The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [94]
What mattered most to Roosevelt, it seemed, wasn’t whether his birds ended up under glass at the Smithsonian Institution—to his mind the greatest museum in the world—but the fact that Baird had actually accepted his taxidermy as being excellent. From then on, whenever Roosevelt went hunting the Smithsonian Institution was the primary beneficiary of his prowess. Three of Roosevelt’s favorite Egyptian birds—a crocodile bird, a white-tailed lapwing, and a spur-wing lapwing—were gifted to the American Museum of Natural History. A white snowy owl he had shot near Oyster Bay in 1876 also was deeded to the New York museum. The largest bird in the arctic region, the snowy owl often migrated southward in the winter; a few were once discovered in the Caribbean. Covered with velvety, fine-textured, white, downy feathers, this owl epitomized gracefulness, swooping down and using its sharp talons to seize prey in a single elegant motion. Even before Roosevelt was famous, just a twenty-three-year-old assemblyman, this expertly mounted snowy-white became something of a tourist attraction at the American Museum. Over time, as his legend grew, this snowy owl likewise grew in significance. Today its recognized as the high-water mark of Roosevelt’s ornithological career.
CHAPTER SIX
CHASING BUFFALO IN THE BADLANDS AND GRIZZLIES IN THE BIGHORNS
I
Although Theodore Roosevelt had donated his vast natural history collection to the Smithsonian Institution, he nevertheless desperately longed for the head of a free-ranging buffalo to hang on his library wall in New York. Roosevelt preferred to call them by the proper zoological classification “bison.” In Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1895) he titled one chapter “The Lordly Buffalo” and was full of reverence for the horned species. With zoological precision he was also careful to note that there were two subspecies of the mammal in North America: Bison bison bison (Plains buffalo) and the lesser Bison bison athabascae (wood buffalo) found primarily along the Pacific Coast.*1
In late 1882, Roosevelt purchased a small brownstone off Fifth Avenue, at 55 West Forty-Fifth Street, hoping to get away from his mother’s tight grip and start a family of his own. The new home was, according to a close friend, a “pleasant” hearth where Theodore and Alice entertained guests with “the kind of generous warmth that characterized them both.”2 Roosevelt decided that his heads of indigenous game—buffalo, moose, elk, antelope, grizzly bear, etc.—would be showcased throughout the residence. “Back again in my own lovely little home,” Roosevelt wrote in January 1883 following a stint in Albany, “with the sweetest and prettiest of all little wives—my own sunny darling. I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in my cozy little sitting room, before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, the playing backgammon with my own dainty mistress.”3
By summer Roosevelt had set his sights on a country house as well. Craving open-air diversions, he acquired 155 acres of pristine land, half-wooded, near the family estate on Long Island’s north shore, and he started building an eclectic, roomy three-story mansion, with a view from upstairs of Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor. Originally called Leeholm, this mansion would become known as Sagamore Hill (after the Indian Chief Sagamore Mohannis, who had deeded away rights to the property 200 years earlier).4 The estate became Long Island’s great wunder krammer (room of wonders) for natural history. Its oak-paneled library would eventually house