The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [396]
In 1936 Congress changed the name of the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve. It would now be called the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge and placed under the Bureau of Biological Survey. In 1939 all federal refuges moved back under the Department of Interior. From 1940 to today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has controlled the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge.
By 2009 the Wichitas had so many buffalo that every October U.S. Fish and Wildlife began auctioning off surplus animals, many recently born calves. Tourists came to the Wichitas to see the buffalo herds grazing in a wild environment. But even though these bison appeared tame, they weren’t. Their behavior remained unpredictable and was likely to change at any time.123 As with the bears in Yellowstone, people now visited Oklahoma just to see a herd in the wild. The Wichitas, in this regard, were never disappointing. All over Oklahoma, in fact, in curio shops and general stores, buffalo souvenirs were sold. Roosevelt was right in thinking that Oklahomans needed buffalo in their lives. Just look at all the places named after them in the Sooner State: there is a Buffalo Creek as well as a Buffalo Springs, which isn’t far from the hamlet of Buffalo in Garfield County. In Harper County kids fish in another Buffalo Creek. What Lincoln’s legacy had become to the Illinois tourist trade, the buffalo has been to Oklahoma.124
Even the White House was permanently altered by Roosevelt’s embracing of the Oklahoma buffalo. As part of his redesign of the White House in 1902, Roosevelt had the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White decorate in a neoclassical style. Construction was also begun on a new executive office building known as the West Wing. He demanded that the East Wing do away with the grand staircase at the west end of the Cross Hall in order to enlarge the state dining room. Roosevelt was quite pleased with the firm’s work, but a flare-up occurred with Edith on an issue of interior design. She insisted that stone lions’ heads be placed on the mantel in the state dining room. Roosevelt thought these would look un-American. Nevertheless, he capitulated to Edith. But with the success of the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve, with his bison surviving their first winter, Roosevelt grew bolder. Off with the African lion heads! In 1908, in a letter to the architectural firm, Roosevelt demanded that the stone lions be recarved as bison heads because bison “made a much more characteristic and American decoration.”125
In the summer of 1962, John F. Kennedy had the “bison mantel” buffed and restored. Seventy-eight-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth was invited to the White House for the unveiling of the frontier symbol her father had championed.126 It had become one of the most distinctive features in the White House. And in 2006—to honor Quanah Parker—the recently founded Comanche Buffalo Society, based in Mount Park, Oklahoma, was created to honor the chief Theodore Roosevelt had considered a blood brother for understanding that America without bison wasn’t America.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE NATIONAL MONUMENTS OF 1906
I
Staring out the White House window one mild spring morning in 1906, President Roosevelt watched his sons Archie and Quentin sculpture little mud monuments in a sandbox. “What a heavenly place a sandbox is for two little boys,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit about his brothers. “Archie and Quentin play industriously in it during most of