The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [4]
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Former president Theodore Roosevelt visiting Arizona in 1913. From his White House bully pulpit, Roosevelt had saved such magnificent Arizona landscapes as the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest. His conservation policies, in general, became the template future presidents followed.
T.R. visiting the Arizona Territory in 1913. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
PROLOGUE
“I SO DECLARE IT”: PELICAN ISLAND, FLORIDA
(FEBRUARY—MARCH 1903)
I
On a wintry morning in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at a White House cabinet meeting unexpectedly and with great exuberance. Something of genuine importance had obviously just happened. All eyes were fixated on Roosevelt, who was quaking like a dervish with either excitement or agitation—it was unclear which. Having endured the assassinations of three Republican presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley—Roosevelt’s so-called kitchen cabinet at least had the consolation of knowing that their boss, at the moment, was out of harm’s way. Still, they leaned forward, bracing for the worst. “Gentlemen, do you know what has happened this morning?” Roosevelt breathlessly asked, as everybody leaned forward with bated breath for the bad news. “Just now I saw a chestnut-sided warbler—and this is only February!”1
The collective sigh of relief was palpable. His cabinet probably should have known that T.R.—an ardent Audubonist—had a bird epiphany. With a greenish-yellow cap, a white breast, and maroon streaks down their sides, these warblers usually wintered in Central America; his spotting one in Washington, D.C., truly was an aberration. By February 1903, after his seventeen months as president of the United States following the murder of McKinley in Buffalo by a crazed anarchist, it was common talk that Theodore Roosevelt was a strenuous preservationist when it came to saving American wilderness and wildlife. His track record was in this regard peerless among the nation’s political class. “I need hardly say how heartily I sympathize with the purposes of the Audubon Society,” Roosevelt had written to Frank M. Chapman, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, just two years before becoming president. “I would like to see all harmless wild things, but especially all birds, protected in every way. I do not understand how any man or woman who really loves nature can fail to try to exert influence in support of such objects as those of the Audubon Society. Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers, and I only wish that besides protecting the songsters, the birds of the grove, the orchard, the garden and the meadow, we could also protect the birds of the sea-shore and of the wilderness.”2
By the time Roosevelt wrote that letter, Chapman—a droll, hardworking, unshowy activist spearheading the Audubon movement—was a legend in ornithological circles, considered by many the father of modern bird-watching. Back in February 1886 Chapman had stirred up a serious commotion in a letter to the editor of Forest and Stream titled “Birds and Bonnets” in which he lamented the fact that in New York City alone three-quarters of all women’s hats sold were capped by an exotic feather from a gun-shot bird. A devotee of comprehensive assessments and long-range planning for protecting aviaries, Chapman deemed the mutilation of birds for fashion “vulgar” and “unconscionable.” 3
Raised on an estate in New Jersey just across the Hudson River from New York City, Chapman had a love of birds from an early age. Although his rich parents had pushed him into the financial world, his passion was ornithology. Still, he went to work on Wall Street, without going to college first—a university degree wasn’t required for a nineteenth-century gentleman banker. But the financial rewards of his brokerage work didn’t satisfy him, so the