The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [244]
Because Roosevelt kept the cougar heads on these rugs, visitors to Sagamore Hill could be forgiven for thinking that he was showing off his hunting skills. Roosevelt even acquired two Alexander Proctor sculptures of cougars, which he used as props to stimulate conversation about his Colorado hunts. Essentially, he had fallen into the same trap as all persona manipulators. For years he promoted himself as a big game hunter extraordinaire—for example, having photographs taken of himself in buckskin holding a rifle. Although he clearly was the leading light of the wildlife protection movement, many average Americans knew him merely as a hunter. After the bad publicity Roosevelt received over the Colorado hunt, in the future he had naturalist-inclined friends at his side to offer testimonials that he was a scientifically-minded hunter, not a bloodthirsty rogue. Confusion over this issue caused Roosevelt deep anguish throughout his years as vice president, president, and ex-president. The sad reality was that most newspaper readers preferred hearing the details of Roosevelt’s hunts, not the biological minutiae about the variation of rings on a lynx’s tail. Roosevelt could be a grave, serious man when it came to studying wildlife genera, but hardly anybody knew it.
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Shortly after Roosevelt became vice president, he began casting a wide net in hopes of bringing first-class men into the Forest Service and the Biological and Geological Survey. Writing to Gifford Pinchot, for example, Roosevelt tried to get Jacob Riis’s eighteen-year-old son Edward attached to an “outdoor government trip.”67 He also lobbied to get his old friend from Maine, Bill Sewall, a job as postmaster of Island Falls. “He is a true American type of the best sort,” Roosevelt wrote in his letter of recommendation, “as strong as a bull moose, fearless, shrewd, honest and kindly.”68 Worried that animals weren’t being properly represented with biological facts in various popular books—especially the short stories of Ernest Seton Thompson—Roosevelt started promoting true animal experts like William Temple Hornaday, not literary imposters.69 As for hunting, Roosevelt wrote a series of letters touting the use of knives rather than guns; a knife at least improved the odds for the animal being pursued. Roosevelt and William Wells of Forest and Stream believed they could, once and for all, get cougars written about in a truthful, detailed, zoological fashion. “That cougar of yours which measured eight feet four inches is the longest of which I have any authentic record,” Roosevelt wrote to Wells. “My biggest one measured eight feet and weighed two hundred and twenty-seven pounds. I sent its skull on to Dr. Hart Merriam, the naturalist, at Washington and he writes me that it is the biggest skull that he has ever seen. From this it is easy to see what perfect nonsense is written by those who speak of ten and eleven-foot cougars.”70
That June the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club appointed a special committee to propose ideas for establishing big game refuges throughout America. All of Roosevelt’s closest conservationist allies were on the committee, including Caspar Whitney, Gifford Pinchot, George Bird Grinnell, Archibald Rogers, and D. M. Baringer. In 1896 the Supreme Court, in the case of Geer v. Connecticut, held that the state owned the wildlife even in a national forest—a verdict Boone and Crockett didn’t like. The club found a convenient way around the impasse in United States v. Blassingame, in which the court ruled that forest reserves were the private property of the federal government and that it could protect acreage from trespassers in the same manner as any private landowner. The ruling made it legal to create refuges in the national forests—the objective of the club.71 Alden Sampson served