The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [20]
Anybody wanting to understand Roosevelt as an outdoors writer must turn to The Boy Hunters. The plot is fairly straightforward—a former colonel in Napoléon’s army moves to Louisiana with his three sons and a servant, determined to be at one with nature—but by Chapter 2 the narrative takes a strange twist. One afternoon a letter arrives from Napoléon’s hunter-naturalist brother asking the old colonel to procure a white buffalo skin for France. Feeling too arthritic to tramp the Louisiana Territory in search of the rare buffalo, the colonel sends his sons—the “boy hunters”—in pursuit of the rare beast. Accompanied by the faithful servant, the adventurous boys head into the dangerous wilderness, determined to find a white buffalo, thought to be a sacred symbol in many Native American religions.* (Starting in 1917 the white buffalo also became a featured image in the state flag of Wyoming.)
Swooning over such chapter titles as “A Fox Squirrel in a Fix,” “The Prong-Horns,” and “Besieged by Grizzly Bears,” Roosevelt loved every page of The Boy Hunters. Much of the novel’s action took place in the Big Thicket of Texas, where wild pigs and horses roamed freely. After exposure to the American West the boys were no longer content shooting at birds: they coveted big game. Their ambition, Reid wrote, was not “satisfied with anything less exciting than a panther, bear, or buffalo hunt.”18 Like a trio of well-armed Eagle Scouts, the boy hunters grew to be completely self-reliant, able to ride horseback, dive into rivers, lasso cattle, and climb huge trees like black bears. They scaled a steep cliff and shot birds on the wing with bow and arrow. They were taught to “sleep in the open air—in the dark forest—on the unsheltered prairie—along the white snow-wreath—anywhere—with but a blanket or a buffalo-robe for their beds.” Drawing on the legends of the mountain men like Jim Bridger, Reid, preaching the strenuous life for boys, created little Natty Bumppos who could “kindle a fire without either flint, steel, or detonating powder.”19 These boys didn’t need a compass for direction. They could read all the rocks and trees of that “vast wilderness that stretched from their own home to the far shores of the Pacific Ocean.”20
The Boy Hunters included marvelous Hogarth-like woodcut illustrations of ferocious cougars and a bear wrestling an alligator, which spiced up the narrative. Lovingly Captain Reid described in credible naturalistic detail tulip trees and the fanlike leaves of palmettos, weird yuccas, and lofty sugar maples. Most ambitiously, however, he anticipated Darwinian theory in anecdotes about the food chain.21 Academics have (accurately) criticized Captain Reid for harboring racist views of Indians and black slaves, but they’ve traditionally overlooked his essentially Marxist analogies about how the rich preyed on the poor in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a radical Republican, and to him the mega-capitalists were “king vultures” who didn’t have a single positive trait and who abused the common vultures (aura and atratus) without mercy. Later in life, when Roosevelt fought in the Spanish-American War, he borrowed much of Captain Reid’s observations of vultures for color in his own memoir The Rough Riders.22
Unlike James Fenimore Cooper or the Crockett Almanacs, Reid’s half-fictions awkwardly offered up the proper Latin names for wildlife and plants he encountered. “About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (artemisia tridentata),” he wrote in The Boy Hunters, “a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (tetrao uro-phasianus), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.”23 Passages like this occur in dozens of Reid’s books, often with the Latin binomials slowing down the otherwise fast-paced prose. Clearly, Reid wasn’t a local-color writer like Bret Harte or Alfred Henry Lewis recounting desperado hijinks and cowboy yarns from the Wild West. Roosevelt, like many American and English boys, made no bones about their idolatry of Captain Reid and