The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [432]
Realizing that passenger pigeons were on Hornaday’s endangered species list, and being exceedingly sportsmanlike about this matter, Roosevelt refused to shoot one. But he knew visually that this was the passenger pigeon, as described in Audubon’s Birds of America (page 25 of Volume 5). All of Albemarle County was abuzz over Roosevelt’s sighting which, if true, was the last official report before extinction. That same year W. B. Mershon had published, as a farewell, The Passenger Pigeon—a book of memories of the great flocks that constituted an impressive ornithological eulogy.31 There was also public concern about the impending extinction. As it happened, the last passenger pigeon on earth—named Martha—died in captivity on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Thereafter, coffee shops and bars would freakishly boast about having a stuffed passenger pigeon on display.
Roosevelt took pride in the fact that Burroughs’s eminence had habituated since their first meeting at the Fellowcraft Club. Likewise he was proud that his illustrator of Ranch Life, Frederic Remington, had become famous. Somewhat surprisingly, Remington was perhaps the one western artist willing to denounce the staged rescues in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and Owen Wister’s hero in The Virginian. Remington called Indians the “aboriginal” Americans, and he was praised by a Crow chief for having white skin but the heart of an Absaroke.32 In articles, short stories, and two novels Remington had treated Native American warriors as outdoorsmen superior to the “great white hunters” of modernity with their scoped rifles and waterproof sleeping bags. As the Independent noted, Remington had been a pioneer in moving away from “mere sentimentality” about Indians to serious ethnography. This intellectual advance in Indian scholarship impressed Roosevelt greatly.33
Over the summer of 1907 Roosevelt composed a series of open letters on the White House stationary, honoring Remington’s artistic achievements. Roosevlt saluted Remington’s painting for the inherent westernness of his broken peaks and purple mountains. Roosevelt was a habitual doodler, but he couldn’t draw his beloved West the way Remington could. However, he had the political power to save natural sites in the rutted wag-ontrail territories. Every Remington rough trapper and graceful Indian radiated a humanity worthy of Rembrandt. “I regard Frederic Remington as one of the Americans who has done real work for this country, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Roosevelt declared on July 17. “He has been granted the very unusual gift of excelling in two entirely distinct types of artistic work; for his bronzes are as noteworthy as his pictures. He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had, and he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet vanishing type of American life. The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”34
To Roosevelt, the very talented Remington had made a “permanent record of certain of the most interesting features of our national life.” He ranked Remington as high as George Catlin for accurately combining Indian ethnography and western landscapes. By 1904 Remington’s bronzes such as The Bronco Buster, The Buffalo Signal, and Coming Through the Rough were themselves virtually national monuments, cycleproof, as recognizable as Leutze’s painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware or Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Remington’s bronzes—twenty-one in all, cast at the Henry-Bonnard Company (using the sand-cast method) and the Roman Bronze Work Company (using the