The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [461]
Characteristically, Roosevelt wrote an exuberant note to Ditmars—a former reporter for the New York Times who served as curator of reptiles at the New York Zoological Park from 1899 to 1920 under the direct supervision of William Temple Hornaday. As with Hornaday, Grinnell, Burroughs, Muir, and others, Roosevelt marveled at how Ditmars—a meticulous man of science—“made the present and past life history of this planet accessible in vivid and striking forms to our people generally.” 64 Ditmars was clearly part of Roosevelt’s tribe. Calling The Reptile Book “genuinely refreshing,” even though at times a slog to read straight through, Roosevelt invited Ditmars to visit the White House or Sagamore Hill, saying it would be “a great pleasure if I could see you some time.” 65 The president wanted to discuss the fate of reptiles in North America with Ditmars, whom he considered the greatest herpetologist alive. “I have a very strong belief,” Roosevelt wrote, “in having books which shall be understood by the multitude, and which shall yet be true—in other words, scientific books written for laymen who have some appreciation for science—so that the books will be of value to all men who are interested in the subject. It seems to me that your volume exactly fulfills these requirements. Personally, I have long wanted to have in my library some good books on reptiles.”66
After his presidency, Roosevelt spent a couple of fine afternoons studying gopher tortoises living on islets around Punta Gorda, Florida. “The burrow was shallow and we speedily dug out the occupant,” he reported for the American Museum Journal. “It was a fairly large specimen, weighing 11½ pounds, with a shell 13½ inches long, 9 inches wide, and 5¼ inches deep. (Later we secured a small specimen on Captiva Island, which weighed 4¾ pounds, was 8½ inches long, 6 inches wide, and 3½ inches deep). How this big tortoise got to the island is something of a mystery, as the species is entirely terrestrial; it must have been drifted out by some accident of flood or storm.”67
A reptile Roosevelt did nothing to protect after reading Ditmars, however, was the alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). Alligators populated the swamps of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, 68 and Roosevelt encountered alligators when he journeyed to the South in 1907, but he never took one for a trophy at Sagamore Hill. An article by John Mortimer Murphy in Outing Magazine titled “Alligator Shooting in Florida,” didn’t endear the species to Roosevelt.69 Murphy compared baby alligators eating prey to a terrier shaking a rat, and Roosevelt’s southern notebooks recounted incidents of humans being bitten by alligators along sandbanks and in mudflats. “In the lakes and larger bayous we saw alligators,” Roosevelt wrote in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter. “One of the planters with us had lost part of his hand by the bite of an alligator.”70 When he traveled to Panama aboard USS Louisiana in November 1906—becoming the first U.S. president to visit a foreign country during his term of office—he wrote to Kermit about what he thought was a cunning gator with a carnivorous mouth. “There are alligators in the rivers,” he reported. “One of the trained nurses from a hospital went to bathe in a pool last August and an alligator grabbed him by the legs and was making off with him, but was fortunately scared away, leaving the man badly injured.”71
Here is a very rare example of Roosevelt misidentifying a species. Alligators weren’t found in Panama. Instead, the nurse was probably attacked by the common caiman (Caiman crocodilus). There is no good explanation why Roosevelt was so sloppy with this field observation. Later, when he was traveling in both Africa and Brazil, Roosevelt