The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [24]
Two days later the precocious nine-year-old responded to a letter from his father, angling for hard-to-find plants. “I have a request to make of you, will you do it?” Roosevelt asked his father drily. “I hope you will. If you will it will figure greatly in my museum. You know what supple jacks are, do you not? Please get two for Ellie [Elliott, his younger brother] and one for me. Ask your friend to let you cut off the tiger-cat’s tail, and get some long moos and have it mated together. One of the supple jacks (I am talking of mine now) must be about as thick as your finger and thumb must be four feet long and the other must be three feet long. One of my mice got crushed. It was the mouse I liked best though it was a common mouse. Its name was Brownie.”42
As a young boy Roosevelt not only collected live mice and a woodchuck but also sketched them in notepads, a few which have survived undamaged. Eastern moles were another favorite of the young Roosevelt, and in a series of drawings housed at Harvard he captured all the salient details of these blind underground tunnelers: flat fur; eyes covered with skin; the absence of ears; and side-facing feet ideal for digging. Then there are his fine sketches of robins and wrens. Clearly, Roosevelt was blessed with a mind that could absorb physical detail. His bird and animal drawings were quite accomplished for a boy of his age. To most children one field mouse was indistinguishable from another, but Roosevelt knew that a canyon mouse (Peromyscus crinitus) or a pinyon mouse (P. truei) was different from a cotton mouse (P. gossypinus). And he didn’t recoil from drawing them.43
III
An astonishing fact about young Roosevelt’s prodigious interest in nature was that he kept semi-regular diaries. Studying his unaffected scrawl and chronic misspellings brings crucial understanding and clarity to his later achievements as a conservationist and wildlife protectionist. Being a naturalist in the 1850s and 1860s was fashionable, and the young Roosevelt had caught the bug. Darwin had sounded a clarion call for a new generation of biological collectors, and Roosevelt had heard it loud and clear. Roosevelt called his first diary My Life and kept it between August 10 and September 5, 1868. That summer the Roosevelt family spent their holiday in Barrytown, a busy railroad depot and steamboat landing across the Hudson River. Leasing the country home of John Aspinwall, the Roosevelts immediately began exploring the Hudson River valley, which had recently been celebrated on canvas by such remarkable landscape painters as Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey, and Albert Bierstadt. Sitting on the riverbank, they could watch steamers, canal boats towed by tugs, and tall sails drifting by in silence.44
Barrytown provided Roosevelt his first opportunity to hear the earth inhale and exhale without interference from the noise and stench of the industrial revolution. In virtually every diary entry throughout the late summer of 1868, Roosevelt wrote enthusiastically about animals he had either encountered or heard of in the dales of Barrytown. There were deer, big and small, to be studied; he learned how to analyze their tracks, like an Iroquois or Algonquin scout in training. There were encounters with packs of wild dogs; mid-afternoon pony rides; times for feeding horses sweet grass, green meat, and bran mash; lazy hours reeling in bluegills at fishing ponds; walks along fast-running brooks teeming with crayfish, eels, salamanders, and water bugs (all easily