Together, Burroughs and Roosevelt champion nature

By Michael Shaver
For the Poughkeepsie Journal

Two important figures of the movement came from New York state.

They both loved the outdoors, watching birds and wrote of the things they loved. John Burroughs of West Park in Ulster County, with his prose and poetry, won the hearts and minds of a nation headlong into an industrial revolution.

On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt of Oyster Bay in Long Island, put conservation of natural resources on the nation’s political agenda, establishing institutions that preserved what both he and Burroughs knew was uniquely American, its natural environment.

John Burroughs (1837-1921) took prose and matched it with recollections of a rural, hardscrabble farm upbringing in the Catskills. His love of nature came about from a dislike of farm labor. In wandering the woods of Delaware County, he developed a keen eye for the natural world.

His observations of the natural world and the personal meaning of what he saw resulted in a distinctly American form of expression known as the nature essay. The prose form influenced and inspired generations of youth from the 1870s to the 1920s of the importance of the natural environment to the human condition.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) first experienced the outdoors at his wealthy Manhattan family’s summer homes along the Hudson River and in Long Island. His childhood asthma was key in his love for the environment. To soothe TR’s asthma attacks, Roosevelt’s father often took him on long carriage rides in the woods and shores of Manhattan and Long Island.

In his 20s, Roosevelt lived and hunted in the West for about 15 months. This was his escape from the sorrow over the deaths of both his wife, to complications of pregnancy, and of his mother, to typhoid fever, in February 1884. In the North Dakota Badlands, Roosevelt pitted himself against man, beast and the elements, changing in the process from a young dandy and near geek, to a confident adult. His granddaughter observed: “If it was not for that time in the West, he would have never become President.”

A special interest in birds

Burroughs and Roosevelt shared a fascination with birds. Roosevelt wrote about the varied bird habitat of the forests and fields of his Long Island home at Sagamore Hill. His second wife, Edith Roosevelt, purchased the first presidential retreat, a bare bones shack called Pine Knot in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where Roosevelt reveled in the bird life he found there. He and his wife were buried in a cemetery in Oyster Bay, Long Island, next to a deep wooded cove that had a delightfully diverse bird population. The wooded cove now belongs to the Audubon Society.

Burroughs’ interest in birds began while teaching school at Highland Falls in Orange County, just outside the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and was enhanced by frequent trips to the West Point Military Academy library.

Birds always came up in the men’s conversations. Roosevelt invited Burroughs down to Pine Knot. They rode a buggy, then walked, jogged, then practically ran through the woods identifying as many birds as they could. Roosevelt identified two birds new to Burroughs. Burroughs thought that Roosevelt made the thing too much a competition. Burroughs always tended to grumble in his journal about Roosevelt’s manic manner, but in time would write fondly of the experience after the president’s death, not forgetting to mention the Berwick wren and the swamp sparrow.

In farming and ranching, Burroughs and Roosevelt experienced some of the barehanded challenges that faced the first European settlers in North America. Taming and transforming the environment transformed the person.

In their lifetimes, however, technology had dehumanized that struggle. Not only the woods and prairies were disappearing, but the bighorn sheep of the Badlands, the Arizona Elk, and the antelope and buffalo of the Great Plains were species either extinct or very nearly so.

Against this backdrop of change, Burroughs’ writings of the life in the Catskills and Roosevelt’s writings about his western ranching and hunting experiences, sold well to an appreciative market. In their first meeting in 1890, Roosevelt told Burroughs how his books left him homesick for America during a yearlong trip to Europe 20 years earlier, when he was 13.

A lifelong and loving admiration grew between the men. Along with New York origins, both had hunted and admired the Catskill and Hudson Valley regions.

Roosevelt, a man of action, and Burroughs, a man of prose, held a mutual fascination. Of all the notables in the early conservation movement, TR enjoyed having Burroughs around and Burroughs enjoyed the bumpy ride.

In 1903, Roosevelt invited Burroughs to join him in seeing the national parks of Yellowstone and Yosemite. The 44-year-old president promised that the 66-year-old writer would endure “neither fatigue nor hardship.”

As Burroughs was dragged in Rooseveltian fashion from one of Yellowstone’s natural marvels to another, he found himself running along a snow sled and snow skiing for the first and last time of his life. Burroughs, who started a nationwide walking craze in the 1870s and 1880s, was on a horse for the first time in 50 years.

Visitors to Slabsides

Exhausted after two weeks, Burroughs excused himself from the trip to Yosemite. But in reflection, he was amazed at TR’s keen powers of observation along with his paradoxical passions as a sportsman and naturalist. Years ago, he sensed this in reading Roosevelt’s “The Wilderness Hunter,” but seeing it in person left a great and lifelong impression. After Yellowstone, TR’s increasing regard and affection for Burroughs led him to address the writer as “Oom John,” Dutch for Uncle John, and to dedicate his book: “Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter” to him.

The Roosevelt boys spent time with Burroughs, too. In an essay entitled “Babes in the Woods,” Burroughs wrote of spending time with Ted, a young weekend visitor who explored the backwoods of Burroughs’ retreat, “Slabsides,” near West Park. Ted was Theodore Roosevelt Jr. During World War I, Burroughs mourned the death of the youngest, most personable and beloved of the Roosevelt children, Quentin, in aerial combat over France. The old man and the young boy also hiked and fished together.

Visiting Roosevelt’s home, Burroughs witnessed TR’s uncanny powers of observation. In an essay entitled “Theodore Roosevelt as Nature-Lover and Observer,” Burroughs talked about the birds they found at Sagamore Hill and his observations of the president’s capabilities as a natural scientist. In identifying a sparrow’s egg in a nest, the president corrected the naturalist in his recollection that the egg was not of a grasshopper sparrow, but of a song sparrow.

A few months after the Yellowstone trip, the presidential yacht sailed up the Hudson River to West Park, landing below “Slabsides,” on the opposite shore from Hyde Park.

Burroughs met the president and his wife on the landing and had a wagon for the president’s use. TR dismissed it and they walked up the steep two-mile hill together. Burroughs noted that TR sounded and moved like a steam engine up the hill, clinched teeth and clinched fists. His recollection of Mrs. Roosevelt’s ascent differed: “There was something queer about it. She did not seem to make the slightest effort, and yet she got to the top just as soon as he did!” For lunch, Burroughs roasted chicken, his wife baked a pie, Mrs. Roosevelt washed the celery and the president talked non-stop.

At a White House dinner, TR told Burroughs about seeing an early spring bird and recited the bird’s call. As a young teenager hunting with buddies in the Hudson Valley, Roosevelt finally discovered his poor vision when he found he could not shoot a bird, much less the side of a barn. However, in turn, he had a phenomenal ear for birdcalls. Now Burroughs, more confident in dealing with the country’s first birder, sounded out the correct bird song for the species. To the amazement and amusement of the diners, the two engaged in a spirited discussion of birds and their songs.

Uncle John Burroughs mourned the death of the younger Roosevelt in January 1919. He wrote: “The old man’s tears come easily, and I can hardly speak his name without tears in my voice. To know him was to love him. The world seems more bleak and cold without him in it.”

As president, Roosevelt set aside 260 million acres of federal lands as parks, monuments, refuges and forests, that all put together would occupy the land area of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Somewhere along the way, Theodore may have influenced distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt, who lived across the Hudson from Burroughs’ home.

Young Franklin worshiped cousin Theodore from afar. Like his cousin, he collected birds, still on display at Hyde Park. And in his way, he influenced a generation of young men in a Great Depression work relief program called the Civilian Conservation Corps by putting unemployed city boys to work in parks and forests. Working in the outdoors changed the course of many of their lives. At the 1991 groundbreaking of the FDR Memorial in Washington, nearly 40 of them, in their 70s and 80s, were present. They nearly outnumbered the dignitaries and the two Roosevelt families gathered there, both Theodore’s and Franklin’s.

Burroughs’ writings of the natural world and his feelings about it captured the imaginations of inner-city children and an evolving middle-class that had time and leisure to “get back to nature.” It extended also to the millionaire industrialists whom Burroughs knew well and considered friends. Men like automaker Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison who as adults would celebrate the outdoors in elaborate camping trips that looked more like safaris or catered picnics. These men, responsible in part for the loss of the very thing Burroughs wrote about, were also one-time farm boys.

Michael Shaver is a presidential historian and acting chief ranger at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Oyster Bay, Long Island.