Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 23

Great Heart The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt 23

“So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend

itself until the establishment of some form of international police

power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As

things are now, such powers to command peace throughout the world could

best be assured by some combination between those great nations which

sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing

aggressions. The combination might at first be only to secure peace

within certain definite limits and certain definite conditions; but the

ruler or statesman who should bring about such a combination would have

earned his place in history for all time and his title to the gratitude

of all mankind.”

 

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, WALTER SCOTT SHINN

 

ROOSEVELT AS A GRANDFATHER]

 

 

 

 

XV

 

From White House to Jungle

 

“Oh, our manhood’s prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living! The leaping from rock to rock;

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-trees; the cool, silver

shock

Of the plunge in a pool’s living water; the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is crouched in his lair.

 

* * * * *

 

How good is man’s life, the mere living! How fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!”

 

 

These splendid lines of Browning were Roosevelt’s outdoor creed. His

exploits as a hunter in Africa were merely a development of his life

as a naturalist and out-of-door man. At Harvard Roosevelt had devoted

himself to a study of natural science, and had even thought seriously

of making it his lifework. Politics claimed him then, but always

underlying Roosevelt the statesman was Roosevelt the naturalist.

 

Francis Parkman--hunter, trapper, horticulturist and America’s most

interesting historian--was Roosevelt’s example for his life in the

open. There was a close relation between the careers of the two men.

Parkman was handicapped in health and bad eyesight. Roosevelt, as a

youth, had a weak frame and his sight was also poor. Parkman loved

Nature and had a passion for writing. He had an indomitable will that

enabled him to overcome his physical handicaps and to make a splendid

mark in literature. Roosevelt possessed the same qualities.

 

It was with Parkman in mind that Roosevelt scaled the most difficult

peaks of the Alps; plunged in the Canadian wilderness; took up prairie

life. As a result of the trained eye and trained ear Roosevelt gained

through these experiences, in his books will be found observations of

animal life and bird life, and a knowledge of plants and trees that is

enlightening to even the experienced naturalist.

 

John Burroughs, in his book “Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt,”

states that when Roosevelt entered Yellowstone Park he wanted all

the freedom and solitude possible. The Colonel craved to be alone

with Nature. It was evident that he was hungry for the wild and the

aboriginal. It was this hunger that came to him periodically and

resulted in his going forth on hunting and exploring trips to the Far

West, Africa and Brazil.

 

As an illustration of the fact that it was love of nature itself

more than love of killing that drove Roosevelt into the wilds,

Burroughs describes how, at their second camp, which they reached in

mid-afternoon, their attention was attracted by a strange note in the

spruce woods. The question arose as to whether it was a bird or a

beast. Their guide thought it was an owl.

 

“Let’s run that bird down,” said the Colonel to Burroughs.

 

They ran across a small open plain and at last saw the bird on the peak

of a spruce. Burroughs imitated its call, but they could not discern

the species of the bird.

 

“Why did we not think to bring the glasses?” said Roosevelt.

 

“I will run and get them,” said Burroughs.

 

“No,” said Roosevelt, “you stay here and keep that bird treed and I

will fetch them.”

 

Off the Colonel went like a boy, returning swiftly with the glasses.

Then it was discovered that it was indeed an owl; a pigmy owl, not much

larger than a bluebird. Roosevelt was as delighted as if he had slain a

grizzly. He had never seen a bird like this before.

 

At one time Roosevelt and his companions camped at the Yellowstone

Canyon, with the river four or five hundred feet below them. Mountain

sheep appeared on the opposite side. The rules of the park forbade

hunting, so the sheep showed no fear of them. Between the sheep and the

riverbed there was a precipice. The question arose among the watchers

as to whether these four-footed creatures could pass down this steep

declivity to the riverbed. Roosevelt asserted that they could. Then he

entered his tent to shave. When the shaving was half completed someone

shouted that the sheep were going down. Roosevelt rushed out, with a

towel around his throat and one side of his face white with lather.

He watched the sure-footed sheep making their descent with great

interest. Then he said: “I knew they could do it.”

 

While Roosevelt was on this trip in the Yellowstone he remarked:

 

“I heard a Bullock’s-oriole!”

 

“You may have heard one,” said a man familiar with the country, “but I

doubt it. Those birds won’t come for two weeks yet.”

 

“I caught two bird notes which could not be those of any bird except an

oriole,” the Colonel insisted.

 

“You may have the song twisted,” said another member of the party.

 

That evening at supper Roosevelt suddenly laid down his knife and fork,

exclaiming, “Look! Look!”

 

On a shrub before the window was a Bullock’s-oriole. This vindication

of his hearing pleased the Colonel immensely.

 

Burroughs, after visiting the Colonel at Sagamore Hill in 1907, wrote

that the appearance of a new warbler in the woods “seemed an event that

threw the affairs of state and the Presidential succession into the

background.” He told a political visitor at that time that it would be

impossible for him to discuss politics then as he wanted to talk and

hunt birds, and for the purpose he took his visitor with him.

 

“Fancy,” said Burroughs, “a President of the United States stalking

rapidly across bushy fields to the woods, eager as a boy and filled

with the one idea of showing to his visitors the black-throated green

warbler!”

 

Roosevelt told Burroughs that when he was President he would sometimes

go on bird excursions in the White House grounds. People passing would

stop and stare at him as he stood gazing up into the trees.

 

“No doubt they thought me insane,” he said.

 

“Yes,” added Mrs. Roosevelt, who was present, “and as I was always with

him, they no doubt thought that I was the nurse that had him in charge.”

 

Roosevelt’s effective war on “nature fakirs” could not have been

possible had he not known intimately the habits and nature of birds and

animals, and never was he found wanting. Roosevelt’s intense interest

in wild animals, it may be noted in passing, showed itself in his early

boyhood. Of the minister of his church he demanded to know the nature

of a “zeal.”

 

“What is a zeal?” repeated the puzzled parson.

 

“You read about him in the Psalms,” said Ted.

 

The minister picked up his Bible. There he found the answer: “For the

zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”

 

 

IN THE AFRICAN JUNGLE

 

How Roosevelt should employ his energy when he left the Presidency had

been a problem he had thought about for many months before his second

term closed.

 

Roosevelt was surrounded then by his famous “Tennis Cabinet.” This was

an elastic term, for the cabinet included not only such old Western

friends as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther Kelly--who was formerly an

army scout against the Sioux--and Abernathy, the wolf hunter, but also

men like Leonard Wood, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, and

Robert Bacon, afterward Secretary of State.

 

One of the chief of the many athletic diversions of the “Tennis

Cabinet” was swimming in the Potomac. Roosevelt in his autobiography

tells how one day, when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, was along,

the members of the party, including the Ambassador, took off their

clothes preliminary to swimming in the river.

 

Just as they were entering the water someone cried:

 

“Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves!”

 

The Ambassador promptly replied:

 

“I think I will leave them on, we might meet ladies!”

 

Often big game hunters from abroad were entertained by Roosevelt and

the “Tennis Cabinet,” and when the Colonel mentioned to this group his

ambition to bring his hunting experiences to a grand climax in the

wilds of Africa he received the enthusiastic encouragement that one

would expect to come from these hunters and sportsmen.

 

On March 23, 1909, with his son Kermit, he sailed from New York to

Naples, thence, by way of Suez, to British East Africa, for a hunting

trip in its jungles.

 

The Smithsonian Institute had commissioned him to collect specimens,

and the faunal and floral trophies he brought back from this almost

unknown country show that he fulfilled this part of his mission with

brilliant success.

 

Roosevelt was on his way to one of the wildest parts of the earth, yet

he did not entirely cut himself off from the influences of culture.

Always there were books to ease his mind when the strenuous hunt was

over or when the journey into the jungle grew monotonous. With him he

took his famous “Pigskin library,” bound in pigskin that they might

be handled by powder-stained or oil-stained hands. This strangely

assorted list, which showed the wide range of Roosevelt’s reading,

included the following-named authors and works:

 

“The Federalist,” Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”, the “Song of

Roland,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer, Dante,

Spenser and Milton, Shelley, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, Poe,

Bret Harte, Bacon, Lowell, Euripides, Froissart, Macaulay, Shakespeare,

Marlowe, Dickens, Thackeray, Cooper and Scott. “Huckleberry Finn”

and “Tom Sawyer” were included for humor, and later were added such

books as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Tartarin,” “Don Quixote” and works of

Darwin, Goethe and Huxley.

 

The members of the Smithsonian African Expedition accompanying

Roosevelt were Dr. and Colonel Edgar A. Mearns, U. S. A. (retired) one

of the first field naturalists of the United States; Edmund Heller, of

Stanford University, a thoroughly trained naturalist; J. Alden Loring,

of Oswego, N. Y., a successful collector of birds and small animals.

 

Among the white pioneers who had preceded Roosevelt in the African

jungles were such famous men as Livingstone and Stanley. In the

footsteps of these self-sacrificing men came great hunters, drawn by

the fascination of facing the lordly lion or the furious elephant or

the dangerous rhinoceros. Among the boldest of these was Roosevelt, the

first great American to track these savage creatures into the secret places of the Dark Continent.