The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [368]
“I am delighted with the good news about the wolves, but please do not have any taken alive and turned out,” Roosevelt wrote to Lyon on March 16. “I would not care to hunt any that were loosed for that purpose. It would not do, on more accounts than one. If we can put them up and kill genuine live wolves and have a genuine hunt, I shall be very glad…. If not we shall take jackrabbits or coyotes; but nothing must be turned loose after having been captured.” 2
Roosevelt had an additional reason to be wary. The day he wrote to Lyon, two white police officers in Mississippi were murdered by a black mob at H. L. Foote’s plantation, not far from the birthplace of the “teddy bear.”3 When this news reached the president, he was bound for New York City to attend the private wedding of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt (both were his cousins). Roosevelt was horrified by the bloodshed: segregationist Mississippi seemed to be a bottomless chasm of violence and injustice. At all costs, Roosevelt instructed his staff, he wanted to avoid galloping into a race war on his trip to Texas and Oklahoma. His advance team was instructed to tread carefully, avoiding political potholes. With regard to other matters, his staffers dutifully found him the right bridles, spurs, and whips, to use in Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. A fast, fearless, long-winded hunt horse was also procured. And, of course, what Roosevelt called “outdoors books” were ordered; they dealt with Oklahoma’s wildlife species and included range maps and pertinent life histories.4 What Roosevelt didn’t want was a hotel with concierge, elevators, and white washbowls with copper fixtures, once he was out of Texas. The White House also announced that Roosevelt intended to spend time with his friend Quanah Parker, the last of the Comanche chiefs to surrender to “the white man’s stony road.”5 (A small contingent of Comanche insisted that Parker wasn’t their real chief, but that thieving white politicians had anointed him as such.)
According to the plan that was developed, Roosevelt would spend April around Fort Sill, hunting wolves in the surrounding primeval prairie dotted with solitary towers. Then he would venture to the Rockies in search of grizzly bears. (Only T.R. could get away with vanishing for weeks on end and still have the public cheer.) Once again the president wanted to explore the Colorado high country, which was the birthplace of his favorite rivers: the Rio Grande, San Juan, North and South Platte, Yampa, Gunnison, Arkansas, and Dolores—and, most famously, the Colorado. Meanwhile Edith, and three of the Roosevelts’ children—Ethel, Kermit, and Archie—would spend a holiday on the Atlantic coast of Florida on the yacht Sylph.
Roosevelt, for his part, was advancing the notion of statehood for the Twin Territories (Indian and Oklahoma) as a single entity: Oklahoma. His choosing to hunt wolves in the Wichitas–Great Pasture area rather than in Texas contributed to that message. Until Roosevelt’s presidency, the Twin Territories were considered largely no-man’s-land to everybody but the mounted warrior cultures of the Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, and Wichitas (considered the ablest bison hunters on the Great Plains). The Spanish explorer Coronado had journeyed through the Oklahoma plains in 1541, looking for a “lost city of gold” but decided there wasn’t one. (He carved “Coronado 1541” on Castle Rock where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Cimarron River.) Thomas Jefferson acquired southwestern Oklahoma in the Louisiana Purchase, but it was considered the least valuable part of the purchase when President Andrew Jackson marched the Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States down the Trail of Tears to the area.