The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [47]
Sawyer claimed that Roosevelt—who preferred venison to brook trout for dinner—had no interest in hunting deer or fishing. It was all birds, birds, birds. Once, in fact, Theodore quietly glided past fifty grazing deer, not lifting his rifle. Arm in arm through the beech woods, Sawyer and Roosevelt traveled; a lifelong bond was forged. As partial payment for taking him into the remote hardwood and softwood forests of the Adirondacks, Roosevelt presented Sawyer with four of the birds he had mounted in Oyster Bay (unfortunately, Sawyer’s cat ate them and died of arsenic poisoning). “He was a queer looker,” Sawyer recalled of Roosevelt in a newspaper, The Adirondack Experience, decades later, “but smart.” According to Sawyer, the oddest aspect of Roosevelt was that he didn’t “smoke, drink or swear.” Sawyer testified that Roosevelt had a puritanical streak lurking in everything he did and said. For example, two prominent New York City doctors—Dr. Wright and Dr. Loomis—spent an evening with Roosevelt and Sawyer at Blue Mountain Lake. After listening to the budding ornithologist pontificate, one of them concluded that Roosevelt was “the smartest idiot I ever saw.”24
What jumps out from “Journal of a Trip to the Adirondacks” is the way Roosevelt was now injecting the botanical history of trees and fauna into his wildlife narrative. No longer was it enough to record seeing a purple finch or a barn swallow from his canoe; now he also described the geographical surroundings in which he observed a blue jay or common sparrow, specifying whether the tree it was perched in was a white pine, balsam fir, or red spruce. Roosevelt enjoyed having the sweat shine on his face as he hiked the alpine terrain to see hapland, rosebay, diaspen-sia, mountain sandwort, and other vegetation native to the Adirondacks. His hope, as he took topographical notes about Saint Regis Lake that August and on follow-up visits in 1875 and 1877, was to write a booklet about the birds of the Adirondacks.25 But since Dr. C. Hart Merriam and other top-notch naturalists had written seriously on Adirondacks wild-life, Roosevelt pragmatically realized that it was hard to add much to “the sum of human knowledge.” 26
On each of these trips Roosevelt’s irreplaceable guide was Sawyer: a real outdoorsman, what loggers called a seven-sided son of a bitch, who knew every bit of the Adirondacks’ mid-mountain and cloud forests like the back of his hand. “The region more particularly dealt with is at an elevation of over 2000 feet, is strongly hilly, or one might almost say mountainous, and is thickly studded with small lakes and ponds whose outlets are narrow and very crooked streams,” Roosevelt recorded in his diary. “It is densely wooded; the few open places being the clearing around houses and the ‘slashes’ where the woods have been burned. The forests are chiefly evergreen (largely intermixed with birches, beeches, and maples, however); the bulk being composed of pines, balsams and spruces, with numbers of hemlocks on the ridges. In the low level lands there are frequently extensive tamarack swamps…. The characteristic features of the fauna of the region are, among mammals, the presence in small numbers of the larger carnivora and furbearing spieces; among birds the abundance of woodpeckers, the breeding of numerous warblers, and the presence of a number of northern species, as Picoides arctus [black-backed woodpecker], Parus hudsonicus [boreal chickadee], Perisoreus canadensis [gray jay], Contopus borealis [olive-sided flycatcher] and Falcipen-nis canadensis [spruce grouse].”27
Unable to find a black bear and uninterested in shooting white-tailed deer (which had been almost wiped out in upstate