The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (128 page)

According to Howard, the president, with a fiercely playful gleam in his eyes, barely acknowledged Bryan’s smug compliment. Instead, he looked over Bryan’s shoulder and waved to Merriam. “I am pleased,” Roosevelt muttered to Bryan perfunctorily, and then quickly pivoted toward Merriam, as if dismissing the Democratic Party’s contender to succeed him in 1908. “How are you, Hart?” Roosevelt greeted Merriam with pointed warmth. “What do you suppose John [Burroughs] and I saw on the twenty-fifth of March at Pine Knot? A yellow warbler, by George!” Roosevelt then turned to Howard. “Hello, Doctor!” the president said, “How are the bugs?”
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As Roosevelt moved off into the crowd, away from Bryan, Howard looked back to see Bryan, still rooted in place, realizing that the president had just gotten the better of him. Howard’s anecdote revealed two things about Roosevelt: his allegiance to the naturalist community and his contempt of Bryan.

To the president, increased interstate cooperation on behalf of conservationism was a stark necessity. If, for example, Missourians dumped sewage in the Mississippi River, then it would travel downstream, adversely affecting citizens in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Garbage didn’t respect state lines. Likewise, it would do no good to save some white pelicans at Stump Lake, North Dakota, only to let them be slaughtered while they were roosting in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. Migration made state game laws pointless. “One of the most useful among the many useful recommendations in the admirable Declaration of the Governors relates to the creation of state commissions on the conservation of resources to cooperate with a federal commission,” Roosevelt wrote to one friend. “This action of the Governors cannot be disregarded. It is obviously the duty of the Federal Government to accept this invitation to cooperate with the states in order to conserve the natural resources of our whole country.”
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A cloth-bound three-volume report of the National Conservation Commission would be made available to the public in January 1909. As an accommodating gesture, Congress would receive an advance copy in December. Roosevelt believed that the publication of the findings would be a historical landmark of his administration, and a turning point in conservation history (though in truth it never acquired any true cogency). He
glowed in the aftermath of the conference. “The grounds are too lovely for anything, and spring is here, or rather early summer, in full force,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Archie on May 17. “Mother’s flower-gardens are now as beautiful as possible, and the iron railings of the fences south of them are covered with clematis and roses in bloom. The trees are in full foliage and the grass brilliant green, and my friends, the warblers, are trooping to the north in full force.”
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When Roosevelt was at Pine Knot with Burroughs, he had reported to Chapman that their trip was a feast of bird-watching worthy of Audubon. His cabin sat smack in the middle of a mecca of Virginia bird-watching, where every streak and eye mark could potentially signify a new species. Unbelievably rare birds could be seen—his passenger pigeons were a case in point. Eagerly, Roosevelt listed for Chapman the various gnatcatchers and summer redbirds they’d seen. Burroughs and Roosevelt had used Chapman’s accessible guide,
Birds of the Eastern United States
, and had spent hours analyzing the noted ornithologist’s various disquisitions. “When I see you again I am going to point out one or two minor matters in connection with the song of the Bewick’s wren and the looks of the blue grosbeak, where we were a little puzzled by your accounts,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman on May 10. “I suppose that there is a good deal of individual variation among the birds themselves as well as among the observers.”
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Chapman was gratified to receive a letter from the White House detailing Roosevelt and Burroughs’s adventures at Pine Knot. But he couldn’t help feeling that Roosevelt was questioning the veracity of his ornithology with respect to the grosbeaks. He was already unusually defensive, partly because in early 1908 a Biological Survey report on grosbeaks had deviated from some of his published ornithological observations of the species.
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Chapman had taken a series of photographs of blue grosbeaks, showing their resplendent blue plumage and the pale gray bill and black and chestnut wing bars. He had also taken photos of female blue grosbeaks, with their brown body and pale beige breast. He volunteered to come to Oyster Bay and put on a slide show for Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Sagamore Hill still had no electricity and no suitable screening room—Roosevelt wanted it to feel rustic—but he invited Chapman to visit the White House in August. Because Roosevelt was planning an African trip for March 1909, he wanted advice on photography from the author of
Birds with a Camera
for Kermit. Perhaps sensing Chapman’s distress, Roosevelt took pains in his reply to put the ornithologist at ease.

“As regards the blue grosbeak, your description of the habits was exactly borne out by the conduct of the individuals we saw,” Roosevelt
wrote on June 7. “They did not behave at all like indigo buntings or rose-breasted grosbeaks, but stayed by preference along the bushy sides of a ditch in the middle of an open pasture, frequently going out into the open grass. Both males and females would sit solemnly on the tops of some thin stalk or small twig a couple of feet high beside the ditch. The Bewick’s wrens were very tame and confiding. To our ears not only their song but their subdued conversational chirping had a marked ventriloqual effect; seeming to be much further away than it was. It had no resemblance to the song of the house wren, and none whatever to the Carolina wren. I do not understand the principles upon which the sparrows are genetically divided. The swamp sparrow to me in color scheme and even in voice to be more like a spizella than a zonotrichia.”
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V

That Roosevelt continued to make birds his hobby in 1908 is indisputable. They were the reason why he had no patience with symphonies or operas. For Roosevelt, warblers were harmonicas, the doves flutes, the jays clarinets, and certain combinations string quartets. There was a feeling among many of the U.S. governors, in fact, that the president was more enthusiastic about birds than about the Constitution, limited government, private property, or corporations. Many business interests interpreted Roosevelt’s national forests, federal bird reservations, buffalo parks, and national monuments as yet another unneeded expansion of his already huge federal regulatory blanket, smothering land development and entrepreneurship. Roosevelt’s real object with these monuments, these critics claimed, was to broaden executive power by sabotaging checks and balances. In the Arizona Territory, for instance, not only had he turned some 800,000 acres of private land into the Grand Canyon National Monument by presidential fiat, but he had also dispatched armed former Rough Riders to oversee it. Also, Alexander Brodie, Arizona’s governor from 1902 to 1905, was one of Roosevelt’s former lieutenant colonels and had been appointed by Roosevelt. (Three territorial governors appointed by Roosevelt, in fact, had served with him in the Cuban campaign.) After stepping down from the governorship in 1905, Brodie had joined the War Department at Roosevelt’s request.

Over the decades confusion has reigned over a group of nine former Rough Riders who joined the Arizona Rangers. They weren’t employed by either the Department of the Interior or the U.S. Army; they were troubleshooters for Roosevelt in Arizona. These men drifted around like a Secret Service outfit within the Texas Rangers, ferreting out informa
tion about illegal mining in the Kaibab National Forest and about vandals at Montezuma Castle near Sedona. The Arizona Rangers were known to have direct access to Roosevelt through Governor Brodie, and they were determined to quash illegal activities in the territory. Operating with little publicity, tough as nails, they brought a conservationist ethos to Arizona because Roosevelt wanted them to. Some of these men were the ones who had given Roosevelt Remington’s
Bronco Buster
bronze as a departing gift in Montauk, Long Island, in 1898. When T.R. declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, it was great for him to have the Arizona Rangers (not to be confused with park rangers) on his side.
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On June 23, 1908, as if rubbing salt into the wounds of westerners opposed to the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt designated thousands of acres of the Grand Canyon as a game preserve. Not a single oil well, ore mine, or asbestos vein was permitted. The Executive Order was clear. As the critics put it, Roosevelt’s idea of commercial activity in the territories involved tens of thousands of deer and elk frolicking about, so that future members of the Boone and Crockett Club could shoot them. This criticism was patently unfair. Without the Roosevelt Dam along the Salt River, settlements never could have prospered in Arizona’s central valleys. It was an engineering wonder, rising 220 feet out of a canyon gorge. Phoenix grew into a metropolis because of Roosevelt’s large-scale irrigation projects. And Roosevelt had encouraged copper-mining towns like Jerome, Globe, and Bisbee to prosper. As for deer and elk, Arizona needed to think of them as game resources, which enriched human civilization in numerous ways.

The National Governors’ Conference had bolstered Roosevelt’s resolve to create new forest and game reserves and enlarge old ones. Roosevelt had taken the tone of the governors and, in general, liked what he had heard. Taken as a whole they seemed to understand that conservation of natural resources was
the
issue of the era. For every grumbler like Governor Norris, there were three other governors who supported increased federal forestlands. The philosopher Edmund Burke once wrote about the “wisdom of ancestors.” The activists at the governors’ conference deserved this accolade. They articulated a visionary conservationist agenda for America in the twentieth century. At least the issues of forestry were no longer hidden from public view. At Pine Knot, a worried Burroughs had told Roosevelt that Taft, whom Roosevelt had chosen as his successor, was too “weak” to sustain such Roosevelt innovations as the wildlife refuge system. According to Burroughs, Roosevelt dismissed his warnings at the time. He had made the choice because he believed that Taft,
then his secretary of war, would faithfully uphold Rooseveltian values, and he was confident that he had chosen wisely.
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But Roosevelt wasn’t leaving anything to chance. While America was consumed with the election of 1908—Taft versus Bryan—that June the president prepared a massive preservationist initiative, scheduled for announcement on July 1. The forestry movement would be forced down his opponents’ throats. Even more than his own birthday, Roosevelt loved the first of July. On that day in 1898, he had won glory in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Santiago, Cuba, leading the two famous charges against the Spanish army. Roosevelt had led the first charge, up Kettle Hill (on horseback). The second and more famous of the two, up San Juan Hill proper, he had led on foot. It was his “crowded hour,” as he famously phrased it. In addition, other important historical events that resonated with Roosevelt had happened on July 1. In 1858, the year he was born, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had offered joint papers on evolution to the Linnaean Society on July 1; these had been a thunderclap of scientific progress whose reverberations can still be felt. As every American schoolchild of Roosevelt’s generation knew, July 1, 1873, was when the Battle of Gettysburg began, with the Union and Confederate forces colliding as Robert E. Lee desperately consolidated his forces.

So on July 1, 1908, in the last full year of his presidency, Roosevelt began a grand expansion of federal forestlands that was stunning in both its scale and its breadth of vision. It was Roosevelt’s presidential “crowded hour.” Forty-five new national forests—scattered throughout eleven western states—were declared that day. New boundaries were also created for existing forests. All day long, Roosevelt signed documents creating or recognizing national forests. A total of ninety-three federal forest sites were effected within a twenty-four-hour period. Innovative protocols for range management, wildfire control, land planning, recreation, hydrology, and soil science were introduced throughout the American West. Because of Roosevelt’s “crowded hour,” much of the Rocky Mountains region, as well as the Pacific Northwest, would no longer be vulnerable to the lumberman’s ax (although, of course, forest fires would remain a serious threat).

Undoubtedly, the “Crowded Hour Reserves” had been under consideration by the Forest Service since 1905. Pinchot had worked intensely with the GLO, state agencies, business interests, and governors to iron out the legalities. Many of the new national forests bore well-known Indian names: Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho, Cheyenne National Forest in Wyoming, Uncompahgre National Forest in Colorado, and Sioux National
Forest in Montana and South Dakota, among others. A few were named to honor great Anglo-Americans who had contributed to the opening of the West, including Lewis and Clark, Madison, Jefferson, and Custer in Montana; Powell in Utah; and Pike in Colorado. Other “Crowded Hour Forests” took the names of nearby cities: for example, Santa Barbara in California and Boise in Idaho. The new Columbia National Forest in Washington state near the Mount Saint Helens volcano—home to bald eagles, bull trout, chinook salmon, grizzly bears, northern spotted owls, gray wolves, and marbled murrelets, among other species—should have been granted national park status; it was certainly spectacular enough. But at least in 1949 it did become the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

Roosevelt also announced on July 1 the creation of Kaibab National Forest (in what he called the Buckskin Mountains), home to high-altitude flora, mountain lions, and scores of mouse subspecies.
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This was another of Merriam’s special patches of wild Arizona. It was a geographical area beloved by both the Biological Survey and the Boone and Crockett Club. And now, after years of contention, it would be preserved as a national forest. A Texas character, Uncle Jim Owens, who had grown up on the Goodnight Ranch, was tapped to oversee the wildlife protection efforts in the national forestlands around the Grand Canyon. Uncle Jim Owens was a passionate supporter of the American Bison Society, working tirelessly to bring bison back to the West. “He was keenly interested not only in the preservation of the forests,” Roosevelt noted, “but in the preservation of the game.”
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