The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [25]
Influenced by Audubon and Darwin, Roosevelt started sketching birds and mammals in his notebooks. In these pencil drawings, he marks the sub-species variations of shrews.
T.R. sketches of mammals. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Throughout his life, bears mesmerized Roosevelt. In An Autobiography, in fact, he wrote wide-eyed of Bear Bob—a former slave once owned by his mother’s family in Georgia—who had been scalped by an angry black bear’s claw.46 (That violent, degrading spectacle haunted Roosevelt’s imagination.) Even at nine, Roosevelt saw bears—lumbering giants that can run as fast as a racehorse for short distances—as a symbol of wilderness. Enamored of their cunning, curiosity, and ferocity (when provoked), Roosevelt marveled that their acute sense of smell enabled them to detect game from nearly one mile away. He also noted that bears belong to a mammal group referred to as plantigrade (i.e., flat-footed, in contrast to digitigrade animals, which walk on their toes, like cats and dogs). Young Roosevelt rejected the human-like Thomas Nast cartoons of these omnivores in Harper’s Weekly (popular in the 1860s) in favor of cutting-edge zoology books with exact details on nonretractile claws agility (among black bears only) in climbing trees. With scientific detachment, young Theodore would correct people who casually claimed that all bears hibernate in winter; they don’t, and such sloppy misconceptions annoyed him greatly.47
For example, he believed bears were “wicked smart,” able to backtrack in their own footprints to shake hunting dogs off their easily detectable scent. Yet popular culture usually portrayed bears as slothful, honey-loving buffoons hiding in a den. Often black bears were written about as small cousins of grizzlies. To a degree, that assessment was fair. But it bothered Roosevelt, who knew that there was nothing small about black bears. Hunters had recently killed adult black bear males weighing well over 300 pounds, with short, stubby claws used to scale trees quickly. In Native American lore, so-called spirit bears—black, brown, grizzly, and polar—were all endowed with sacred characteristics; but in European culture they often had a menacing reputation, as in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. As a boy Roosevelt was largely unimpressed with both caricatures of bears. He wanted hard, factual, empirical data about their instinctive habits. “My own experience with bears,” he later wrote, “tends to make me lay special emphasis upon their variation of temper.” 48
The Hudson River valley was the first American wilderness area Roosevelt fell in love with. He tossed fist-sized rocks into boggy creeks and used miniature nets to scoop up minnows from local muddy bottoms. Such was his enthusiasm for the region that Roosevelt pouted the following spring when his family left for a year in Europe (from May 12, 1869, to May 25, 1870). He preferred studying North American wildlife in the woods of New York to what his parents thought would be a sweeping “continental” educational experience for their four children. Capitulating to his father’s will, Theodore put on a cheery face and grew excited about the prospect of inspecting the zoos and natural sites of old Europe. While their steamship, the Scotia, headed across the Atlantic, Roosevelt’s journal commented briefly on staterooms and seasickness, then focused on wild-life. Numerous entries in his log for 1869–1870—the spelling atrocious—mention some encounter or another with wildlife or domestic animals.
May 19th, 1869 [at sea]
Warmer. Read and played. We saw two ships one shark some fish severel gulls and the boatswain (sea bird) so named because its tail feathers are supposed to resemble the warlike spike with which a boatswain (man) is usually