The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (124 page)

On behalf of the Oregon Audubon Society, Finley, armed with field notes, photography, and a home movie, journeyed back to Washington, D.C. in 1906 to personally show off the Oregon lake region to Roosevelt at the White House. Roosevelt congratulated Finley on Oregon’s Model Law for birds. Finley inquired about Three Arch Rocks. The conversation went back and forth like that for an entire evening. The two naturalists discussed how to preserve lower Klamath Lake as a breeding ground for native birds. The Klamath basin was a large area of land, which dwarfed Crater Lake. In Florida, Roosevelt was creating federal bird reservations of forty to 200 acres. If Klamath was declared a reservation, it would be something like 80,000 acres. Further complicating the situation was the fact that the Reclamation Service was draining the wetlands for large-scale agricultural farming. Finley told Roosevelt that his Klamath irrigation project—while obviously a well-intended offshoot of the Newlands Act—was turning wetlands into mudflats. “We move to conserve or develop one resource,” Finley complained, “while at the same time, we are destroying another.”
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Roosevelt thought Finley had the right stuff. He was a well-spoken, accomplished young man, rather overly serious, but otherwise with no discernible flaw. He had a wonderful scientifically inclined mind, which appreciated that even maggots had an important role in nature, feeding grackles and nighthawks. Also, Finley could make even a magpie nest sound as interesting as the Taj Mahal. Like Chapman, he was doing a fine job of popularizing birding.
Sunset
magazine—aimed at middle-class families—had published a few of his well-written ornithological pieces. Perhaps knowing that Roosevelt had a soft spot for the American white pelican (Roosevelt had, in fact, saved both Stump Lake and Chase Lake in North Dakota largely for their benefit), and much like Pinchot and La Farge in 1900 regaling Roosevelt with stories about Mount Marcy, Finley
told of rowing in puffs of wind, making treacherous landings, putting up rough campsites, setting up a blind near Rattlesnake Island, and seeing half-grown pelicans and hearing their cries. Combined with the home movies, all this was quite a pitch. What image could have appealed to Roosevelt more than Finley’s colorful remark that these pelicans looked “like a squadron of white war-ships”?
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Bravo! Bully! Wow! Roosevelt loved the whole presentation. Perhaps he had discovered a new American original like the young Audubon. Clearly, Finley wasn’t a fringe ornithologist but a main voice. Once again T.R.’s famous exuberance was called forth by the incredible photographs of young burrowing owls perched on Bohlman’s lap and Finley hand-feeding double-crested cormorants at Tule Lake. There was nothing bland about Finley’s photos. Having already saved, for John Muir, the 14,162-foot Mount Shasta, which was prominent on the horizon in much of the Klamath basin area, Roosevelt wanted to solve the political problems associated with creating a huge federal bird reservation in the middle of his Reclamation Service project. This was seen by Auduboners as Pinchot’s public revenge. Finley, however, took the compromise with a certain grace, as though, having toiled so long to bring attention to the Klamath basin, he felt a distinct relief in having gotten Roosevelt to establish something big for birds.

As if in a great wave of protectionism, Roosevelt rescued more than 37 million waterbirds in Oregon. On August 8, 1908, by means of an “I So Declare It” executive order he created the Klamath Lake Reservation, consisting of 81,619 acres of lakes and marshes. (This would be only the first of six national wildlife refuges set aside in the Klamath basin.
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) He wanted the habitat preserved—particularly the ten- to fifteen-foot-high tule—for the pelicans and grebes. But a serious error had also been made. The entire Klamath basin should have been declared a national park, like Crater Lake or Mesa Verde, and the Reclamation Service should have been booted out of southern Oregon once and for all. However, this didn’t happen. Spurred on by the Klamath Waters Association, the raping, dredging, and draining of the wetlands ecosystem continued. At best, the reclamation project was a product of its time. Although Auduboners
were (and still are) grateful that Roosevelt had helped rescue the white pelicans, cormorants, grebes, and great blue herons, his conservation policy mainly failed in the Klamath basin. It was the worst example of Roosevelt’s trying to reconcile agricultural utilitarianism and waterfowl preservation. But since then, rehabilitation efforts have succeeded.
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“I hope the marsh,” Finley wrote, “will defy civilization to the end.”
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Also, Finley succeeded in getting 81,619 acres of the Klamath basin preserved inside the Bureau of Reclamation’s reservoir. Eventually Roosevelt created many of these “overlay” refuges in the West—seventeen were established on February 25, 1909, alone, by Executive Order 1032. Some environmental historians think that these “overlay” bird reservations within reservoirs were largely a waste of time. Finley, they claim, was hoodwinked by Pinchot and those around Pinchot.

When in 1911 Governor Oswald West of Oregon, a Democrat, selected Finley to become the state’s first Fish and Game Commissioner, Roosevelt celebrated. It was a victory for “citizen bird.” But besides women’s suffrage and prison reform, wildlife protection was one of the issues dearest to West’s heart. With unflinching determination, he insisted on public access to Oregon’s beaches.
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“In Governor West of Oregon, I found a man more intelligently alive to the beauty of nature and of harmless wild life, more eagerly desirous to avoid the wanton and brutal defacement and destruction of wild nature, and more keenly appreciative of how much this natural beauty should mean to civilized mankind, than almost any other man I have ever met holding high political position,” Roosevelt wrote in
Outlook
. “He had put at the head of the commission created to express these feelings in action, a naturalist of note, Mr. Finley.”
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Praise from a former president is always a good thing for a writer. But Finley felt especially blessed when Roosevelt commended West’s environmentalist ethos in rhapsodic terms: “He desired to preserve for all time our natural resources, the woods, the water, the soil, which a selfish and shortsighted greed seeks to exploit in such fashion as to ruin them and thereby to leave our children and our children’s children heirs only to an exhausted and impoverished inheritance; he desired also to preserve, for sheer love of their beauty and interest, the wild creatures of woodland and mountain, of marsh and lake and seacoast.”
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In the years after Roosevelt and Finley’s initial collaboration of 1903 to 1909, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to pay tribute to these conservationists. In 1964, 5,325 acres of the Willamette Valley were saved as the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Here was one of the best spots to see Canada geese, mallards, northern pintails, and great blue
herons. A botanist could study broad-leafed pondweed, water plantain, American slough grass, and Engelmann’s spike rush in the refuge. Anybody who wants to experience the Willamette valley ecosystem before Portland’s sprawl reaches it can today wander around the white oak savanna in all its primordial splendor. And in the the refuge (which is near Corvallis, Oregon), among bottomland ash forest and native prairie, is a herd of Roosevelt elk—a truly fitting tribute to the two naturalists’ work together.

And who had the idea for this refuge? Ding Darling. He was intent on having the Willamette Valley refuge, deep in the foothills of the coast range, named for Finley and populated with Roosevelt elk. The story of Finley and Roosevelt’s collaboration now lives on in the Oregon landscape, thanks to Darling’s foresight. As for Governor Oswald West, there is a spectacular Oregon state park—situated on the Pacific Ocean between Hug Point and Nehalem Bay—named to honor his crusade for public access to beaches and for bird sanctuaries.

The Malheur National Refuge—spanning a forty-mile area in the southeastern corner of Oregon—celebrated its centennial on April 4, 2008, by brewing a micro beer manufactured by Rogue and called Great Egret Pale Ale.
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife had good reason to celebrate. After decades of setbacks in the Klamath, rehabilitation was succeeding. Now tens of thousands of visitors come to the northern Great Basin to watch migratory birds feed in the high desert.

Three Arch Rocks became—even more than Crater Lake—a symbol of Oregon’s pristine beauty. The largest of the surf-pounded mounds was officially named Finley Rock and is home to the largest colony of tufted puffins in the state. Tourists come to view the puffins with binoculars from Oceanside Beach and Cape Meares on the mainland. But no trespassing is allowed at the sanctuary. And from May 1 to September 15 no boats are allowed within 500 feet of the mounds.
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Early on, some critics of Roosevelt’s reservations at Klamath basin said that only a lunatic would have the audacity to declare Oregon’s tule land a breeding grounds for birds. As their argument went, this wasn’t Mount Rainier or Crater Lake but a swamp splotched with bird excrement! Other critics said that Roosevelt’s penchant for bird-watching was warped,
occultism
. Scoffing at such thinking, Roosevelt said that preserving the Pacific coast’s wildlife was democratic in spirit. There was nothing warped about protecting canvasback and white pelicans. In fact, he wanted to protect endangered birds all over American territory, from the eskimo curlews in Alaska to the whooping cranes in Michigan to parrots in
Puerto Rico. That some fellow Americans couldn’t understand the inherent morality of species survival was troubling to Roosevelt. But so what? Before leaving the White House he planned to create even more than the twenty-five bird sanctuaries of 1903 to 1908. It was as if he had found in wildlife protection his autumnal passion. And he had Grover Cleveland’s famous “midnight reserves” to use as a presidential precedent.

I

O
ld John Muir could barely believe the stunning news. On January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an unexpected proclamation designating a wondrous 295-acre strand of coast redwoods (
Sequoia sempervirens
) as the Muir Woods National Monument in northern California.
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It was a magnificent tribute to the self-described “poetico-trampo-geologist.”
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Situated across the Golden Gate Bridge near Mill Valley in Marin County, Muir Woods was an ideal forest to honor the “sage of the Sierras.” The giant trees along Redwood Creek, each casting a hulking shadow on its way skyward, seemed a trenchant retort to the unchecked capitalism of the gilded age. Sunlight filtered down to create a living silence in the forest. This fine uncut coastal redwood strand had been donated to the federal government by William Kent, a wealthy disciple of Muir’s, originally from Chicago, who had purchased it in 1905 for $45,000.
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A businessman, philanthropist, and amateur naturalist (who would later be a congressman from California), Kent couldn’t stomach lumbermen clear-cutting the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais for a “few dirty dollars” and criminally depriving “millions of their birthright.”
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Muir Woods was really something special. Eternity was somehow present in the delicate greenery of the redwood foliage, and the thick fog of the Pacific dripped into the forest offering moisture year-round. In fall, ladybugs swarmed Redwood Creek, and the big-leaf maples turned yellow. During the winter months, steelhead and silver salmon migrated up the creek to spawn. Sweet berries ripened in the springtime meadows, interspersed with a dazzling display of purple and pink wildflowers. In the Bohemian and Cathedral groves, visitors could see sequoias more than 250 feet high and fourteen feet in diameter.
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Many were 2,000 years old or more. Because the rather slender redwoods had little resin, they were insect-resistant. They had survived windthrows, wildfires, and the march of progress. And although the coastal redwood trees were always
the main year-round attraction at Muir Woods, the site wouldn’t have been complete without its stands of Douglas fir, tanbark oak, and bay laurel. On the forest floor, mushrooms often emerged after the frequent rain showers and helped regenerate the soil. For bird-watchers, there were squawking Steller’s jays, melodic thrashers, cawing ravens, and the “zree-zee-zee” of the golden-crowned kinglet. Around every bend there were spontaneous bird sounds piercing the divine silence. It was poetically appropriate that this wonder of biological diversity in California bore Muir’s imprint—a perfect confluence of place and name.

Kent had stipulated that the forest be dedicated to Muir. Already in California, individual sequoias were named after great men: for example, General Grant in General Grant National Park and General Sherman in Sequoia National Park.
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Even burned, hollowed “goose pens” where early pioneers used to hide poultry often had individual names. Although Muir himself was deeply averse to the materialism and filthy lucre of his age, he nevertheless recognized that the national monument bearing his name was a gift only wealth could have bestowed. In California the words “John Muir” had become part of the land. Glaciers advanced and retreated, but Muir—and his woods—would last for the ages. “Saving these woods from the axe & saw, from money-changers & water-changers, & giving them to our country & the world is in many ways the most notable service to God & man I’ve heard of since my forest wanderings began,” Muir wrote to Kent with profound gratitude, “a much needed lesson and blessing to saint & sinner alike. That so fine divine a thing should have come out of money-mad Chicago! Wha wad a’thocht it! Immortal sequoia life to you.”
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Except for naming a large swath of the Catskills the John Burroughs National Monument, little could have made Roosevelt happier than the gift of these California redwoods—one of the greatest accumulations of biomass in the world. Of the original 2 million acres of coastal redwoods in America, more than 80 percent had been logged; the sawmills’ blades had to slow down. But Roosevelt’s satisfaction with Muir Woods was also tinged by envy. Thus far in his illustrious career his only namesake in nature was a rare species of Olympic elk. “I have just received from Secretary Garfield your very generous letter enclosing the gift of Redwood Canyon to the National Government to be kept as a perpetual park for the preservation of the giant redwoods therein and to be named the Muir National Monument,” Roosevelt wrote to Kent. “You have doubtless seen my proclamation of January 9th, instantly creating this monument. I thank you most heartily for this singularly generous and public-spirited
action on your part. All Americans who prize the undamaged and especially those who realize the literally unique value of the groves of giant trees, must feel that you have conferred a great and lasting benefit upon the whole country. I have a very great admiration for John Muir; but after all, my dear sir, this is your gift. No other land than that which you give is included in this tract of nearly 300 acres and I should greatly like to name the monument the Kent Monument if you will permit it.”
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But Kent modestly declined the honor. He considered himself a mere instrument in the whole affair, and insisted that Muir’s name was a much worthier one for these woods. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your message of appreciation, and hope and believe it will strengthen me to go on in an attempt to save more of the precious and vanishing glories of nature for a people too slow of perception,” Kent replied to Roosevelt. “Your kind suggestion of a change of name is not one that I can accept. So many millions of better people have died forgotten, that to stencil one’s own name on a benefaction, seems to carry with it an implication of mandate immortality, as being something purchasable.” As for the Kent family name, he had “five good husky boys” to carry it forward. Should they fail to make something of themselves, Kent concluded, “I am willing it should be forgotten.”
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Attached to Kent’s letter were exquisite photographs of the gargantuan trees at Muir Woods, which led Roosevelt to reflect on his own legacy. His oldest son, Ted, was a few months away from graduating from Harvard University. Like many fathers, the president realized that his brood had suddenly grown up on him. Kermit—little Kermit—was now almost six feet tall. Roosevelt wondered if he’d been as good a father as his own, Theodore Sr., had been. Why hadn’t he taken his boys to see Crater Lake or Key West or Mesa Verde? “Apparently, I have saved up more last year than I ever have before,” Roosevelt wrote to Douglas Robinson the day after establishing Muir Woods, “and I am mighty glad of it, for next year Ted will go out into the big world, and from that time right along the little birds will hop off one after another out of the nest.”
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It saddened him to recall that he had left both Ted and Kermit at home during his sojourn of 1903 to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt now resolved to bring his teenage boys along when he bivouacked in remote parts of Africa, Arizona, or the Amazon.

Except for the pursuit of wealth, one’s legacy is often the strongest motivator for powerful figures. Everybody supposedly had at least one memorable sermon in him, and Roosevelt’s was American conservationism. He had far exceeded any other individual in U.S. history in his efforts
to preserve the natural wonders of the West. But he was also uncomfortably aware that his preservationist accomplishments were geographically scattered and isolated, and that his objectives were still hobbled by a slow-moving legislative process. Roosevelt needed a better weapon against congressional lethargy in matters of conservation, and he found it in federal bird reservations, big game commons, and national monuments (as set forth by the Antiquities Act of 1906).

Accustomed to pushing against limits, Roosevelt was determined to put the theoretical power of the “national monument” as a legislative maneuver to an audacious practical test. He wasn’t going to allow the size of a national monument to be a stumbling block with regard to the Grand Canyon. On January 11, 1908, just two days after the Muir Woods initiative, the president snatched the Grand Canyon from the preservation-versus-development debate by declaring it a national monument. His goal was straightforward: to save the Grand Canyon, unmarred. It was, by any measure, a bold step. Until then Roosevelt, with persistence, had put aside only monuments of limited acreage such as Devils Tower, El Morro, Montezuma Castle, the Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, Lassen Peak, Cinder Cone, and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. And Muir Woods had been a generous gift by Kent to the federal government; who could argue with such beneficence? But the Grand Canyon wasn’t a small site preserved for scientific interest, as stipulated by the Antiquities Act. This was 808,120 acres of mineral-rich land in Arizona, larger than some New England states. The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that “each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon.”
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This may be true, but only Roosevelt could claim, on a return visit to the canyon in 1913, that he was its presidential protector. “The importance of the canyon will likely outlive the parochial American idea of wilderness designation as world heritage site and mass tourism,” the historian Stephen J. Pyne surmised in
How the Canyon Became Grand.
“A place that can hold a score of Yosemite Valleys and in which Niagara Falls would vanish behind a butte, that could absorb the shock of American expansionism and democratic politics, that could transcend a century of intellectual inquiry from Charles Darwin to Jacques Derrida, has not exhausted its capacity to refract whatever light nature or humanity casts toward it provided a suitable overlook exists from which to view it.”
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By 1908, Roosevelt’s characteristic impatience had made it difficult for him to abide by the old rules and wait for legislators to see the light. Most politicians of his day made backroom deals, but the supremely self-confident Roosevelt did most of his political maneuvering in full view of the public. He always welcomed scrutiny. He would just declare some
thing and let the chips fall where they may. And if Congress and Arizonan lawyers were confused about the Grand Canyon’s irreplaceable aesthetic value, he would
make
them see it. If Congress was drowsy, Roosevelt was going to wake it up; if it was operating in the gutter, he was going to teach it to look at the stars. His job as president was to procure the most happiness for the most people. The Grand Canyon was a truth for all time, not to be denied to future generations—a holy spot.

So Roosevelt abandoned noisy ideas and went for a premeditated fait accompli in northern Arizona. Purposely oblivious of the legal obstacles, Roosevelt aimed to evict the Kaibab Cattle Company, for example, from the scenic and scientifically invaluable area. In the nineteenth century, explorers such as Robert Stanton, John Hance, and William W. Bass had promoted the Grand Canyon as a magnet for tourists. As tourism increased, the calls for its becoming a national park did too. But Congress was too scared to move, worried about the reaction from miners and ranchers who were against any alteration that would limit their access to public land.
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As the historian Hal Rothman noted in
Preserving Different Pasts
, designating the Grand Canyon as a national monument allowed Roosevelt to “circumvent the fundamentally languid nature of congressional deliberation and instantaneously achieve results he believed were in the public interest.”
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When the dust cleared, the Grand Canyon was a national monument. More important, Roosevelt had conclusively demonstrated the elasticity—and thus the power—of the Antiquities Act, the new favorite instrument of the conservation movement. As Rothman put it, “no piece of legislation” had ever before (or since) “invested more power in the presidency,” than the Antiquities Act. The elastic clause “objects of historic or scientific interest” made it “an unparalleled tool” for Rooseveltian conservationism.
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The Antiquities Act was to Roosevelt a contraption with which he could dictate land policy in the West, circumventing Congress. Nature may not have proceeded by leaps, but Theodore Roosevelt now did. Roosevelt claimed that those 800,000 acres of Arizona contained prehistoric ruins and hence had scientific value. True, there were ruins in the Grand Canyon, but only very meager ones. There was nothing to match Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, or Montezuma Castle. As for ethnographical research concerning the residents, the Havasupi were a dwindling tribe content with foraging around the Colorado River, as they had done since the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. Yet Roosevelt wasn’t wrong when he claimed this vast part of Arizona had ruins and had Indians. If the ruins were “diminutive by regional standards,” they nevertheless pro
vided a political pretext for Roosevelt to invoke the Antiquities Act and remove the area for special protection within the public domain.
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As ex-president, in
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
, Roosevelt declared all of Arizona and New Mexico an anthropologist’s dreamland.
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The apparent ease with which Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a national monument belied what a long slog it had actually been to save the site. Local opposition to such a huge national park at the Grand Canyon—particularly among corporate cattle, sheep, lumber, and mining outfits—was fierce. Communities surrounding the Grand Canyon, such as Flagstaff, Williams, and Peach Spring, saw the resource-rich proposed parklands as their own. The concept of a “monument,” they believed, was a shenanigan, which the courts would rule unconstitutional. Truth be told, their proprietary claims to parts of the canyon were not groundless. The federal government, after all, had encouraged these Arizona pioneers to displace the Hualapai and Havasupai, and to construct their own wagon roads and stagecoach lines. Over time, they had legally purchased grazing lands, mineral deposits, and spring holes. They had developed an interior network of trails at considerable cost. They had already constructed gateway villages along the approach to the Grand Canyon to welcome tourists. Now Roosevelt, disregarding the wishes of an adjourned Congress, was telling the pioneers to step aside for the Department of the Interior.