The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (125 page)

For those Arizonans displaced by the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt could muster little sympathy. He saw only their greed or simplicity, and he firmly believed that when archaic land claims from the mid-nineteenth century clashed with the moral imperatives of the progressive era, morality must win out. Beyond that, however, this was a struggle between personal profit and the public good. The country’s future depended on the outcome. So he took a stand. The resources of the Arizona Territory belonged not to local residents only, but to all Americans. Arizonans would have to shake off ignorance and accept that the Grand Canyon was a national treasure. His former Rough Riders who lived in the territory had already done so.

When Benjamin Harrison was a U.S. senator, after Reconstruction, he had introduced legislation in 1882, 1883, and 1886 to preserve the Grand Canyon as a “public park.” The bills had all perished in committee. When he became president, he used his new executive powers to create the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve. But Harrison’s legislation had allowed entrepreneurs to construct commercial monstrosities on the rim, and these
had cheapened the canyon’s appeal. With hotels now appearing along the rims, and tourists arriving in unprecedented numbers by both road and rail, Roosevelt maintained no illusions that the Grand Canyon would remain completely “unmarred,” as he had called for in 1903. However, Roosevelt insisted that the north rim stay exactly as it had been when Spanish explorers first encountered it in the early sixteenth century. He believed that by repeatedly refusing to declare the Grand Canyon a national park, Congress had thrust the responsibility for protecting it on his shoulders. This time, he wouldn’t give Congress a chance to stop him.
Somebody
had to change the old land-use ways for the new progressive ethos. As Mark Twain once quipped, Roosevelt may have been a “spotless” character, but he was always ready to “kick the Constitution into the back yard.”
¹⁷

Weighing the options presented to him by the Department of the Interior, Roosevelt decided to again implement the Antiquities Act of 1906, using it to confer national monument status on the Grand Canyon on January 11, 1908. In the following decades, Arizonan libertarians would claim (accurately) that the Antiquities Act had been intended only to preserve scientifically valuable sites of 5,000 acres or less, and that Roosevelt’s edict was an abuse of executive power. But regardless of the legality of Roosevelt’s maneuver, the Grand Canyon—the great American temple of nature—would never again return to private hands. From 1908 to 1918, even as the land-use status of the new national monument was hotly debated in both Arizona and Washington, D.C., the increasing tourist appeal of the Grand Canyon made its reprivatization politically unfeasible. The Grand Canyon finally became a national park by an act of Congress on February 26, 1919. The now legendary announcement came just a month after Roosevelt’s death. Furthermore, in 1975 President Gerald Ford passed the Grand Canyon Enlargement Act, placing the entire Colorado River corridor under the management of the National Park Service.
¹⁸
In 1990, the area between Bright Angel Point and Cape Royal was renamed Roosevelt Point to honor the twenty-sixth president.
¹⁹
And tourists come by the millions to experience what is now a World Heritage Site, just as Roosevelt predicted during his presidency. “To none of the sons of men,” Roosevelt wrote of his new national monument, “is it given to tell of the wonder and splendor of sunrise and sunset in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.”
²⁰

Not that Roosevelt was anxious about how his preservation of the Grand Canyon would be evaluated in history books. Certitude was his greatest political strength. In fact, on the same afternoon that he declared
the Grand Canyon a national monument, he began threatening to do the same with large parts of the Appalachian and White Mountains, an action certain to cause tremendous resistance by congressmen from Maine to Georgia. One notable exception was Governor Robert Glenn of North Carolina, who committed himself politically to Roosevelt’s conservationist crusade, hoping that the Great Smoky Mountains would emerge as a national monument.
²¹
For his part, Roosevelt intended to take the Antiquities Act to its limit not just in the West, but everywhere in America. He envisioned the act as a federal hand with numberless fingers. It was obvious that his last fifteen months in office were going to be filled with conservationist action.

And as of January 11, 1908 (“Grand Canyon Day”), it was also clear that no parcel of wilderness—private, public, or other—was immune from potential seizure by the federal government. Roosevelt’s preservationist initiatives would be as simple as they were decisive. Orthodoxy was being shattered, and many more projects were in the works. With no worries about reelection in 1908, Roosevelt was ready to take on “the American goliath” (which he later defined as a vicious plutocracy, with morals of “glorified pawnbrokers,” that owned both political parties along with “ninety-nine percent at the very least of the corporate wealth of the country, and therefore the great majority of the newspapers”).
²²

II

Roosevelt, in fact, wasted little time in pressing the Antiquities Act into service yet again in California in early 1908. Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan, had previously written to Roosevelt about the Pinnacles, a fantastic landscape of jutting rocks and volcanic formations near Soledad, California. The spires and crags of the Pinnacles were awe-inspiring. Jordan was a leading eugenicist and ichthyologist, whose
Guide to the Study of Fishes
sat prominently on one of Roosevelt’s bookshelves at Sagamore Hill. The inspiration for this book had been Robert B. Roosevelt. No fewer than 1,000 genera and 2,500 species of American fish were named after Jordan. A founding member of the Sierra Club, he was a devotee of Darwin and Huxley’s biology, and he developed his own laws of biogeography. Fascinated by the adaptability of species, in 1907 Jordan had cowritten
Evolution and Animal Life
, which President Roosevelt found illuminating.
²³
If Jordan—an expert on organic Evolution—believed that the Pinnacles were worth saving, then Roosevelt needed no other authority. He could now wave his wand—the Antiquities Act—and immediately guarantee federal protection to whatever Jordan wanted.

On January 16, 1908, Roosevelt turned these 2,500 acres of grandeur into Pinnacles National Monument, on Jordan’s recommendation. (By 2009 the site had been expanded to more than 26,000 acres.) Only superlatives can describe the Pinnacles ecosystem. Oddly, the Pinnacles had more types of bees—400 species—than anywhere else known to entomologists. There were also 149 species of birds, forty-nine of mammals, twenty-two of reptiles, eight of amphibians, sixty-nine of butterflies, and forty of dragonflies and damselflies. And there were also precipitous bluffs, talus caves, crags of volcanic rock, and little canyon hideaways where the lizards seemed almost as ancient as the brontosaurus. The clincher, to Roosevelt, was that
The Condor
(a periodical) reported California condors using the Pinnacles as a primary roosting site. And the red rock formations, courtesy of an extinct volcano, were more than 23 million years old. If that didn’t constitute antiquities, what did? As Jordan boasted, the Coast Range chaparral (the finest examples in the national park system) and the riparian, xeric, and foothill woodlands were ideal for getting away from the cityscapes of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. One of the prettiest sites in the natural world was in the Pinnacles: the acmon blue butterflies, in spring, congregating on coyote brush flowers. And saving all this was as easy as signing a declaration!

Holed up in the White House because of snowstorms and freezing weather, Roosevelt began methodically marking on a map of the United States sites he wanted preserved by the federal government before he left office on March 3, 1909. His desks at the White House and at Sagamore Hill were crossroads for plans to rehabilitate species. From a political standpoint, the Antiquities Act was a revelation, freeing the Department of the Interior from having to squabble with Congress. Much like federal bird reservations for the USDA, national monuments soon became an idée fixe at Interior. Even more significantly, bureaucrats and politicians alike were beginning to see national monuments as a way station to national park status. And even Pinchot, chief of the Forest Service, wanted his reserves studied for Indian artifacts. “The importance of taking steps to preserve such objects has become very apparent,” Pinchot wrote to his on-site employees, “and as soon as possible I wish you to report specifically upon each ruin or natural object of curiosity in your reserve, recommending for permanent reservation all that will continue to contribute to popular, historic, or scientific interest.”
²⁴

Roosevelt was temperamentally well suited to conflict and acrimony, and his presidency had already had more than its share of both. By February 1908, he had made an impressive number of political and corporate
enemies, including Standard Oil Company, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the E. H. Harriman conglomerate, and J. P. Morgan, among many others. But as the biographer Ron Chernow wrote in
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.,
Roosevelt had “no more potent ally than the press,” in his corner.25 And the clashes of Roosevelt versus the titans made good copy. The corporations of the gilded age spent millions of dollars on advertising, trying to smear Roosevelt’s reputation, cripple him politically, and exhaust him personally. They had failed on every count. Each swipe had the reverse effect—bolstering Roosevelt’s obstinacy. He licked them at their own game. Although he had never been solicitous of the opinions of his political antagonists, by February 1908 Roosevelt had lost all patience for anti-forestry. He now saw his enemies as Dickensian villains, full of “bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth.”
²⁶

America’s corporate leaders (and their army of bosom chums) were not the only unfortunates on the receiving end of Roosevelt’s wrath. When he had established Wind Cave National Park in 1902, a clamor had arisen for him to do the same with Jewel Cave, 143 miles of unmapped underground passageways in the Black Hills just west of Custer. Even though it was the second largest cave in the world, this labyrinth hadn’t been discovered until 1900, when a couple of small-time prospectors, the brothers Frank and Albert Michaud, had felt a blast of chilly air emanating from a rock crevice in Hell Canyon one warm summer afternoon. It was a good place to protect the carcasses of slaughtered cattle from rotting in the heat. But just maybe there was gold beneath where they stood!

Excited by their find, the Michauds purchased dynamite in Rapid City, South Dakota, blasted a big opening, and then crawled into a cavernous room aglow with calcite crystal. Much to their chagrin, there was no gold to be found. But there were numerous caverns filled with stunning, gemlike calcite crystals, which caught the light from their lanterns and returned it in varied patterns and colors. The brothers rushed to procure a mining claim for Jewel Tunnel Lode, as they named the site, and began advertising it as a tourist attraction. They even used the caves to hold a number of dances for local couples—the crystalline walls were a natural forerunner of the disco ball. A few geologists who studied the site determined that the passageways were part of an extinct geyser channel.
*
²⁷

The Roosevelt administration soon got involved, using the almost unlimited power of the executive branch to establish national monuments for the permanent preservation of places deemed to have historic and scientific interest. Certainly Jewel Cave met this criterion. In 1907, he authorized Harry Neel and C. W. Fitzgerald to survey Jewel Cave. Roosevelt imagined the underground site to be part of a larger preservation initiative in the Deadwood and Rapid City area, which would include the Badlands, Devils Tower, Wind Cave, and the Black Hills National Forest. Neel and Fitzgerald’s report recommended that Jewel Cave be declared a national monument—despite the mining claim of the Michaud brothers.
²⁸
Like Wind Cave, this new find was situated in the Pahasapa limestone rock layer of the Black Hills, and the federal government wanted to study its geological history.
²⁹

When Roosevelt established Jewel Cave National Monument on February 7, 1908—his thirteenth designation thus far under the Antiquities Act—he knew there could potentially be decades of legal problems.
³⁰
But Roosevelt was apparently untroubled by the possible consequences. There was no restraining him. As far as he was concerned, the 1,280-acre Jewel Cave Monument was a national treasure. If only the Michauds weren’t such self-interested money-grubbers, they would have understood that such a unique natural wonder belonged to
all
Americans. Furthermore, the Michauds had to stop making additional openings to Jewel Cave, because they were desecrating the site. This was tough medicine for a couple of presumably lucky prospectors, who thought they had stumbled on a fortune. But as Roosevelt saw it, if soldiers gave their lives for the democracy, surely land could be deeded to the federal government for the sake of science. With federal lawyers breathing down their necks, the Michaud brothers sold their claim to the U.S. government for $500.
³¹

To Roosevelt’s way of thinking, the notion that a little knot of men in the Black Hills saw Jewel Cave as a source of profit was depressing to contemplate. The labyrinth of chambers and tunnels belonged to the U.S. government: end of story. Conservation was, above all else, a moral issue to Roosevelt—a cause he believed he shared most intimately with men like John Muir and Seth Bullock, who were uninfected by the greed of New York and Chicago. By contrast, the South Dakota miners seemed to Roosevelt rather like lowly English sparrows—deemed a pestilential invasive species by the Biological Survey and thus deserving neither understanding nor accommodation.
³²
Well, if sparrows they were, then the president would deal with the Michauds, and all those like them, in his typically expedient fashion. “Is there any kind of air gun which you would
recommend which I could use for killing English sparrows around my Long Island place?” Roosevelt wrote to Dr. C. Hart Merriam. “I would like to do as little damage as possible to our [other] birds, and so I suppose the less noise I make the better.”
³³