The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [484]
Shockingly, to Burroughs, Pine Knot was genuinely rustic. It had no amenities aside from an old woodstove. His own Slabsides was regal by comparison. The “barn-like structure” of Pine Knot made it too primitive for a gentleman to sleep in.51 Oom John looked around and let out a great sigh. If Burroughs had had his former energy and confidence, a local inn in Charlottesville would have been hurriedly found. But as it was, bizarrely, Roosevelt had two northern Virginia flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus fuscus) living indoors, and Burroughs remained unable to sleep because of the racket these nocturnal critters made (they were active at night because their large eyes allowed them to see in extremely low light). Roosevelt, however, seemed to genuinely enjoy their midnight madness, tossing them nuts the way he threw nuts to the scampering grays on the White House lawn. Delightedly Roosevelt watched the squirrels glide from the rafters to the bed and from the bed to the floor, like trapeze artists. As an evolutionist, he was intrigued by their membrane, called a patagium, which allowed them to glide as far as 240 feet through the air. Roosevelt erupted in disapproval when Burroughs gingerly moved the flying squirrels’ nest outside the cabin, and a quarrel ensued—those were Roosevelt’s indoor flying squirrels! How dare he! Eventually, Roosevelt compromised by placing the nest in his own bedroom, minimizing Burroughs’s interaction with the squirrels.52 Still, the high-pitched chirps continued to annoy Burroughs; even holding a pillow over his ears didn’t work. At one juncture Roosevelt himself was bitten by one of the squirrels; blood trickled down his hand from a real puncture wound. What shocked Burroughs was that Roosevelt seemed to admire the squirrels even more for this hostile act.53
“Mr. Burroughs, whom I call Oom John, was with us and we greatly enjoyed having him,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Archie. “But one night he fell into great disgrace! The flying squirrels that were there last Christmas had raised a brood, having built a large nest inside of the room in which you used to sleep and in which John Burroughs slept. Of course they held high carnival at night-time. Mother and I do not mind them at all, and indeed rather like to hear them scrambling about, and then as a sequel to a sudden frantic fight between two of them, hearing or seeing one little fellow come plump down to the floor and scuttle off again to the wall. But one night they waked up John Burroughs and he spent a misguided hour hunting for the nest, and when he found it took it down and caught two of the young squirrels and put them in a basket. The next day under Mother’s direction I took them out, getting my fingers somewhat bitten in the process, and loosed them in our room, where he had previously put back the nest. I do not think John Burroughs profited by his misconduct, because the squirrels were more active than ever that night both in his room and ours, the disturbance in their family affairs having evidently made them restless!”54
IV
On May 11, 1908, two days before the participants were to arrive in Washington for the governors’ conference, Roosevelt arrived there from Pine Knot, with Burroughs at his side. Deciding to do something to honor the founders of western naturalist studies in America—Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—Roosevelt signed into being the first national monument in Montana. If John Muir could have a monument named after him in Marin County, then surely one should be dedicated to the great explorers of the Jeffersonian era in Jefferson County, Montana. Roosevelt had a deep-seated memory of reading Lewis and Clark’s diaries as a boy, and