The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [320]
III
Uninterested in lobbying Roosevelt for anything, Burroughs had accepted the president’s offer as a chance to better educate himself about Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain wildlife. “I had known the President several years before he became famous, and we had had some correspondence on subjects of natural history,” Burroughs wrote. “His interest in such themes is always very fresh and keen, and the main motive of his visit to the Park at this time was to see and study in its semi-domesticated condition the great game which he had so often hunted during his ranch days; and he was kind enough to think it would be an additional pleasure to see it with a nature-lover like myself. For my own part, I knew nothing about big game, but I knew there was no man in the country with whom I should so like to see it as Roosevelt.” 29
On April 1 the president’s train left Union Station with Burroughs on board, and headed for Pennsylvania’s famous Horseshoe Curve—near Altoona—in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains. Just before his departure, Roosevelt had written to Dr. Merriam of the Bureau of Biological Survey asking for up-to-date information about the Shoshones, Sioux, Hopi, Apache, and other western tribes. Roosevelt said he would be most grateful if Merriam could put together a box of books, articles, and reports on Native Americans. The esteemed biologist quickly complied with the president’s request. Knowing that Merriam was an Indian rights activist, Roosevelt hoped to educate himself about the shabby conditions on the reservations. “In cases where you can do so without interfering with your biological survey work, I should be glad to have you secure for me reliable information concerning the present condition, necessities, and treatment by Government agents of such Reservation and non-Reservation Indians as you may meet,” Roosevelt wrote. “Show this to any Government officials as your warrant for inquiry; I shall expect them to give you all possible facilities to find out the facts deemed of interest to me.”30
In essence Roosevelt seemed to be offering a quid pro quo to Merriam: Roosevelt’s chief biologist would provide him with pertinent information on Native Americans while he, in turn, sent status reports back to Washington, D.C., on the Yellowstone cougars, elks, and buffalo. The reports would contain no skins or claws, however: the president would not be exercising his powder finger. As Burroughs confirmed in his 1905 book Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt, the president refrained from hunting in or around Yellowstone, taking only field observations and photographs. That didn’t protect Burroughs from being teased by his friends. “The other night I met at dinner that fine old John Burroughs,” the novelist and editor William Dean Howells wrote to C. E. Norton that April, “whom I congratulated on his going out to Yellowstone to hold bears for the president to kill.” 31
Burroughs consistently defended Roosevelt as a naturalist first and a hunter second. “Some of our newspapers reported that the President intended to hunt in the Park,” Burroughs wrote. “A woman in Vermont wrote me, to protest against the hunting, and hoped I would teach the President to love the animals as much as I did—as if he did not love them much more, because his love is founded upon knowledge, and because they had been a part of his life. She did not know that I was then cherishing the secret hope that I might be allowed to shoot a cougar or bobcat; but this fun did not come to me. The President said, ‘I will not fire a gun in the Park;