The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [21]
Later in life, when Roosevelt moved to the Dakota Territory for intermittent spells to ranch and research a trilogy of books on the outdoors and hunting, Reid remained his literary model. Reid’s prose exploits of an American “cibolero” (buffalo hunter) in The White Chief: A Legend of North Mexico (1855), for example, motivated Roosevelt to lustily track down a nonwhite bison himself. In following its protagonist on a wild, woolly hunt for trophies in the Rockies, the book celebrated manifest destiny while offering Roosevelt a “manly” lesson in natural history. “To [the cibolero] the open plain or the mountain was alike a home,” Captain Reid wrote. “He needed no roof. The starry canopy was as welcome as the gilded ceiling of a palace.”24
Whenever Roosevelt wrote about the wilderness or birds, even as a boy, traces of Reid’s hyper-romantic style are easily detectable.25 Although other naturalist writers also captivated young Theodore’s imagination—for example, John James Audubon and Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost naturalist of the era *—Captain Reid, whom Edgar Allan Poe witheringly described as “a colossal but most picturesque liar,” remained his role model.26 (Captain Reid seldom purposely lied about nature, but he always embellished his own supposed rough-and-ready heroics.) An impressive five times in his An Autobiography of 1913, Roosevelt wrote about how “dearly loved” Reid was.27 By contrast, other outdoors books for boys didn’t much appeal to Roosevelt. For example, he dismissed Johann D. Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson for its clumsy zoology and was bored by its tropical escapism and dragfoot juvenility. According to young T.R., Wyss had assembled a “wholly impossible collection of animals” to pad his plot about survival after a shipwreck.28
One naturalist Roosevelt did enjoy was the British scholar Reverend J. G. Wood, whose Illustrated Natural History was published to wide acclaim in 1851. Wood made studying wildlife fun for nonscientific minds as well as specialists, without dumbing it down. Ignoring the complications of Darwinism, he simply took the view that natural history was “far better than a play” and “one gets the fresh air besides.”29 In particular, Roosevelt loved Wood’s Homes without Hands: Being a Description of the Habitations of Animals, Classed According to Their Principle of Construction (1866). Roosevelt marveled at passages in this weighty 632-page tome about ant nests and tunnels, deciding on the spot to emulate the author.30 The eight-year-old Roosevelt sat down and wrote a short essay, his first known written work, titled “The Foraging Ant.” There were more than 10,000 ant species in the world and Roosevelt wanted to understand their differences.* Proud of “The Foraging Ant,” which was about the workaholism of ants, Roosevelt read the essay out loud to his parents, who were complimentary about the pseudoscientific earnestness of his naturalist prose.31
More impressive than the essay itself, however, was the mere fact that young T.R. had read Homes without Hands. Although the book was replete with engravings of numerous species ranging from ospreys to wasps, the prose was fairly dense. Ostensibly, Wood was describing the varied hearths wild creatures built to live in—moles’ burrows, prairie dogs’ tunnels, rabbits’ warrens, beavers’ dams, spiders’ nests, and so on. But Homes without Hands was not aimed at the children’s book marketplace; it was serious adult fare, the kind of comprehensive text required in mid-nineteenth-century university biology or zoology introductory courses. Full of Latin identifications, choking with minutiae about the abdomen colors of bees and conchologistical (conchology is the study of mollusks) insights into Saxicava, this book was a far cry from the elegant musings of Thoreau about the shifting light at Walden Pond or a National Geographic article on white-water runs down the Shenandoah River. That Roosevelt gravitated to its heft pointed to his future avocation as one of the most astute wildlife observers our country