"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt

XV
From White House to Jungle

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.

Penetrating the jungles of East and Central Africa, he and his party remained for months almost entirely cut off from the outside world.

In his book, “African Game Trails,” published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, the hunter-naturalist-author has described fascinatingly the story of his encounters with lions, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, and other dangerous animals.

At Heatley’s ranch, a place seventeen miles long and four miles wide, he found the haunts of the buffalo, a creature it had been his desire for a long time to shoot. Of these animals he wrote:

“There is no doubt that under certain circumstances buffalo, in addition to showing themselves exceedingly dangerous opponents when wounded by hunters, become truculent and inclined to take the offensive themselves. There are places in East Africa where, as regards at least certain herds, this seems to be the case; and in Uganda the buffalo have caused such loss of life and such damage to the native plantations that they are now ranked as vermin and not as game, and their killing is encouraged in every possible way.”

Here is his account of his shooting of his first buffaloes:

“Cautiously threading our way along the edge of the swamp, we got within 150 yards of the buffalo before we were perceived. There were four bulls, grazing close by the edge of the swamp, their black bodies glistening in the early sun rays, their massive horns showing white, and the cow herons perched on their backs. They stared sullenly at us with outstretched heads from under their great frontlets of horn.

“The biggest of the four stood a little out from the other three, and at him I fired, the bullet telling with a smack on the tough hide and going through the lungs. We had been afraid they would at once turn into the papyrus, but instead of this they started across our front directly for the open country.

“This was a piece of huge good luck. Kermit put his first barrel into the second bull and I my second barrel into one of the others, after which it became impossible to say which bullet struck which animal, as the firing became general. They ran a quarter of a mile into the open, and then the big bull I had first shot, and which had no other bullet in him, dropped dead, while the other three, all of which were wounded halted beside him.

“One bull dropped to the shot as if poleaxed, falling straight on his back with his legs kicking, but in a moment he was up again and after the others. Later I found that the bullet, a full metal patch, had struck him in the head, but did not penetrate the brain, and merely stunned him for a moment.

“All the time we kept running diagonally to their line of flight. They were all three badly wounded, and when they reached the tall, rank grass, high as a man’s head, which fringed the papyrus swamp, the two foremost lay down, while the hindmost turned, and, with nose outstretched, began to come toward us. He was badly crippled, however, and with a soft-nosed bullet from my heavy Holland I knocked him down, this time for good. The other two rose and though each was again hit they reached the swamp, one of them to our right, the other to the left, where the papyrus came out in a point.”

Roosevelt the hunter had faced many dangerous situations in his adventures in the wilds, but his first encounter with an elephant brought him closer to death than he had ever been. It was his comrade, F. C. Selous, an able and experienced African hunter, who saved the American on this occasion.

A shot from Roosevelt’s party had badly wounded a great lion. It had finally taken refuge in a dense thicket. Selous advised the party that it would be dangerous to come to close quarters with it. Roosevelt excited by the chase, plunged into the thicket in pursuit of the beast.

The party had seen no elephants and were unaware that any were in their vicinity. Selous, who, with Kermit, had followed Roosevelt, saw the Colonel lift his gun hurriedly to his shoulder. He glanced in the same direction and caught sight of a herd of elephants led by an enormous tusker. This animal was less than two hundred feet away.

Selous shouted: “For the life of you, don’t shoot! A bullet will bring a charge of the herd and we may be trampled to death. Follow me!”

Roosevelt reluctantly lowered his rifle. Selous led the Colonel and Kermit to a safe spot and bade them climb a tree. From this position Selous showed his companions how to aim. Roosevelt raised his Winchester and sent a half-dozen bullets into the leader of the herd.

With a scream of pain, the elephant charged, but when close to the tree he fell with a tremendous crash. He had received his death wound. The rest of the herd fled, pursued by Kermit’s bullets.

Many a big game hunter has been killed by the swirling trunk or the trampling feet of a wounded elephant. If the Colonel had fired from the position from which Selous rescued him he would undoubtedly have been crushed to death when the brute charged.

Roosevelt’s exploits in Africa aroused the intense admiration of the natives, and as a compliment to his shooting ability they named him “Bwana Tumbo,” the Great Hunter.

Carl Akeley, head of the elephant hunting expedition in Africa for the American Museum of Natural History, met the Roosevelt expedition in Africa and spent several days hunting with the Colonel.

Mr. Akeley found that while the Colonel took a huge interest in the hunt for big game, he was yet so much of a naturalist that he showed a keen interest in even the most insignificant of wild creatures. A small rodent had been discovered on the North American Continent. The discovery was of small moment. Few men remembered it, yet the Colonel was found to know all about it. Akeley says:

“I found Colonel Roosevelt one of the most refreshing and delightful companions I ever had the pleasure of knowing. He was as ideal and keen a sportsman as ever lived. The least of his pleasure was in the killing of animals. He found infinite joy in studying wild animal life in its native haunts. His greatest pleasures lay in seeing and learning, thereby proving himself an ideal naturalist.”