The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [321]
Chicago was a highly successful first stop for President Roosevelt on his way to Yellowstone. More than 6,000 people crammed into a downtown Chicago auditorium that had only 5,000 seats. The Halley’s comet known affectionately as Teddy Roosevelt had arrived in the flesh and the Marconi wire was tap-tap-tapping to the world about his visit. Roosevelt passionately defended American hegemony in the Caribbean and an expanded navy, thunderous applause greeting his words.33 To Roosevelt the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t mere diplomatic ornamentation—it was enforceable policy. He received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Chicago, which was rapidly becoming one of the best schools in America.34 Afterward, Roosevelt met with a cheerful group of its students, who sang a specially composed “Dooleyized” song. One verse went:
There is a sturdy gent who is known on every hand:
His smile is like a burst of sun upon a rainy land.
He’ll bluff the Kaiser, shoot a bear, or storm a Spanish fort.
Then sigh for something else to do and write a book on sport.35
Roosevelt’s “sport” on this Great Loop tour was conservation, not hunting. Among the primary concerns on the first leg were the devastated buffalo herds. Soon, the Bronx Zoo would have a herd to return to the prairies, and the president was shopping for a proper geographical spot. Carefully, Roosevelt inquired about the remnant herd living in Yellowstone. Working closely with Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt was eventually able to appropriate $15,000 to help manage the Yellowstone herd; the improved management included shelter buildings. With Buffalo Jones updating him on bison grazing strategies, the president grew excited about the prospect of reintroducing his Bronx Zoo herd to an experimental range in Oklahoma. If the reintroduction worked, it might be possible to create bison ranges in Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, and Montana.
While Roosevelt appreciated Buffalo Jones’s firsthand knowledge of bison, he believed Jones’s report on elks “was all wrong.” Jones was a self-serving old reprobate whose opinions on Yellowstone’s wildlife were usually far off base.36 Accordingly, a determined Roosevelt tried to hand-count every elk in Yellowstone. He wanted near exact numbers. His “very careful” estimate was that there were more than 15,000 elks (a figure much higher than what Buffalo Jones was claiming). As for cougars, Roosevelt—after careful study—determined that they were actually providing a service in the park, keeping the elk herds thinned down to ideal numbers. “The cougar are their only enemies,” Roosevelt noted, “and in many places these big cats, which are quite numerous, are at this season living purely on elk, killing yearlings and an occasional cow; this does no damage; but around the hot springs the cougar are killing deer, antelope and sheep, and in this neighborhood they should certainly be exterminated.”37
In coming years Roosevelt would modify his harsh views about predator control in Yellowstone and elsewhere. He began seeing cougars and other predators as assets to the park’s natural balance. When word got back to the White House in 1906 that Buffalo Jones planned to hunt sixty-five cougars in Yellowstone, Roosevelt surprised Jones by nixing the idea. “I do not think anymore cougar (mountain lions) should be killed in the park,” Roosevelt wrote to the superintendent. “Game is abundant. We want to profit by what has happened in the English preserves, where it proved bad for the grouse itself to kill off all the peregrine falcons and all the other birds of prey. It may be advisable, in case the ranks of the deer and antelope right around the Springs should be too heavily killed out, to kill some of the cougar there, but in the rest of the park I certainly would not kill any of them. On the contrary, they ought to be left alone.