Amongst the nice hunters and adventurers of the Roaring Twenties were the 2 eldest sons of Teddy Roosevelt, America’s twenty sixth president, former Latest York governor and one in all the country’s most energetic and famous figures. The Roosevelt family had funded museums to fill their halls with exhibits of virtually every large animal known to man, but for one — the elusive and legendary creature, the large black and white panda.
Emboldened by their legendary lineage, Ted Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt decided to follow within the footsteps of their big-game-hunting father who had brought back kills of lions, tigers, elephants and bears — often exhibited in Latest York City’s American Museum of Natural History, which the boys’ grandfather had co-founded in 1869.
Pursuing fame and glory — in addition to hoping to flee the shadow of their father — the brothers set out for distant, and inhospitable Himalayan mountains in Asia, which had yet to be explored by Westerners. Their goal was to search out the panda considered some form of polar bear — but a beast that many believed didn’t exist. And the brothers faced a punishing route up a 16,000-foot peak with howling winter storms.
As Nathalia Holt writes in her deeply researched nonfiction account, “The Beast within the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda” )One Signal Publishers): “The animal the brothers coveted looked like no other species on the planet . . . a black and white bear so rare that many individuals didn’t imagine it was real.
“Not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives would say precisely where the creature lived, what it ate, or the way it behaved . . . The Roosevelts desired this one animal so acutely that they might barely talk about it with one another, much less anyone else,” the creator observes.
Few people within the Republic of China had ever seen the panda, but there was a probable reference to it in Chinese literature within the early Third Century, in keeping with the creator. And proof of its existence arose when Joseph Milner, a missionary, donated the skin he had purchased of an enormous panda to the American Museum of Natural History in Latest York in 1919.
A French missionary, Armand David, had hired hunters within the Chinese province of Sichuan in 1869 to gather interesting specimens. They returned with a dull body of an unidentified animal, possibly the panda. David skinned it and shipped the pelt to Paris to be identified by experts. But scientists wouldn’t confirm it was authentic.
In 1929, the determined Roosevelt siblings began an expedition to finally find this elusive bear, more legend than fact, within the inhospitable bamboo forests of the Tibetan Plateau within the high Himalayas. The brothers were accompanied by naturalists, trackers, guides, interpreters and scientists, and funded by Chicago’s Field Museum and a wealthy donor.
The Roosevelts were unprepared for what they faced: treacherous glacier crossings of the Himalayas, raiders able to attack travelers, and air so thin that it was easy to die of oxygen deprivation. But they were driven by their ambitions to search out a beast within the clouds that was considered essentially the most difficult trophy on earth.
The trail that crossed China and Tibet was desolate and forbidding with its intense wind, snow and ice, writes Holt. Indeed, there was “no tent strong enough” to resist the mountain squalls, and no fire hot enough to warm the explorers.
“These were the Roosevelts. They bore an air of invulnerability that had carried your entire group forward into this treacherous environment,” writes Holt — even when passing through a region called the Valley of Death, situated in what’s today the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, that was said to be filled with evil spirits that haunted people while they slept — never to awaken.
In the course of the trek, forest partitions closed in on all sides, and the extremely high mountain elevation made it difficult to breathe. There have been bandits — including a “band of eight hundred Tibetan marauders” — who roamed the rugged terrain.
One night, their team of mules mysteriously disappeared and starvation became a stark possibility with few provisions left beyond dried green peas and rice. A Tibetan lamasery provided nourishment before the crew moved on in blizzard-like storms.
While the elusive panda remained little greater than a fantasy, the scientists captured birds, broke their necks and skinned them. Capturing as many specimens as they might for natural history museums, a whole family of nine golden snub-nosed monkeys — the last of their kind — was killed within the name of science.
After rugged days and nights, the expedition was finally on the panda’s trail when reports of a white bear sighting got here from a close-by village. The natives considered this beast a “supernatural being, a kind of demi-god,” writes Holt. The villagers never tried to capture it and only agreed to take the white hunters in quest of it — for money.
At the bottom of a tree trunk, panda scat was discovered with bamboo in it, known to be the day by day weight-reduction plan of the panda, together with its coarse white hair.
A trail of paw prints within the snow and half-munched bamboo quickly led them to their ultimate goal. He was shot and killed on sight — a panda!
“For the explorers, it felt like the top,” writes Holt. “Within the five months of their expedition, the party had collected five thousand bird skins, two thousand small mammals, and forty big mammals,” but not the nice bear.
“It was only here, at the top, that the brothers realized that they had been flawed and the panda wasn’t the wild, bellicose predator that they had expected,” writes Holt. The gentleness of “the panda had permanently altered their sense of purpose — and immediately following the panda hunt they were struck by illness.”
A cut on Ted’s leg became infected with bacteria spreading up his torso. News coming in revealed that Kermit’s shipping business was headed to bankruptcy, and he needed to return to Latest York. As soon as Kermit left, Ted felt himself emotionally and physically unraveling, in keeping with Holt.
“His body ached from months of sleeping on the bottom, repeated illness, and hard climbing,” Holt writes.
“Together we had shivered within the bitter winter cold of the high mountains and sweltered within the damp heat of the semi-tropics. Together we had passed through troubles starting from lost mules to bandits. Now most likely we might never meet again,” Ted later wrote.
He got here down with malaria and was admitted to a Saigon hospital where doctors found he had dysentery, attributable to bacteria or parasites.
The 2 brothers had at all times trusted each and now they were separated and barely speaking.
Kermit’s company was bleeding money and, worse, he had turn out to be an alcoholic. Along with his marriage unravelling, he began having affairs. In June 1943, he placed a revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger.
Ted lived a yr longer.
They’d woke up a pandamonium with pandas now being hunted for excessive sums becoming one in all the rarest mammals on earth.
“A dark shadow had fallen across their lives the moment the brothers had concurrently pulled their triggers,” writes the creator.
“The panda hunt had without end altered his life,” writes Holt, they usually had woke up a “panda-monium” with pandas now being hunted for excessive sums becoming one in all the rarest mammals on earth.
