The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [260]
What impressed Merriam about Roosevelt was that even while living the “strenuous life,” he never stopped being a faunal naturalist. The microscope had turned a new generation of biologists to studying minute organisms, but Roosevelt stayed focused on what Merriam called the more “obvious forms of life.” Starting in November 1901 and continuing until he left office in March 1909, Roosevelt would telephone Merriam quite regularly, particularly during the spring migration, making sure that the warblers in the White House elms were blackpolls or that the flocks of rusty blackbirds along the Potomac basin hadn’t decreased in numbers from the previous year. Not long after becoming president, in fact, Roosevelt had asked Merriam to take a twilight bicycle trip with him from the White House to Rock Creek Park to watch a beaver build a lodge. “He was ‘delighted’ to see the beaver cut a willow and swim with it to a floating log,” Dr. Merriam recalled in Science, “where he sat up and ate the bark.”44
Regularly Roosevelt would walk from the White House to Merriam’s home to study his world-class collection of mammal bones and skins.45 He was like a child wandering into F.A.O. Schwartz on Christmas Eve. Merriam’s huge library was the “zoological salon” of the District of Columbia. “Few people are aware of Roosevelt’s knowledge of mammals and their skulls,” Merriam recalled. “One evening at my house (Where I then had in the neighborhood of five thousand skulls of North American mammals) he astonished every one—including several eminent naturalists—by picking up skull after skull and mentioning the scientific name of the genus to which each belonged.”46
Besides rattling off the genus of skulls, Roosevelt was proud that some of the Biological Survey’s best cougars were courtesy of his prodigious hunting efforts. Two weeks after Roosevelt delivered his Annual Message he wrote to Yellowstone’s acting superintendent, Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, about shooting cougars to control predation. The president wanted to arrive in Yellowstone that June and hunt “varmints” that were “not protected.” A backwoodsman, John B. Goff, would serve as a guide, using his pack of hounds to chase the big cats. If Roosevelt collected ten or twelve cougars from Wyoming he could ship them to Merriam to be compared with the ones from Colorado. Being president shouldn’t mean relinquishing his reputation as the world’s leading expert on cougars. From Major Pitcher’s perspective this was an insane request. The president of the United States, busy with international crises, wanted to summer in the wilds of Yellowstone to “thin out” the cougars? But Major Pitcher—particularly as acting superintendent—wasn’t going to tell his boss no. He started making arrangements.
The rumor that Roosevelt was coming to Yellowstone had C. J. “Buffalo” Jones whooping with excitement. Sidestepping Major Pitcher, Jones started to make plans for a hunt in Yellowstone. He was especially anxious for the president to see some of the buffalo he’d raised like cattle. Most Americans in 1901 could see bison only in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, or at Bronx Zoo or the Goodnight Ranch in Texas. Jones was determined to change that sad fact. An old buffalo runner, he had reformed and was among the best bison breeders in the American West. Sickened that his own slaughtering of buffalo had almost brought about their extinction, Jones wanted to show his hero, President Roosevelt, how he had made a 180-degree turn. Roosevelt was greatly interested in Buffalo Jones’s claim to have successfully crossbred bison with cattle (producing