The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [54]
Animal stories were the mainstay of R.B.R.’s skill as a first-rate raconteur. To Uncle Rob treed opossums and sneaky foxes were more colorful than boring gossip about the sexual affairs of fellow socialites. Whenever young Theodore visited his uncle’s home, in fact—as he often did—he encountered a veritable menagerie: guinea pigs, chickens, parrots, and ducks coexisting in total mayhem. A cow even pastured in the parlor while a pony walked in circles around the dining room table.62 A pet spider monkey dressed in ruffled shirts would often greet visitors at the front door. A German shepherd was allowed to dine at the main table. Somewhere along the line Uncle Rob made it a consuming hobby to collect “Brer Rabbit” stories from African-Americans and dutifully wrote them down as an ethnologist would, mastering the slave-culture diction. Unfortunately, when he published these stories in Harper’s, readers paid them little mind. “They fell flat,” T.R. would later recall, although he was proud that Uncle Rob had been ahead of Joel Chandler Harris in collecting this Georgian folklore. “This was a good many years before a genius arose who in ‘Uncle Remus’ made the stories immortal.”63
That R.B.R.’s affinity for animals eventually developed into conservationist activism owes much to the influence of a British-born outdoor writer, Henry William Herbert. The indefatigable Herbert had been educated at Cambridge University and launched a literary career as a romance novelist, influenced by Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. Moving to America in 1831, he adopted the pseudonym Frank Forester for his outdoor writing.64 Both a fine writer and a pen-and-ink artist, Herbert cofounded the Atlantic Monthly in 1833, believing that outdoors prose needed a fresh, clever popular outlet. The magazine flourished. But it was Herbert’s conservationist activism in such books as The Warwick Woodlands (1845)—denouncing “game hogs” and advocating a measured conservationist approach—that caused alarm in hunter-angler circles.65 R.B.R., for one, took keen notice of Herbert’s grim warning that “the game that swarmed of yore in all the fields and creeks of its vast territory are in such peril of becoming speedily extinct.”66
Robert B. Roosevelt joined Herbert’s crusade to replenish the trampled fisheries of New York. In 1844 Herbert helped found the New York Sportsmen’s Club, whose mission was to have the state legislature place seasonal limits on the hunting of deer, quail, and woodcock. The club’s first successes were the passage of model game laws in three counties: New York (Manhattan), Orange, and Rockland. As soon as R.B.R. joined, he championed an important auxiliary mission for the club, declaring that his priority in life was to enact laws protecting trout, shad, and perch. Indiscriminate fishing practices in general, he believed, had to be curtailed at once if the waterways of New York were to maintain even a semblance of their old abundance.67 Thus R.B.R. became—as his editor friend at the New York Times John Bigelow dubbed him—the “Piscicultural High Priest or Pontifex Maximus.”68
What Robert B. Roosevelt admired about Frank Forester was that he was an able practitioner of “outdoor” literature. Writers in this genre recounted hunting and fishing trips, as opposed to nature writers (who usually refrained from killing wildlife) and latter-day environmental writers (who were more technical in their approach). When Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, most outdoors writing was Anglophile. It was impossible to find a good angling book, for example, about Florida’s reefs, Louisiana’s bayous, Hawaiian atolls. John Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine in 1829 was filled with pedestrian prose. Henry’s creation of Frank Forester changed all this, demonstrating that American soil was fertile ground for outdoor writing. Single-handedly, he made “hook and bullet books” respectable; this was the genre at which Theodore Roosevelt was determined to excel.69
Young Theodore, however, never fully cottoned to Frank