The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [317]
What triggered Roosevelt’s letter was a hard-hitting article that Burroughs had recently written in the Atlantic Monthly, “Real and Sham Natural History.” Twenty years before, Burroughs had pleaded in Scribner’s Monthly that poets stop depicting wildlife falsely; they should instead follow the romantic Whitman’s fine naturalist example.6 Now the usually mild-mannered Burroughs lit into Ernest Thompson Seton for completely fabricating bizarre species behaviors in Wild Animals I Have Known: Seton had claimed that foxes contemplated suicide, and that deer had sensitive humanlike feelings. What perturbed Burroughs was that Seton advertised his encounters with animals as nonfiction. This purported zoology book wasn’t natural history but fable. “There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record that match his,” Burroughs wrote. “Such dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows, as he has known, it is safe to say, no other person in the world has ever known.”7
Roosevelt, on reading this article, hurled himself into the fray. On the Executive Mansion’s letterhead, Roosevelt wrote Seton a punishing note, haranguing him and challenging him to cough up his facts for the Biological Survey.8 “Burroughs and the people at large don’t know how many facts you have back of your stories,” Roosevelt wrote to Seton. “You must publish your facts.”9 Seton, wanting no part of the “bully-boy” Roosevelt (at least in public), wisely stayed mute. Burroughs actually began to feel some pity for Seton, whose ego was shattered and whose literary reputation was taking a pummeling. And Seton, to his credit, took Burroughs and Roosevelt’s charges to heart; he later published the scrupulously accurate Life Histories of Northern Animals and Lives of Game Animals. Both are fine, highly readable zoological contributions to the American naturalist canon.10 Eventually, after bumping into Seton at an ostentatious literary party hosted by Andrew Carnegie, Burroughs decided he liked Seton. “He behaved finely and asked to sit next to me at dinner,” Burroughs wrote to his son. “He quite won my heart.”11
Another of Burroughs’s “nature fakers” was Reverend William Long, who had an advanced degree in divinity from Heidelberg University in Germany. Long, who believed in the power of pets to heal the tormented soul, was a popular pastor at First Congressional Church in Stamford, Connecticut, and the author of some celebrated children’s books, including Ways of Wood Folk and Fowls in the Air. A zealous anti-Darwinist, he held that animals’ knowledge was based on parental training within each species. Picking apart Long’s false descriptions about how robins feed their young, Burroughs called the pastor a deliberate liar. And robins were the least of it. Long also claimed to have seen a woodcock mend its broken leg by making a clay and grass cast for itself. “Why should anyone palm off such stuff on an unsuspecting public as veritable natural history?” Burroughs asked in the Atlantic Monthly. “When a man, writing or speaking of his own experience, says without qualification that he has seen a thing, we are expected to take him at his word.”12
Long came to his own defense that May in the North American Review, arguing that wildlife observation was inexact and diverse enough that no one man—not even le grand John Burroughs—had the status to say what was true or false with such arrogant definitiveness. Roosevelt was incensed beyond words by this rejoinder. He wanted to go to war, publicly, with both Seton and Long. He wrote to Burroughs a defense of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, which were labeled correctly as fiction. And he launched into an academic discussion with Burroughs that included his views on domestic dogs first introduced to a Pacific Island; differences between the Falkland and the artic fox; polar bears versus black bears; and Lewis and Clark meeting grizzlies.