The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [376]
III
From San Antonio it was on to Fort Worth and Wichita Falls, where many of the largest cattle ranches in the world were situated. Two “old style Texas cattlemen,” as T.R. described them—Burk Burnett and Guy Waggoner—were going to lead the presidential wolf hunt to the Big Pasture.32 Between them, these two pro-Roosevelt ranchers practically owned Fort Worth. Burnett, in particular—who had been a trail boss on the 1,200-mile cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail to Kansas in 1867—was a legend along the Red River of the South. He was known for his financial acumen and hard deals, and his “Four Sixes” brand dominated the North Texas range for decades. He was also a meticulous caretaker of his cattle empire; there was no such thing as a collapsed corral fence on his property. Moving his ranch operations to Wichita Falls—as well as his Longhorns, Durhams, and Herefords—he produced the best cattle strains in Texas. A grin-and-bear-it type, a man of deliberate action who never knew regret, Burnett wasn’t enamored of grammar books, dictionaries, or the history of European civilization. Like Roosevelt he was an advocate of direct action.
A close friend of Quanah, Burnett leased 300,000 acres from the Indian Territory to graze cattle. Often, Burnett slept on the wraparound front porch of Quanah’s Star House (which Burnett had purchased for Quanah), preferring Indian company to the drifters working in Fort Worth’s stockyards district. But for all his Texan down-homeness and honesty, Burnett was extremely rich. His feeder steers were selling at a fair market price, and he had a lot of them. At the time Burnett organized the wolf hunt for Roosevelt he had more than 20,000 head of branded cattle on a spread totaling 206,000 acres.33
In anticipation of President Roosevelt’s arrival, Catch ’em Alive Jack Abernathy scouted for the most desirable places to camp in the Big Pasture and found an ideal spot along Deep Red Creek in Oklahoma. Some chauvinistic Texans criticized Abernathy for not holding the hunt on Lone Star soil, but the objections passed. Both Burnett and Waggoner did supply Texan “daredevil” riders—their hired ranchhands with the best equestrian skills—to impress the president. (Guy Waggoner, in fact, was an expert rider himself. He became head of the Texas racing commission and eventually moved to New Mexico, where betting on horse races was legal.) Ranchers from some ten or fifteen counties tried to wangle a slot on the hunt party. Every man under fifty wanted to be an extra in the Roosevelt extravaganza.
Roosevelt’s longtime physician friend Alexander Lambert was designated as the official photographer for the hunt; no reporters would be allowed to witness it, because there was a strong possibility of an embarrassing moment for the president. Lambert was perhaps Roosevelt’s most intimate friend. He specialized in diagostics, internal medicine, and drug addiction and was also the president’s personal physician.34 His loyalty to the president and to the principle of doctor-patient confidentiality was so great that he left no diaries or reflections about their times together. With his thick goatee, large ears, and an ever-present doctor’s bag, he was a fixture on all of Roosevelt’s hunts. A professor of clinical medicine at the Cornell University medical school and director of the fourth division at Bellevue Hospital, he was one of the best doctors of his generation. Besides enjoying his company immensely Roosevelt was beholden to Lambert for his sophisticated knowledge of how mosquitoes carried yellow fever.35
Roosevelt’s hunt in the Great Pasture of the Indian Territories (near Oklahoma) attracted the eager participation of the richest ranchers in Texas.
The great