insurrection against