The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [382]
Day after day Abernathy caught ’em alive and Roosevelt glowed with approval. Abernathy always paid dividends as promised. Roosevelt, in fact, came to be strangely in awe of him. In his novel The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad wrote that “shrinking delicacy” exists “side by side with aggressive brutality in masculine nature.” That was the case here; Roosevelt the New York bird-watcher had overnight turned into the admirer of an Oklahoman wolf catcher. The conflict between Roosevelt as a preservationist versus Roosevelt as a conservationist and hunter had taken a bizarre turn. John Muir would have been appalled at the grotesque “catch ’em alive” spectacle.
“The fact that I had won the friendship of the president in such a short time,” Abernathy later recalled, “naturally raised great popular interest.”55 Unfortunately, Burnett and Waggoner grew more and more envious of Abernathy. They kept muttering half-comical innuendoes at his expense. Ignoring these gibes, the president kept showering Abernathy with attention. Although the press was not present for the wolf-coursing, Lambert was on hand to photograph the catches. When other members of the hunt tried to pose with the president for a photo, Roosevelt waved them off. “I want this picture with just Abernathy and myself in it,” Roosevelt said. The loyal Lambert, sensing the value of the publicity, said to Roosevelt excitedly, “You can say that this picture was snapped about a minute from the time Abernathy started the chase and made the catch.”56
The plains and its sentinels had once again captured Roosevelt’s imagination. The more harrowing the encounter, the happier the president was. A six-foot rattlesnake had lunged at Roosevelt four times before he killed it with his eighteen-inch quirt.57 Even the god-awful sound of a gray wolf being tackled by Abernathy seemingly calmed his nerves. On day three of the hunt, Quanah brought his three wives along for the fun, accompanied by his son and baby daughter. Self-sufficient and uncomplaining, Quanah and his family had their own wagon. With temperatures in the low seventies and bright sunshine turning the prairie grasses different hues of green and blue, Roosevelt was in his element. For lunch he enjoyed eating beef strips by hand, all reeking from wood smoke. He kept blurting out bully. In this land where sound preceded sight, Roosevelt was happy that there wasn’t a lamppost for miles. “The air was wonderfully clear, and any object on the sky-line, no matter how small, stood out with startling distinctness,” he wrote. “There were few flowers on these dry plains; in sharp contrast to the flower prairies of southern Texas, which we had left the week before, where many acres for a stretch would be covered by masses of red or white or blue or yellow blossoms—the most striking of all, perhaps, being the fields of the handsome buffalo clover.”58
Fascinated by wolves, Roosevelt here ponders one caught by Jack Abernathy.
T.R. with a roped wolf. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Just in case the taxpayers thought President Roosevelt was on a naturalist adventure at their expense—which he was—he once again invoked the Biological Survey. Roosevelt sent a minutely detailed scientific report to Dr. C. Hart Merriam about the weight and coloration of more than a dozen coyotes. With a uniform collecting technique that would have made Spencer Fullerton Baird proud, Roosevelt recorded facts about Oklahoma’s coyotes that are still used for reference. Doing some on-the-spot calculations, Roosevelt wrote to Merriam that the average weight of a coyote in the Wichita Mountains region was thirty pounds. Skulls, skins, and paws were likewise shipped from