The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [37]
But T.R. had something more in mind than sketchbook drawings on this journey to the Nile. Recently he had taken taxidermy lessons from John Bell, a wizard at the art who had trekked with John James Audubon up the Missouri River in 1843. According to the Ornithological Dictionary of the United States, the sage sparrow (Amphispiza belli), in fact, was named after Bell by the great Audubon himself.28 Decades later, Roosevelt would recall the lanky, white-haired Bell fondly as being “straight as an Indian,” with a “smooth-shaven clean-cut face” and a “dignified figure always in a black frock.”29 It was at Bell’s crammed shop at the corner of Broadway and Worth that T.R. eagerly learned the “art of preparing” wild-life. The high odor of microminerals, in fact, became almost a perfume to Roosevelt. In particular, he was attracted to cleaning skulls and other bones with the larvae of dermestid beetles. To Roosevelt, Bell’s office was straight from Mr. Venus’s shop in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. In his “Notebook on Natural History,” he recorded a story Bell had told him about a death match between a rooster and a field mouse. “The field mouse fought long and valiantly,” Roosevelt recounted, “but at last was overcome, although not until after a protracted battle.”30
So now, when the Russia dropped anchor, T.R., coughing unmercifully, his stomach weak from seasickness, he went wandering through the shopping district of Liverpool looking for arsenic, an odorless ingredient used by ornithologists for skinning and cotton-stuffing birds. “In the streets I was much annoyed by the street boys who immediately knew me for a Yankee and pestered me fearfully,” he wrote on October 26, 1872. “Requiring to buy a pound of Arsenic (for skinning purposes) I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadful thing, before I could have it!”31
By the 1860s, taxidermy—a craft practically as old as Egypt itself—had become a high art, with specialists the world over vying to be the very best mounters. The etymology of the word derived from the Greek taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin). Taxidermy took a steady surgeon’s hands adept at making incisions carefully and treating skins delicately. Always the loyalist, young Theodore bragged that his prized teacher, John Bell, one of Audubon’s right-hand men, was the top taxidermist, the world champion.32 But critics instead preferred Jules Verreaux, whose innovative exhibit “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions” at the Paris Exposition of 1867 was novel in that the skinned and mounted animals were displayed in a harrowing, gruesome diorama. The innovative Verreaux actually had a Barbary lion (now an extinct subspecies) ripping a helpless camel. Authentic skulls and teeth were used in the diorama, and a human figure wrapped in plaster of paris was added for increased dramatic effect. In 1869 the American Museum of Natural History acquired this pioneering work of taxidermy, which initiated a new way of displaying wildlife worldwide. Young Theodore was enthralled with Verreaux, because he opened up new possibilities for how naturalists and taxidermists could expand science and art.33 But his loyalty was with Bell for one overriding reason: Bell had the great Audubon on his résumé.
After procuring the arsenic, T.R. raced to see Liverpool’s natural history museum. He didn’t like its displays, concluding that Americans did taxidermy better. Perhaps because he was being teased by working-class European boys, a pronounced nationalism and family chauvinism began seeping into T.R.