The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [202]
While waiting to be shipped out, Roosevelt studied the waterfowl along the wharf front and marshy inlets—ibis, herons, and double-crested cormorants, among scores of others. These were the species his Uncle Rob had written about so ably in Florida and Game Water Birds. Beneath Roosevelt’s army boots on the Tampa beaches were sunrise tellin and wide-mouthed purpura and ground coral, bay mud, tiny pebbles mixed with barnacles and periwinkles. Writing to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt turned quasi-geobiologist, delineating Florida’s semitropical sun, palm trees, sharks swimming in the shallows, and sandy beaches much like those on the French Riviera.38 The Gulf of Mexico, the ninth-largest body of water in the world, interested Roosevelt no end. Its barrier islands from Texas to Florida were home to myriad songbirds and shelled mollusks. Captain Mayne Reid had written about the region as a place of high adventure, where swells were 150 feet long, the throw of the surf was unpredictable, and pirate bands camped on isolated coral islands, eating clams and octopuses, fugitives from all governments.
Spending these days in Tampa Bay, various U.S. Fish and Wildlife historians believe, later influenced Roosevelt’s creation of federal bird sanctuaries along both of Florida’s coasts. What Roosevelt understood from being stationed on the Gulf Coast was that the market hunters were having a bad effect on Florida’s ecosystem, including the Everglades, Indian River, Lake Okeechobee, and the Ten Thousand Islands. The previous year, Roosevelt’s New York–based ornithologist friend Frank M. Chapman had warned him once again that tricolor herons and snowy egrets were being slaughtered for their feathers. Now, huge mounds could be seen around the port of Tampa, bird carcasses piled twenty or thirty yards high and rotting in the sun. If the slaughter wasn’t stopped, the bird roosts of Florida would vanish, species going the extant way of the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the Labrador duck.39*
As President McKinley concentrated on the Spanish-American War, the American conservationist agenda in 1898 was left in the hands of Secretary of the Interior Bliss. Realizing that creating new forest reserves was inevitably controversial, Bliss focused on enlarging existing federal reserves, such as Pecos River in New Mexico and Trabuco Canyon in California. In addition, the lands in the Alaskan Territory were protected under an experimental program for the Department of Agriculture. President McKinley himself bragged about these forest reserves—and other accomplishments—in his third State of the Union address.40 Meanwhile, Roosevelt noticed in Tampa Bay that Florida—one of the richest states in the Union in terms of wildlife—was being treated as a worthless swamp, instead of as the amazing array of ecosystems his Uncle Rob and Charlie Hallock had written about. As Chapman, who was spending much of his year in Florida, told Roosevelt, wildlife protection had to be enforced there, or else dozens of species would soon be destroyed forever.
When the Yucatan finally set sail for Cuba on June 13, Roosevelt was nearly giddy with joy at escaping from Tampa. As the regimental band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Girl I Left behind Me,” he looked at the other forty-eight vessels in the flotilla, neatly aligned in three columns, steaming to war. As his boat headed southward, he used his descriptive powers in his correspondence, saying that the Florida Keys area was “a sapphire sea, wind-rippled, under an almost cloudless sky.”41 There was no sign of an equinoctial storm that could throw the armada off course; it was, to