The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [60]
For far too long, environmental history has obscurred R.B.R.’s influence on his nephew’s desire to become a naturalist. You might say the future president was a hybrid—half his father, the other half Uncle Rob. Clearly, Robert B. Roosevelt had taught his nephew that ruinous times would ensue if waterways weren’t properly managed. Later in life, T.R. collected live animals exactly the way R.B.R. did. The conservationist books and articles T.R. wrote about the American West were merely more sophisticated versions of Superior Fishing and Florida and the Game Water Birds. It’s not a stretch to believe that T.R. inherited his idea of owning a beautiful Long Island estate surrounded by teeming wildlife—what became his beloved Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay in 1887—directly from his parents’ Tranquility and his Uncle Rob’s Lotus Lake. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to visit R.B.R. on Long Island, even Oscar Wilde, who arrived one afternoon with a “wreath of daisies” for a hatband.97
To anybody interested in the angler’s life, R.B.R. was a true celebrity as an author and activist. His motto—“Remember, no man ever caught a trout in a dirty place”—galvanized anglers to support antipollution laws.98 Everybody, it seemed, wanted to fish with Robert B. Roosevelt. So as Theodore Roosevelt prepared to attend Harvard University in the fall of 1876, his uncle was already an irrepressible crusader for fish and wild-life.99 Certainly every natural history professor T.R. took a course with at Harvard would have known him as R.B.R.’s nephew; R.B.R.’s fame was that widespread in biology circles. Robert’s books, while quirky, were honored at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Robert had earned a place in the history of pioneering conservationists. “Robert B. Roosevelt was among the first to understand that our wild species were being decimated,” Ernest Schwiebert, the renowned author of Trout and Matching the Hatch, wrote. “Our cities and factories were already spewing their waste into our waters. Timber was cut with a mindless rapacity, and land poorly suited to agriculture was being stripped for farmsteads. Roosevelt worked tirelessly for conservation.”100
CHAPTER FOUR
HARVARD AND THE NORTH WOODS OF MAINE
I
At age thirteen, when Theodore was deemed mature enough, his father sent him on a 500-mile excursion by train and stagecoach from Manhattan Island to Moosehead Lake to convalesce in a serene alpine environment after his bouts of asthma. The lake was the largest in Maine, with more than 400 miles of rugged shoreline, most of it untrampled wilderness in 1871. All was going well for Roosevelt on the unescorted journey to the lake until he arrived at the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad depot and station. As he waited for a stagecoach bound for Moosehead Lake, a couple of local youths began taunting him for being a sissy. A nauseated, demoralized feeling rose up behind Roosevelt’s breastbone. Timidly, he put up his dukes and in return got pummeled. “They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me,” he recalled in An Autobiography. “The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”1
From his lakefront lodge, Roosevelt, piqued by the hazing incident, embarrassed by his feebleness, stared zombie-like at the blue water, which swallowed strands of dark green spruces along its shoreline.2 Instead of resenting his tormentors, he envied their hardiness, brawn, and condensed force. Following the humiliation at Moosehead Lake, Roosevelt made a pact with himself: he was going to become a man of true physical strength. Boxing, weight lifting, calisthenics, hiking—he would do whatever it took. Someday, he promised, those same bullies would treat him with respect. “The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could