The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [384]
In 1901, when President McKinley created the Wichita Mountains as a forest reserve, nobody imagined that it would become the focus of a federal buffalo reintroduction program. But Roosevelt was always thinking and listening. Some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had come from the Wichitas area and had been full of stories about the landscape’s lyrical, magnetic charm. Now, in 1905, as Roosevelt rode amid the strange rock formations with Quanah, he learned why the area was considered sacred by the Comanche, Kiowa, and other tribes. For example, there was a magnificent rock formation 2,464 feet high, designated by the U.S. Army as Mount Scott. Quanah told Roosevelt that a Kiowa medicine woman had prophesied that all the Great Plains buffalo, after being chased by murderous American hunters, had disappeared down Mount Scott’s summit in single file. They descended farther and farther, into the earth’s core. Inside this safe haven, everything sparkled for the buffalo; the world was “green and fresh” and rivers “ran clear, not red.”64 Someday, the Kiowa medicine woman prophesied, the buffalo would return to the plains from the top of Mount Scott, erupting like a volcano. A gregarious herd would trot out happily, resurrected and with a fierce unity of purpose, for a new day on the Great Plains.65
Roosevelt, of course, didn’t subscribe to this prophecy, but he nevertheless enjoyed hearing the legend. And he had to admit that the elegant pyramidal sentinel that stood watch at the eastern gate—like an island in the sea—was the energy source of the entire Wichita preserve.66 For 70 million years, ever since mammals eclipsed reptiles as the dominant vertebrates in Oklahoma, Mount Scott was the home of buffalo or their ancestors. Roosevelt understood the importance of their return. “The extermination of the buffalo,” he had lamented, “has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”67 Now, at Mount Scott, they were going to make a stand with the help of buffalo men. Roosevelt spoke to the Wichita Forest Reserve rangers—who operated out of a little white clapboard hut with cedar posts—about the imminent prospect that the park would become America’s first National Game Preserve for buffalo and deer. A wooden archway was soon built in an attempt to keep poachers out; it gave the reserve a legal feel.
Not since his youth had Quanah Parker been so excited about anything as he was about Roosevelt’s repopulation scheme. Before long Roosevelt received public support for the idea from the Boone and Crockett Club and the League of American Sportsmen (of which Hornaday was vice president). Hornaday also worked hard to find exactly the right spot in Winter Valley, with grasses and with canyons to provide shelter from the winter weather. Daily, a typical bison herd foraged on vegetation over a two-mile radius, so the acreage of the reserve had to be fairly large. If everything worked according to plan fifteen buffalo—a nucleus herd of breeding cows and young bulls—would be shipped by train to the Wichita reserve in 1907. Hornaday, biologically cautious, selected the buffalo from numerous bloodlines to avoid inbreeding. There was only one chance to get it right.68
V
Following the Oklahoma hunt Roosevelt, as a courtesy, asked to meet Mrs. Abernathy and the five children. Approving of their pioneer stock he enjoyed them immensely. The six days at Big Pasture had been bully, a brief return to the heroic days before the Indian Wars. Roosevelt extended an open invitation to the entire Abernathy family to visit him in the White House. Clearly, Roosevelt honored Abernathy even though other Texans might consider him a court jester. “The petty rivalry of which I had been the object during the course of the wolf hunt in the Big Pasture was but a small incident in comparison with the experience that was awaiting me when I was now unexpectedly drawn into public life,” Abernathy wrote, “as a result of my new friendship with President Roosevelt.”69
Now that the hunt was over the Washington Post cast it in glowing terms. Seldom, if ever, had the