The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (40 page)

Before this act, land in the American West was being sold by the U.S. federal government to private enterprises. Nearly a quarter of the Montana Territory, for example, had been deeded or sold to the railroads. But President Harrison’s act put a wrinkle in that habitual practice. Recognizing that Europe’s natural resources were being depleted and its lands deforested and eroded, President Harrison had behaved like a champion for George Perkins Marsh and the Boone and Crockett Club. Working in the administration’s favor was the fact that starting in 1876 the Department of Agriculture had created an activist U.S. Division of Forestry. Meanwhile, at the Department of Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey had formed the Irrigation Survey, in which scientists worked to find solutions to America’s resource management problems. Like Roosevelt, both
government divisions considered themselves enemies of the railroad and mining industries.

Despite the enormous victory, Roosevelt wasn’t satisfied. There were still no laws to properly police these public lands; and he was worried that market hunters, loggers, and miners would not be deterred by “No Trespassing” signs if ignoring them had no consequences—no jail time and no heavy fines. In fact, implementing the Forest Reserve Act wasn’t easy. Congress grappled over the legal specifics until in 1897 it passed the National Forest Management Act (Organic Act), which clarified “the purposes for which the national forests could be created to preserve and protect the trees in a reservation; secure good water conditions; and furnish timber for the use of the American people.”
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Or, put more simply, to make sure every generation of Americans had healthy forests. As the historian Harold K. Steen explained regarding the 1897 provisions, “Not until the 1960s and 1970s would Congress, and the courts, take another look at those purposes.”
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The 1897 provision authorized U.S. presidents to set apart and reserve, whenever they chose, government land wholly or in part covered with timber or underwood growth. This executive branch prerogative, in fact, was used by T.R., who founded the Forest Service in 1905, saving 151 million forested acres between 1901 to 1909 as president, mostly in the West (an increase of forest reserves by 300 percent.) As Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, perceptively noted, “The Boone and Crockett wildlife creed…became national policy when Theodore Roosevelt became president.”
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Of course, Roosevelt was thrilled that cedars along the Pecos River in New Mexico were now protected and that the ponderosa pine around Los Angeles’s San Bernardino Mountains would tower unmarred for decades to come. However, he was most gratified that President Harrison had placed 1.2 million acres of Wyoming forest (an estimated area of 1,936 square miles) adjacent to Yellowstone National Park under federal protection as part of the new Yellowstone National Park Timberland Reserve. This was a crucial component for his idea of a big game preserve to grow properly. Not only did Yellowstone deserve recognition as the first national park, but courtesy of the Harrison administration the Yellowstone National Park Timber Reserve was now also where the national forest system was born. This wasn’t quite the same as the enlargement of the park that Roosevelt had lobbied for, but it nevertheless was a huge victory for the Boone and Crockett Club.

Once Noble had understood how forests protected watersheds, he
never hesitated in his advocacy of the reserve system. “Your associates, Mr. Phillips and Mr. Hague, brought the business to my attention,” Noble wrote to Roosevelt on April 16, 1891, describing how the Forest Reserve Act was consummated. “Having been familiar with the subject, I had no hesitation in immediately advising the President favorably as to the proclamation, and I am glad to see that he has promptly appreciated the situation and acted as he did.”
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V

The early 1890s were the halcyon days of the American conservationist movement. Groups like the American Forestry Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were starting to be heard on Capitol Hill. In 1891, when the first Irrigation Congress met in Salt Lake City, a future senator—Francis G. Newlands of Nevada—stated matter-of-factly that “unless the mountains and the hillsides are kept covered with timber the snows which now practically impound the water and hold it until needed will melt the quicker in summer and thus make artificial storage more expensive.”
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The lobbying efforts of leaders like John Muir, George Grinnell, and Theodore Roosevelt were paying off. Few congressmen—except some in the West—wanted be remembered for contributing to the deforestation of America. Senators George Vest of Missouri (D) and Charles Manderson of Nebraska (R) bravely fought for forest reserves every year and eventually influenced the Senate with their pro-conservationist views. If the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame were on the job, both men would have been inducted long ago,
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as should Noble and Harrison. “The Executive and its representative, the Department of the Interior,” Roosevelt and Grinnell wrote following the act of 1891, “have at all times been most sympathetic and helpful in the movement for forest and game preservation.”
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But the stunning success of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 raises a question: why then? Was it a coincidence that these events followed on the heels of the supposed close of the western frontier? In a historic paper delivered at the Chicago World’s Fair on July 12, 1893—“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”—Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier closed in 1890. Influenced by Roosevelt’s
The Winning of the West
, Turner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, claimed that the United States’ westward expansion had created a new
sort of citizen: the frontier-spirited outdoorsman (e.g., Carson, Bridger, and Pike). On top of that, pointing to census figures on population destiny in the West, he stated that western expansion was now a
fait accompli
.

Many historians consider Roosevelt the “progenitor” of the frontier thesis because on January 24, 1893, more than six months before Turner delivered his paper at the Chicago World’s Fair, Roosevelt had delivered the biennial address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison declaring the Old Northwest the “heart of the country.”
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Turner was sitting in the audience dutifully taking notes. The historian Michael L. Collins noted that at the very least Turner owed a huge debt to Roosevelt.
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Graciously, Roosevelt claimed that Turner had “put into definite shape a good deal of thought which…[had] been floating around rather loosely.” Essentially, an alliance was formed in promoting the frontier hypothesis, with T.R. as the popular oracle and Professor Turner influencing fellow academics. Even though they developed only what the historian Ray Billington deemed a “corresponding” relationship, Turner, in what is widely interpreted as honoring a debt, quoted T.R.’s Wisconsin address in his own 1920 book
The Frontier in American History
.
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Roosevelt and Turner’s frontier thesis was clever. In 1890 settlers were no longer riding Conestoga wagons up the Oregon Trail and trailblazers like Kit Carson were no longer tangling with the Navajo at Canyon de Chelly. Thirty years earlier Abraham Lincoln had called for a transcontinental railroad. By 1890, with Chicago as the main terminus, a web of tracks now ran out of Illinois in every direction from coast to coast. Cities all through the American West, such as Albuquerque, Omaha, Sacramento, Seattle, Tucson, Denver, and Portland, were rapidly growing in population. Although Geronimo was making a little noise in the Arizona Territory, the Native American population had by and large been pacified, and reservations were being set up in dozens of states and territories. Indians had now been relocated to Oklahoma reservations (and other locales), the buffalo were nearly gone, and the Great Plains–Rocky Mountains landscape was being developed and mined. Even the stubborn Mormons of Utah had renounced polygamy in the Woodnuff Manifesto.
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“Literally innumerable short stories and sketches of cowboys, Indians, and soldiers had been, and will be written,” Roosevelt wrote Frederic Remington. “Even if very good they will die like mushrooms, unless they are the very best; but the very best will live and will make the cantos in the last Epic of the Western Wilderness, before it ceased being a wilderness.”
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Now that the “West was won” and the Rocky Mountain wilderness
“ceased to be wild,” Roosevelt and his fellow members of the Boone and Crockett Club saw the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 as the responsible national starting point for creating a sustainable trans–Mississippi River environment from which
all
Americans could benefit.
The Winning of the West
—plus, equally important, his naturalist writings—made clear Roosevelt’s advanced belief in the benefits of timber resource management and regulated hunting and fishing. Shortly after the passage of the act of 1891 Roosevelt and Grinnell cowrote an essay, “Our Forest Reservations,” lambasting “corporate greed” and fretting over the lack of game wardens in the American West. “We now have these forest reservations, refuges where the timber and its wilds denizens should be safe from destruction,” they wrote. “What are we going to do with them? The mere formal declaration that they have been set aside will contribute but little toward this safety. It will prevent the settlement of the regions, but will not of itself preserve either the timber or the game on them…. The forest reservations are absolutely unprotected. Although set aside by presidential proclamation, they are without government and without guards. Timber-thieves may still strip the mountain-sides of the growing trees, and poachers may still kill the game without fear of punishment.”
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What Roosevelt and Grinnell (and John Muir, for that matter) were arguing for was, in fact, closing much of the western frontier to settlement and development. What good, they asserted, were forest reservations and national parks if these were left unprotected and not administered properly? With his characteristic law-and-order attitude, Roosevelt believed all poachers and despoilers should be imprisoned. Their actions, he felt, were unpardonable. All the wildlife he loved that flourished on federal property in 1891—including walruses on Alaska’s Amak Island, sea lions in California’s Farallones, and bald eagles in Colorado’s White River plateau—needed police protection. The national park and forest movement, both Roosevelt and Grinnell understood, was going to hinge on the federal government’s protecting its assets. “The game and timber on a reservation should be regarded as government property, just as are the mules and the cordwood at an army post,” they wrote. “If it is a crime to take the latter, it should be a crime to plunder a forest reserve.” With strict law enforcement, they believed, no big game species would “become absolutely extinct.”
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In recent decades the “new western history”—presented by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White—postulated that declaring the “frontier closed,” as Turner (and Roosevelt, in a sense) did in 1890 had (in
postmodern terms) deeply racist connotations.
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They chastised Roosevelt and Turner for believing, as Limerick put it, that the frontier was “where white people got scarce, or alternatively, where white people got scared.”
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The White-Limerick’s new western history arguments, in hindsight and from the vantage point of multiculturalism, were fundamentally sound. As the premier champion of Anglo-American settlement of North America, Roosevelt treated Native tribes, Spanish settlers, and even French Canadians as riffraff who needed to be cleared away like so many weeds. Caucasian outdoorsmen on the western frontier were, to Roosevelt, almost infallible. For example, Daniel Boone and his cohorts in the Cumberland valley, Roosevelt believed, had been “ordained of God to settle the wilderness.”
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Every chance Roosevelt got, he championed George Rogers Clark and Zebulon Pike. No matter how cruel white backwoodsmen were to “red Indians,” the savagery was blamed on the Indians. Although Roosevelt sometimes wrote glowingly of the Indians’ wilderness prowess—as he did in
The Winning of the West
—he still seemed to be using them as foils in order to elevate the frontiersmen into first-class guerrilla fighters. At its best,
The Winning of the West
treated Native Americans as Rousseauesque noble savages—a popular concept of the time.

Yet, it’s important to remember that although Roosevelt’s ethnocentrism and his notion of the white man’s burden are repugnant today, they were the accepted tenets of his own time. Nationalistic boasting was in fashion. Ever since Polk won his war in 1848 and the United States acquired parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, western expansion had been touted as an accomplishment to be celebrated, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. So, with half-shut eyes, Roosevelt wrote only the winner’s history of the West. Western triumphalism—called “new history” because it dealt with a part of the continent about which very little had been written—became the scholarly norm in the 1890s, with Roosevelt leading the way. Despite all its shortcomings, Roosevelt and Turner deserve kudos for helping create this genre of U.S. western history, on which both Lim
erick and White would build their careers 100 years later. Limerick, in particular, challenged the 1890 frontier-is-closed thesis time and again. “In the American West, too many ‘frontier-like’ events happened
after
1890—homesteading continued, short-term extraction even accelerated as the western oil, timber, and uranium booms took off, and contrary to myths of a vanished West, neither Indians nor cowboys disappeared,” Limerick noted in 1991, in a speech celebrating the National Forest Service’s centennial. “In extractive industries, the familiar boom/bust cycle continued, while Indian, Hispanic, Anglo, and Asian people continued to search for ways to live together. The westward movement didn’t stop at 1890; millions more people moved into the West in the twentieth century. If one went by numbers, one would have to call the nineteenth century westward movement the frail prelude to the much more significant twentieth century westward movement. It would be easier to sell me a used car, or a vacuum cleaner, or an encyclopedia set, than it would be to sell me on the idea that the creation of forest reserves was another sign and symbol of the end of the frontier.”
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