The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [294]
To Roosevelt, the westerner who most epitomized the Virginian (besides Seth Bullock) was the lawman Pat Garrett, who had shot Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on July 14, 1881. Roosevelt had learned from his Rough Riders—half of whom came from New Mexico—that Sheriff Garrett was revered from Las Cruces to the Four Corners. A worshipful Roosevelt loved to meet the renowned sheriffs of the West—they were heroes. Garrett, fairly honest, upright, with a bit of a drinking problem, didn’t disappoint him. No sooner had McKinley been assassinated then Roosevelt, in December 1901, hired Garrett to be collector of Customs based in El Paso (or one of Roosevelt’s “White House gunfighters,” as the newspapers began calling such appointments). When Roosevelt and Garrett finally met, around Christmas 1901 in Washington, they got on like long-lost brothers.36
The western code that Wister promoted and Garrett lived, President Roosevelt believed, should become a moral code. As an addendum, as Roosevelt said in The Deer Family, a backyard naturalist code should be adopted. Wyomingites had to save the Yellowstone forests just as Oregonians had to fight for the environmental integrity of Crater Lake. Concerned about industrialization and urbanization, President Roosevelt proudly idealized the West as America’s last best hope. That was why he pushed for the Newlands Act and for so many irrigation laws. Roosevelt had long understood that Congress could declare places like Wind Cave and Sequoia as parks, but if the locals didn’t accept them as such, if county sheriffs continually let poachers go free and laughed as hooligans carved their initials in rocks and stole native American pottery, then the federal reserves would be destroyed. Only if the fighting men of the American West believed in protecting parklands and forest reserves could the West really be the Garden of Eden of his dreams. Although the “Virginian” wasn’t what we would now call an eco-warrior, he later became the prototype for Edward Abbey’s character Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang, which led to the creation of Earth First! in 1980. It’s safe to argue that tolerating President Roosevelt’s warrior-like romanticization of Wister’s cowboy virtue and his mystical belief (like Muir’s) in the power of primeval nature is a small price to pay for saving over 230 million acres of the American West.
Roosevelt believed that Wister, far from selling out, did America a favor by making his masculine archetype a man of virtue, not vice. (Medicine Bow, Wyoming, continues to boast that it was the model for the setting of The Virginian, and that Wister’s novel put the “Western-man’s ways” on the “straight-and-narrow.”) Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle—two other novels with a cause—The Virginian helped galvanize Americans to celebrate law enforcement instead of propagating the far more destructive trend of outlaw chic. Big game hunting was going to happen in the West. Therefore, wasn’t it far better for settlers to follow the noble sportsman’s code of The Virginian instead of the butchery of Buffalo Bill? Wister, with President Roosevelt as a guiding light, did the West a favor by making the region’s first true literary hero a white hat instead of a black hat. When The Virginian wandered the badlands, he was, like Roosevelt himself, a righteous horseman in the “quiet depths of Cattle Land” where every magnificent vista was considered “pure as water and strong as wine.” According to Wister, being “a man” meant holding congress with nature—again, like Roosevelt, who he said was the “greatest benefactor we people have known since Lincoln.”37
The Virginian continued selling like hotcakes, with a stage production