The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [241]
Accompanying Roosevelt, Stewart, and Webb on the hunt was John B. Goff, considered the finest tracker of the “ghost cats” in Colorado. This was always Roosevelt’s secret as an outdoorsman; he had a genius (and the money) for finding the best hunt guides available for every expedition. Roosevelt’s deft writing about the hunt—when published in 1905—contained the most anatomically correct descriptions of Colorado cougars, from their white muzzles to their huge paws, ever written up until that time. Carefully crating his kills in Denver, Roosevelt had shipped his cougars’ heads, paws, and skins directly to C. G. Gunther’s Sons on Fifth Avenue in New York City for preparing.
The trip to Colorado whetted Roosevelt’s appetite for more cougar collecting. Word from Yellowstone National Park was that cougars were wreaking havoc on the elk herds. Encouraged by Merriam, Roosevelt planned on heading up to the park within the year to find more specimens for the Biological Survey and help out the bands of elk. “Many conservationists of the day, including Roosevelt, believed limiting predation would increase ungulate populations,” the historian Jeremy M. Johnston explained in Yellowstone Science, “allowing them to recover from the results of the intensive market hunting that occurred in the park before the ban on hunting.”54
IV
Roosevelt returned to Washington tremendously improved in appearance. In Colorado, he had written a dozen letters detailing his hunt for the cougar (and lynx). What he seemed to admire most about cougars was that they ate meat only fresh and clean—and, of course, the way they mastered topography; they were able to live in isolated cliffs or remote alpine valleys far removed from civilization. Armed with all his detailed measurements and field notes regarding cougars and lynx, Roosevelt denounced William Henry Hudson, best known in history as the author of Green Mansions, for his “preposterous fables” about cougars in his recent book The Naturalist on the Plateau.55 Roosevelt kept score on those whom he considered “nature fakers,” preparing for a frontal assault in the near future. Unlike bears—which were omnivores with meal alternatives like berries, roots, shoots, and pine nuts—cougars were able to eat only meat; Roosevelt believed this was the reason they were overdramatized as bloodthirsty killers.
Famously, Mark Hanna once quipped that Roosevelt was a “damn cowboy,” now only “one heart beat away from the presidency.” But the word “cowboy” would imply that Roosevelt was a rubber stamp for the stockmen’s associations of the Rocky Mountains, which he clearly wasn’t. The reality, in fact, was far worse than Hanna contemplated. Roosevelt was a pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist who had been trained at Harvard as a Darwinian-Huxleyite zoologist and now believed that the moral implications of On the Origin of Species needed to be embraced by public policy. The GOP was in trouble.
While Roosevelt had been in Colorado a great oil boom was under way. It was big enough to have befuddled John D. Rockefeller himself. Roosevelt didn’t know whether it was a cause for celebration or woe. Near Beaumont, Texas, at a place known as Spindletop, black gold spouted 200 feet in the air. The western plains of Texas and Oklahoma, he knew, would never be the same now that oil had been found. Somehow or other Roosevelt found a way to be at war with the Standard Oil Company for his entire life. Meanwhile, on the