The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (122 page)

Roosevelt himself never became engaged in these drainage schemes, but his Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot did. Pinchot considered draining the Everglades by planting Australian melaleuca trees a noble idea. When John Gifford quit
Conservation
, his replacement, Thomas Will, was even more of an advocate for drainage. As a former president of Kansas State Agricultural College, Will envisioned citrus groves and housing developments instead of little blue herons and alligators. With the apparent approval of Roosevelt’s Forestry Service, Will offered his visions to the Florida Everglades Homebuilders Association, the Everglades Farming Association, and the South Florida Development League. Aiding Will’s boosterism was a legendary promoter of development in Florida: Napoleon Broward. A huge fan of Roosevelt’s, Broward was opposed to railroads, corporations, and Flagler’s populism. He claimed to be a Rooseveltian conservationist, but he favored only reclamation. And although he was a dedicated outdoorsman, he nevertheless led the campaign to drain the Everglades with considerable audacity. His conservationist rationale was that the wildlife could live
around
the newly drained Everglades communities. Broward thought of himself as standing up for the “little folks.” He believed that Flagler and other rich railroad men were “draining the people” from Florida, “instead of the swamp.” Roosevelt’s fingerprints aren’t found on any of the documents in this episode, but he clearly sided with Broward in the hope that south Florida could be made “fit for cultivation.”

A generation of Florida environmentalists never forgave Roosevelt for embracing the Gifford, Will, and Broward’s drainage scheme. They pointed out that Florida had plenty of land available for settlement without destroying the Everglades ecosystem. In
The Swamp
, Grunwald inventoried anti-drainage comments that became widespread in Florida: “a wildcat scheme,” “a sinful waste,” “nonsensical,” and so on. Roosevelt ignored such complaints, unconcerned that a big project (on the scale
of the Panama Canal) in the Everglades might bankrupt the state, and that its effect on nature would be devastating. Because Broward was an ambitious reformer—opposed to child labor, opposed to the millinery industry, in favor of road expansion, and a committed educational activist—the Roosevelt administration approved of Florida’s building four canals in the Everglades. In 1908, the same year Roosevelt saved Mosquito Inlet, Tortugas Keys, Key West, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, Palma Sola, and Island Bay Federal Bird Reservations in Florida, he named Napoleon Broward president of the National Drainage Congress.

Perhaps President Roosevelt supported the idea of draining the Everglades simply for reasons of political expediency. After all, Broward was a Rooseveltian reformer. The president had enough problems in the South without squaring off against Broward. And keep this in mind: even though Roosevelt approved twenty-four federal irrigation-drainage projects as president, not one was in Florida. After the Newlands Act of 1902, all his projects were in the West.
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Roosevelt, however, never approved a major project for draining the Everglades, and the plan never got off the ground. What’s curious about his implicit support of the idea, however, is that he simultaneously embraced the opposite logic with regard to the Panhandle and central Florida. There, Roosevelt created large national forests instead of approving drainage projects. Federal bird reservations were usually not more than five to 100 acres in area (there were exceptions, though) because they were confined to isolated islands and swamps. But the national forests sprawled over whole counties. On November 24, 1908, Roosevelt created the Ocala National Forest in central Florida. Pelican Island was only 55 acres; Ocala covered 607 square miles. It ran nearly from the Atlantic to the Gulf. According to Frank M. Chapman, who knew the area inside-out, the name “Ocala” came from the Timucuan Indians and meant “big hammock.” This region was where Chapman had cut his teeth as an ornithologist in the 1870s. The Ocala ecosystem was like a recharge battery for the entire Floridan aquifer. The new national forest contained more than 600 natural lakes and ponds. The management of Ocala National Forest was similar to that of the forests of the west,
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but Roosevelt wanted the waterways to remain pristine, with no urban pollution.

Today Florida treasures the Ocala National Forest. Situated between Marineland on the Atlantic and Silver Springs in the interior, it attracts tourists because of its renowned mirrorlike waters and their cypress trees, bending ferns, and water lilies. It’s the premier home of the Flor
ida black bear (
Ursus americanus floridanus
). For Americans seeking “wild Florida,” camping at Ocala in places such as Doe Lake and Big Bass Lake has become a must. Ocala is about as close to the wild Florida of the days of Ponce de Leon as one can comfortably get without heading into the deepest recesses of the Everglades.

Three days after the Ocala National Forest was created, Roosevelt created another national forest, in the Panhandle. Established on November 27, 1908, the Choctawhatchee National Forest was a flatland full of longleaf and pine trees. It looked almost like a tree nursery or an arboretum. Turpentine workers and small-time fisherfolk lived in the Choctawhatchee—the Roosevelt administration didn’t mind them. Cattlemen were another story. They were burning down the pinelands to create grazing areas—a practice T.R. deemed reprehensible. American and European tourists were heading to Miami and Palm Beach in droves, and many people thought the Panhandle worthless. But Florida was a big state with over 1,200 miles of tidal shoreline.
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Just going from Key West to Pensacola—near where the Choctawhatchee National Forest was formed—was a 1,000-mile journey. If Ditmars had spent a day there, he’d have given up counting reptiles; the number of lizards and tree frogs were in the millions. While south Florida was becoming a center for land-promotion schemes and nightclubs, the Panhandle, still fairly rural in 1908, was considered Florida’s best-kept secret. An outdoorsman could collect specimens in the Panhandle waterways and pinelands without many distractions.

Because the South was anti–federal government, the mere fact that the Roosevelt administration had created the Choctawhatchee National Forest there was notable. The forest reserve had about 467,000 acres and was situated on the extreme western arm of Florida and Choctawhatchee Bay, Santa Rosa Sound, and East Bay. It went from the Gulf of Mexico to about twenty miles into the Panhandle’s interior. The longleaf and pines and the dense undergrowth of blackjack and turkey oak made the forest tract commercially valuable. The Choctawhatchee National Forest was President Roosevelt’s last great conservation initiative in Florida. It wasn’t far from where John Quincy Adams had preserved his tree farm for the U.S. Navy in 1828.

VI

Just eleven days after Pine Island, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 943 (September 26, 1908), creating the Matlacha Pass Federal Bird Reservation. Originally, he protected three teardrop-shaped Matlacha Pass
islands overflowing with mangrove vegetation—red, black, and white. Later, when he visited the area, he commented on the Florida figs and pawpaws.
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There was also a lot of buttonwood. Sea grape grew wild on the Matlacha Pass islands, as did strangler fig and gumbo-limbo. So many unusual plants grew at Matlacha Pass, in fact, that a pharmaceutical company dispatched botanists to Florida looking for possible cures. On any given day a visitor to Matlacha Pass circa 1908 could see birds nesting, eastern indigo snakes hunting for mice, and American crocodiles sunning in mudflats. There were numerous hummingbirds—a species whose metabolism and oxygen consumption always fascinated Roosevelt. (Hummers have been clocked at 200 wing-beats a second.
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) But it was the West Indian manatee of Matlacha Pass that impelled Roosevelt toward bold preservation measures.
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On the same day Matlacha Pass was saved, he created yet another federal bird reservation for seabirds near Sarasota. This was Palma Sola, an island on an isolated lake where plants sprang up and grew at an astonishing rate.

Not far from T.R.’s federal bird reservations at Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, and Palma Sola was Island Bay, an intricate complex of mangrove keys including some that were unnamed. When T.R. signed Executive Order 958 on October 23, 1908, creating Island Bay (including the refuge islands Gallagher Key and Bull Key) as a “preserve and breeding ground for native birds,” he considered it his last one in Florida, the pièce de résistance there.
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Surrounded by brackish waters, the bottom around Island Bay offered fine examples of such rich Florida marine vegetation as widgeon grass and shoal grass. Besides the more commonplace shorebirds, gulls, and terns, the rare little blue herons often congregated on Island Bay. For centuries the Calusa Indians lived on these islets, and for good reason: an abundance of shellfish was available. West Indian manatees also congregated in the warm waters around Island Bay where vegetation was plentiful.
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Fittingly, Roosevelt’s last bird reservation in Florida had the additional value of protecting manatees from human encroachment.

During this period Roosevelt, hoping to guide public opinion, supported William Dutcher’s request to the AOU and—following the lead of Pennsylvania and Delaware—appointed state ornithologists in Florida. A concerted effort was also under way for state Audubon societies to affiliate with the SPCA and other humane organizations. Some states, as a result of Dutcher’s lobbying, outlawed the shooting of birds on Sundays. The AOU chastised Arizona, Hawaii, Oregon, Michigan, and other states with a high concentration of birds for not adopting this prohibition, which gave “absolute rest to bird life for the one day per week.”
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With Roosevelt’s support, Dutcher also wrote to the U.S. Navy, asking it to protect the rookeries of the Philippines, and of the Midway atolls, which were owned by the United States and were a station of the Pacific Cable Company. Roosevelt had already sent U.S. Marines to Midway to protect the albatross, and he was ready to do the same for terns in the Dry Tortugas. “I am informed that the Japanese people have been in the habit of visiting these islands for the purpose of killing birds for their plumage,” Dutcher wrote to T.R.’s secretary of the navy, William Moody, about Midway. “It is known that during the past few years enormous numbers of seabirds have been killed by the Japanese and have been shipped to the Paris, London, and New York markets for millinery ornaments; among these birds were great numbers of a very beautiful form of the tern family known as
Gygis alba
. Our Society is under many obligations to your Department for your hearty cooperation in our work for the preservation of sea-birds, the latest and one of the most notable instances being your order of April 24 [1903]
in re
the birds on the Dry Tortugas, Florida.”
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Once the Dry Tortugas became a federal bird reservation in 1908, Roosevelt personally asked the Secretary of the Navy to make sure that the Tortugas group, including every key and shoal, would never be disturbed. No traps, torpedoes, maneuvers, or mock invasions would be allowed to turn this paradise into an ash heap. Roosevelt wanted the Tortugas group astir with birds flying along the ocean’s edge. A special warden, W. R. Burton, was assigned to Bird Key by AOU. Burton’s job was to report to Dutcher anybody encroaching on the Tortugas bird sanctuaries. Dutcher in turn would report the matter to Roosevelt, who would inform the secretary of the navy. If any U.S. sailors dared touch a sooty tern’s egg or nest, they would be severely punished. Herbert Job went to the naval station at Key West and spoke personally with the coolheaded Commander George Bicknell. Bicknell understood what the president wanted and expressed to AOU the Navy Department’s deep regret that some shortsighted Florida residents seemed “determined to make of their beautiful state a lifelong, treeless desert as fast as they possibly can.”
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Roosevelt scoffed at the notion, expressed by people in Florida’s chambers of commerce, that the White House’s approval of AOU-Audubon wardens in Florida smacked of socialism. Collective action on behalf of “citizen bird” was a good thing, he said. “Every civilized government which contains the least possibility of progress, or in which life would be supportable, is administered on a system of mixed individualism and collectivism and whether we increase or decrease the power of the state,
and limit or enlarge the scope of individual activity, is a matter not for theory at all, but for decision upon grounds of mere practical expediency,” Roosevelt argued. “A paid police department or paid fire department is in itself a manifestation of state socialism. The fact that such departments are absolutely necessary is sufficient to show that we need not be frightened from further experiments by any fear of the danger of collectivism in the abstract.”
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VII

Creating seven federal bird reservations in Florida from February to October 1908 brought Roosevelt unexpected accolades from an up-and-coming political cartoonist: Jay Norwood (“Ding”) Darling. A short résumé of Darling’s life will help us to better understand how Roosevelt influenced a new generation of bird protectionists.

Although Darling was born in Michigan, he grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. As a teenager he often explored the flatlands of Nebraska and South Dakota like a cowlicked Tom Sawyer. He was employed as a cattle herder but had ambitions to earn a college degree. When he went to Yankton College in South Dakota, however, his smart-aleck side got the best of him, and he was kicked out in 1894 after taking the school president Henry Kimball Warren’s horse and buggy on an unauthorized ride. Rebounding, however, was part of Darling’s nature. He developed a fascination for Darwinian biology—an outgrowth of his infatuation with the ecosystems of the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River—and the prowling habits of cougars intrigued him (he and Roosevelt were kindred spirits to Roosevelt in this regard). He learned the Latin taxonomy of the Great Plains creatures, and he enrolled in Beloit College (Wisconsin), where he became the art editor of the yearbook. But he remained mischievous and an incurable class clown, and it didn’t take him long to get suspended for ridiculing faculty members in a series of cartoon strips.
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