The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [441]
Vicksburg—where from 1899 to 1902 the Corps of Engineers diverted the Yazoo River to flow into the old riverbed so that today the Yazoo, not the Mississippi, flows past the town. Vicksburg—the very word had been part of his life since his boyhood. Vicksburg—to Roosevelt it was a sacred site of both the Union’s glory and America’s eventual healing.
Following an obligatory speech in Leland, Mississippi, Roosevelt made his way back to Memphis and then headed by train to Washington, D.C. The combination of the Mississippi River steamboat trip followed by stalking bears in the Louisiana canebrakes had made him long for the vitality of his youth. How simple the outdoors life, rich with bird life, was: the search for wood, meat in the pot, the sound of painted finches singing in the dawn. Everything required to feel alive with God was available by walking through a meadow, the woods, or a bayou with an eye out for warblers and vireos. An idea started to percolate in Roosevelt. Perhaps he would lead specimen collecting expeditions to the three A’s: the Arctic, Africa, and the Amazon. There were still wild places left where an explorer could make his mark.
President Roosevelt in the Louisiana canebrakes with his hunting partners.
T.R. at the Louisiana canebrakes hunt. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
As a token of appreciation to Harley and Clive Metcalfe and Holt Collier, Roosevelt had three 45–70-caliber model 1886 Winchester rifles shipped to Mississippi as “treasured keepsakes.” On each weapon the hunter’s full name was engraved, with “1907” underneath.60
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Reports of Roosevelt’s bear hunt sickened Mark Twain. He saw Roosevelt as a hypocrite: a purported conservationist but also an obsessive hunter. To Twain, the spectacle of the president, who was getting rounder by the day, trudging through swamplands in a downpour to kill one of the last black bears in East Carroll Parish was pathetic. Also, why was a busy president disappearing for days to beat the bushes for bears? Twain personally liked Roosevelt, who had once helped him with a tricky customs issue in Europe. He even enjoyed Roosevelt’s conversation from time to time. But the hunt in Louisiana was the tipping point. As America’s foremost humorist, Twain attacked Roosevelt by writing burlesque versions of the hunt. The gist of the ridicule was that Roosevelt had a rogue hormone, which caused him to light out after animals with deadly intent. A bear or cougar would be better off taking an anesthetic than having to encounter an inglorious death at the hands of a maniac shouting bully before pulling the trigger. Yet Twain was dealing with only one side of Roosevelt’s multidimensional self. As many others have noted, T.R. had thousands of sides, including bird-watching and forest preservation. But Twain, of course, wasn’t looking for balance.
And Twain, as he was apt to do, hit his mark. He had a legitimate ax to grind in this regard. A longtime animal rights advocate who had written A Horse’s Tale and A Dog’s Tale and condemned bullfighting, Twain now insisted that killing a bear with a pack of yapping hounds and mastiffs was the equivalent of shooting a cow in a pasture. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he described two loafers in the town of Bricksville who enjoyed pouring kerosene on stray dogs and torching them.61 Turning to Roosevelt, he now imagined the unfortunate cow looking at the president and saying, “Have pity, sir, and spare me. I am alone, you are many…. Have pity, sir—there is no heroism in killing