The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [390]
What transformed Abernathy into a national celebrity was the publication of Roosevelt’s Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter in November 1905. The book was an omnibus of Roosevelt’s best outdoors essays written between 1893 and 1905.92 His preference had been to call it Outdoor Pastimes of an American President, but he worried about commercializing the executive branch. The first half of Outdoor Pastimes dealt more with hunting, the second half more with conservation. Chapter 3 was about “Wolf Coursing” with Abernathy and was accompanied by dramatic photographs (taken by Lambert and Simpson). The images included the president and a captured coyote, saddling the Big D cow pony, greyhounds resting in a run, and much more. There were other chapters about hunting in Outdoor Pastimes, taking up Colorado’s bears and Idaho’s mountain sheep, but it was the chapter on wolf-coursing that stole the show.
Five of the chapters in Outdoor Pastimes were new; the other six had originally appeared in The Deer Family. (The first three chapters were reprints of four articles Roosevelt wrote for Scribner’s while he was president.) Preserving nature is an overriding theme in the book. In rapturous prose, Roosevelt wrote about the beauty of Yellowstone and Yosemite in his chapter “Wilderness Reserves.” Many passages in this essay represent his most glorious writing ever about the national park movement. Phrases in the essay were calculated to make the reader want to take a hike or watch birds; basically, the essay was a meditation by America’s top wildlife manager. In Outdoor Pastimes Roosevelt championed the preservation of buffalo, bears, deer, and wapiti in federal reserves as never before. “The most striking and melancholy feature in connection with American big game,” Roosevelt wrote, “is the rapidity with which it has vanished.”93
The average reader could be forgiven for finding Catch ’Em Alive Jack the most colorful character in Outdoor Pastimes, but the book’s intellectual muse was Oom John. In a series of long, radiant vignettes Roosevelt recounted his time with Burroughs in Yellowstone. Burroughs, in fact, looms large throughout the book. Not only did Roosevelt dedicate Out-door Pastimes to Burroughs, but he began the book with an open letter to his dear friend, dated October 2, 1905: “Dear Oom John,” it started. “Every lover of outdoor life must feel a sense of affectionate obligation to you. Your writings appeal to all who care for the life of the woods and the fields, whether their tastes keep them in the homely, pleasant farm country or lead them into the wilderness. It is a good thing for our people that you should have lived; and surely no man can wish to have more said of him….” From there, Roosevelt went on and on in the same salutary vein.94
Burroughs was flattered beyond words, and The New York Times said that those, like Burroughs, who “make the study of wild life” would love the book for its utter “accuracy.”95 Furthermore, Oom John wasn’t the only outdoorsman whose career the president boosted in Outdoor Pastimes. In 1906 Roosevelt, encouraged by the fame Outdoor Pastimes had brought Abernathy, appointed him U.S. federal marshal of Oklahoma. Annoyed because easterners didn’t believe that Abernathy actually caught wolves alive, Roosevelt also sent a movie crew to Oklahoma in 1907 to make a motion picture of Catch ’Em Alive’s feats.96 Even by the standards of modern filmmaking, which uses sophisticated special effects, footage of Abernathy remains riveting. It’s like an early herky-jerky black-and-white western; even Animal Planet hasn’t yet captured such a crazy episode on film. On this hunt Abernathy came just a hair away from being mauled to death by a wolf. Eventually Abernathy was able to wire the muzzle of