The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [391]
Roosevelt was so impressed by the footage that he asked Hornaday to allow Abernathy to course for wolves in Oradell, New Jersey. The idea was to get first-class motion picture cameras from New York to film the event. Hornaday would let seven wolves loose on an estate in New Jersey, and Abernathy would recapture them. Sam Bass and a couple of other horses were sent by railroad from Oklahoma, as were Abernathy’s best dogs. “The wolves were easily tracked in the new-fallen snow,” Abernathy wrote. “Two of them were found within one hundred yards of the cage from which they had escaped. They did not seem wild or disposed to flee at the sight of men with horses and dogs. On the contrary they seemed half tame and inclined to be playful in the snow.”98
Critics of Roosevelt thought Abernathy was a ridiculous carnival attraction, not worthy of all this attention. Also, members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, were furious at Roosevelt for trying to get Abernathy a marshalship in Oklahoma; they tried to characterize him as a drifter type. According to one charge against Abernathy, he was nothing more than “a bronco rider, and a wolf catcher; was reared in a cow camp; has been a fiddler at country dances, a cotton picker, a patch digger, and a friend of the outlaws—and is not a politician.” Telegrams poured into Washington, D.C., from Oklahoma City and Tulsa protesting Abernathy’s appointment as marshal. Some senators, adding to these complaints, said that Abernathy played the fiddle at honky-tonks and got into barroom fights. But Senator Freeman Knowles of South Dakota was sympathetic. “Well, Marshal I am going to call you Marshal, since your name already has gone to the Senate,” he said, “tell us some wolf stories.”
Abernathy gladly obliged Senator Knowles and was easily confirmed. One thing that worked in Abernathy’s favor was his knowledge of all the business operations of the Indian Tribes in Oklahoma. And Abernathy knew how to let his horse pick the trails along the Cimarron River—a sure sign of a first-class tracker. Many whites considered the Comanche and Kiowa terrorists; Abernathy didn’t. “Thus I became Marshal of Oklahoma,” he wrote in Catch ’Em Alive Jack. “The position was one of great responsibility and trust. The salary was five thousand dollars a year (a big sum to me) and all expenses incurred while in the discharge of duty.” Law enforcement, however, wasn’t Abernathy’s forte. He didn’t want to turn down cash offers for catching wolves. “My Dear Marshal,” Roosevelt wrote to Abernathy June 4, 1906: “I guess you better not catch live wolves as a part of a public exhibition while you are Marshal. If on a private hunt you catch them, that would be alright; but it would look too much as if you were going to show business if you took part in a public celebration.”99
Roosevelt kept up an intermittent correspondence with Abernathy about all things Oklahoman. He hoped that Abernathy would succeed as a marshal. Before long, however, Abernathy, under a storm of charges of conflict of interest, quit the job. A true Texan-Oklahoman, Abernathy was too lenient toward his outlaw buddies. While this never-turn-on-fourth-cousins attitude was commonplace in Oklahoma City, it didn’t play well in the East. Roosevelt remained loyal and found Abernathy employment with the U.S. Secret Service in New York. “My first assignment was in Chinatown and the subways,” Abernathy recalled. “I was required to visit the underworld resorts, among them being the opium dens often frequented by rich and fashionably attired society folks. In company with a U.S. Marshal, one night I ‘hit the pipe’ just to experience the sensation; also to get information from the addicts in the resort.”100
Catch ’Em Alive wasn’t the only colorful westerner appointed to law enforcement jobs by Roosevelt. Bat Masterson of “Dodge City (when Dodge