The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [38]
To practice his taxidermy in England, Roosevelt would purchase snipe and partridges at marketplace stands. Meanwhile, John James Audubon had entered Roosevelt’s life in a profound way. Studiously, Roosevelt pored over leatherbound volumes of Audubon in a succession of hotel suites and railway compartments, clutching an aunt’s copy of Birds of America like a fumbled but recovered football. And he also started to become enamored with Audubon’s three-volume study The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. While he was studying Audubon’s works, species extinction and animal abuse started to worry Roosevelt. In Turin, for example, he lamented the “miserable” treatment of horses. And his Berghian sentiments about how European carriage horses were treated in paddocks was once again noted in his diary. “The cabhorses are worse [off] than those of New York,” he complained at one juncture, “and the animals in general are treated much more badly.” 35
Young Theodore was happy to be done with Europe when the Roosevelts finally arrived in Egypt a few days after Thanksgiving 1872. The very sight of the ancient city of Alexandria was like a tonic to him. “How I gazed on it!” Roosevelt wrote. “It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries! A land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Babylon was in its glory, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts, and it did.”36
No sooner did Roosevelt arrive at the dock than he started filling his diaries with descriptions of braying donkeys, foxlike yellow dogs with perked ears, leashed baboons doing circus tricks on a street corner, and camels smaller than he expected. He hurried to a fowl stand and purchased a quail—after haggling with the Arab vendor over the price—for taxidermy. As the family continued on to Cairo by train, T.R. was enthusiastic about the wildlife he saw from his compartment window. “We passed through the Delta of the Nile and on all sides numerous birds of various spieces areose, while heards of buffaloes and zebus grazed quietly in the marshy fields,” he wrote. “Among the birds were snipe, plover, quail, hawks, and great black vultures.”37
A group photo of the Roosevelt family, taken in Egypt in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., is at center back row, seated; Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt is at his left. Seated on floor: Anna, Corinne, Theodore Roosevelt, and Elliott.
Roosevelt family group shot. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
The historian David McCullough has written that young Theodore had a deep aversion to attending church. He reached this conclusion by reading the boyhood diaries. He even ventured to claim that T.R.’s asthma attacks were often precipitated by not wanting to go to Sunday services. However, McCullough only hints at something that becomes abundantly clear in the diary entries of 1872; T.R. wrote religiously about the animals he saw before and after services. As a “natural theologist” of sorts, Roosevelt had an image of God that wasn’t a gray-bearded patriarch hurling thunderbolts down to earth but an omnipotent guardian who devised the exquisite intricacies of all living things. Here is a sample entry from Egypt on December 1:
We went to the English Church at the New Hotel. The sermon was quite good. Afterwards we visited the gardens where we wandered about till lunch time. There were many beautiful trees and at one place an artificial cave with brooks, and cascades, and winding passages and stone cut stairs, and so cool and refreshing! The ground moreover was covered with a creeping sort of vine, which looked like grass, and on this tame ravens and crows hopped about, while warblers sang in the bushes. It was altogether very beautiful and we passed a very happay time there. Coming home we were followed by a man who showed off a funny little longeared hedgshog and wanted us to let him