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.”