The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [379]
Unfortunately, Roosevelt never published his campfire stories. With meat in the pot and log flames jumping high and low, on these outdoor outings Roosevelt would recount moments from the strenuous life with cliff-hanging suspense. There were accounts of sumo-wrestling with a 300-pound Japanese man; tramping toward the Missouri River headwaters, boxing with the heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan, and encountering rattlesnakes in North Dakota. Holding his audience’s attention with theatrical gestures, Roosevelt made it seem as if he had strode over the Alleghenies and down the Ohio River valley with Daniel Boone. When Frederick Jackson Turner told stories of western expansion, the farmer was the hero. By contrast, Roosevelt glorified men who had channeled violence into grand deeds such as hunting or boxing. His favorite camp-fire stories dealt with the ritualistic tradition of hunting grizzly bears: man pitted against beast. What made Roosevelt’s stories about grizzlies more interesting than anybody else’s was the way he personalized the bears without sweetness: for example, Big Foot Wallace in Wyoming, Old Mose in Colorado, and Old Ephraim in Idaho. And he always spoke of these bears with reverence.
The Wichitas truly were a biotic crazy quilt, Western trees grew in the range that didn’t exist even a mile east of Fort Sill. Rounded domes and jagged granite peaks seemed to erupt out of the ground. Here the western meadowlark sang with its counterpart, the eastern meadowlark. As the Oklahoman historian Edward Charles Ellenbrook once put it, this was the demarcation line of biological America. Only in the Wichitas could one of John Burroughs’s beloved dark-blue eastern bluebirds be seen hopping around with the azure Rocky Mountains bluebird. And Roosevelt, a dedicated Auduboner, hoped to clap his eyes on one of America’s most unsociable birds: the Mississippi kite. Oh, what a delicious place the Wichitas were for a naturalist! And they didn’t offer just birds and small mammals. Besides collared lizards there was an odd assortment of poisonous snakes, broad-banded copperheads, western diamondback rattlers, prairie rattlers, and western massasaugas among them. The Bronx Zoo’s new herpetologist, Raymond L. Ditmars, needed to do field collecting in the Wichitas.
Although Roosevelt wrote an article about his plains hunt, titled “Wolf-Coursing,” for Scribner’s Magazine that summer, he often used the term “coyotes” while he was in Oklahoma. To Roosevelt the pageantry and novelty of catching a wolf alive were intoxicating. What he admired most about gray wolves and coyotes was their survivalist behavior. Even their cowering had a certain nobility. The reason was fairly simple. During the great slaughter of buffalo by the U.S. Army, wolves and coyotes had prospered. After skinners finished cutting up the buffalo for robes and meat, the canids soon rushed up to the carcass to devour the entrails. With such an abundance of free food, they quickly multiplied throughout the Great Plains. A new breed of hunter—the wolf exterminators—replaced the buffalo hunters in Texas and Oklahoma. These were considered a lowly type in the hunters’ pecking order. “A wolfer could manage with just a pack horse, a gun, a bedroll, and a bottle of strychnine crystals, but more often he had two pack horses, or a team pulling a small cart or wagon,” the historian Francis Haines noted in The Buffalo. “He followed after the buffalo hunters, and at each kill poisoned every carcass within a mile or so of his central point. Then he went away for a few days to let the wolves and coyotes have plenty of time to eat their fill and die.”47 This breed of hunter had two objectives: obtaining wolf furs and being paid by local ranchers.
Roosevelt immediately took a shine to Abernathy (and for that matter to Abernathy’s father, a former Confederate soldier, whom he met). There was a softness in Abernathy’s eyes that belied his hell-on-wheels reputation. He was like a live coal. Initial conversations between Roosevelt and Abernathy centered on