The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (45 page)

Roosevelt respected Smith, who was then thirty-eight years old and the publisher of the
Atlanta Evening Journal
. A tall, pickle-nosed, big-bellied Cleveland Democrat, Smith was a shrewd anticorporation lawyer bent on
promoting the “New South.” President Cleveland believed Smith would “stand fast against land grabbers and exploiters of the public domain.” As a corollary, Smith was unafraid to lambaste the Populist Party (or People’s Party, founded in 1891 to lobby for free silver coinage), scoffing at its membership as essentially a beehive of charlatan hayseeds.
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Although Roosevelt was from the opposition party, he respected Smith as a tough, honest, no-nonsense yellow-dog Democrat with the admirable glare of a battle-tested Confederate veteran. Smith was a snappy dresser, always seen wearing a frock coat and slouch hat; there were no wrinkles in his wardrobe. Often he would sport a handkerchief in his jacket pocket as an affectation. Roosevelt, who denounced the Populists as the type of men who didn’t wear “under shirts,” admired Smith’s sense of style. Furthermore, Smith’s wife was the daughter of the legendary General Howell Cobb—a Confederate so gray his image should have been chiseled onto Stone Mountain, and also a former secretary of the treasury, having served under President Franklin Pierce. Cobb, it was said, calculated every waking hour in the service of Georgia’s greatness.
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Shrewdly, Roosevelt used the fact that his own mother had lived in Georgia—as a Bulloch from Roswell—as an ice-breaker with Smith. Peaches, pine trees, and red clay
were
part of his heritage, and many of his first-prize items assigned to his boyhood Roosevelt Museum had come from just north of Atlanta. For his part, Smith, who would go on to serve as a U.S. senator from Georgia, told Roosevelt that he welcomed any strategic wisdom from the Boone and Crockett on how to deal with policing Yellowstone and the California national parks.

Roosevelt’s friendship with Smith became extremely important in the bipartisan effort to vex the relentless lobbying of western anticonservation legislators. From the outset of his second term, President Cleveland, using Smith as his megaphone, made it clear he was on the side of the forestry movement. Only weeks after his inauguration Cleveland, in fact, threw down the gauntlet: he “deplored” the grim fact that the western timberlands, which his predecessors Grant and Harrison had saved, were being destroyed by “timber depredators.”
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Scolding Congress, particularly the senators from Colorado and South Dakota, President Cleveland, under Hoke Smith’s sway, called for immediate protective legislation.
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With the Panic of 1893 giving economic reasons to fight the new forest preserve system, the timber lobby in the West was pushing back against the conservationists. Led by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado (himself the secretary of the interior in Chester Arthur’s administration, a
man who now advertised himself as the “defender of the West”), this group wanted the reserves reduced in size if not abolished completely. To repeat, however: from the outset of his second term, President Cleveland had made it clear that he was on the side of the forestry movement.

In April 1894 Roosevelt was preparing to testify before the Senate Committee on Territories, chaired by Charles Faulkner of West Virginia, in favor of giving Yellowstone Park’s U.S. Army soldiers real authority to deal with trespassers; he also testified against the redrawn, smaller boundaries of the park that the timber lobby was championing. An incident in the park the previous month added fuel to Roosevelt’s cause.

Captain George S. Anderson—the superintendent of Yellowstone and a member of the Boone and Crockett Club—tracked a suspected poacher, Edgar Howell, for a few days in the Pelican Valley region of the park. At one abandoned campsite Captain Anderson found six buffalo scalps and skulls. On March 13, he stumbled on Howell along Astringent Creek skinning a buffalo that had just been shot. Nearby were the bodies of five other kills. The superintendent arrested the poacher red-handed and immediately wrote to Secretary of the Interior Smith from Cooke City, Montana, recommending that this arrest “be made the occasion for a
direct
appeal to Congress for the passage of an act making it an offense…for any one to kill, capture, or injure any wild animal in the Park.”
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By chance, Emerson Hough was on assignment for
Forest and Stream
in Yellowstone at the time of the arrest, and the official Yellowstone photographer, Jay Haynes, using his new portable Eastman Kodak camera, was able to take pictures of the dead buffalo. This firsthand evidence was the basis for a stinging editorial in
Forest and Stream
: George Bird Grinnell urged “every reader who is interested in the Park” to write to his “Senator and Representative…asking them to take an active interest in the protection of the Park” before America’s last great buffalo herd was gone forever. Meanwhile, with righteous indignation, Roosevelt publicly lashed out at Howell, claiming that the sleazy marauder should, at the very least, be “sent up for half a dozens years” Roosevelt personally preferred a stiff rope and a short drop.
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In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Territories, Roosevelt milked the Howell case for every possible drop of sympathy, resorting to both shaming and tongue-lashing.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt acquired a new Yellowstone ally on the other side of the U.S. Capitol. Representative John F. Lacey of Iowa was the principal sponsor in the House of the administration’s Yellowstone Game
Protection Act; it would “protect the birds and animals in Yellowstone National Park, and to punish crimes in said park, and for other purposes.”
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Lacey was born in Virginia in 1841, and his family moved to Iowa when he was a teenager. The Laceys homesteaded along the Des Moines River, where John was immediately mesmerized by the open prairie and amazed by the endless sea of tall grass and the abundance of songbirds.
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He enrolled at college in nearby Marshalltown, but after the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The combat he saw, against Confederate forces in northern Missouri at the Battle of Liberty on September 17, 1861, turned him against war forever.
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He returned to college, studied law, and by 1870 was elected to Iowa’s House of Representatives, where he became known as an avid advocate of wildlife conservation.

By the spring of 1894, Lacey was in his second of eight terms representing Iowa in the U.S. House of Representatives. He took fact-finding trips around the West (unusual for a congressman representing the Midwest at the time), assessing timberlands that might well be considered future forest reserves and growing angry at the smoking lumber mills and the stump-dotted slopes that he passed. He always harbored a primal urge, a yearning, to be around nature. According to his daughter Berenice, he was “pained” to see the “wanton destruction” of forests and wildlife.
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On May 7, 1894, the president’s team of Hoke Smith, John Lacey, and Theodore Roosevelt secured the passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act (otherwise known as the Lacey Act of 1894). At long last the federal government could take poachers like Howell to nearby courthouses in Cooke City and Livingston for legal prosecution, instead of merely having them escorted off the park premises.
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The Act also ensured protection by the U.S. Army against timber harvesting, mineral extraction, and the defacing of geysers or rock formations for the foreseeable future. If you were caught carving your initials in rock—the way William Clark had done in 1806 at Pompey’s Pillar in Montana—you could end up in jail. The U.S. Army, which had first started administering the park in 1886, would continue doing so until 1918. Entrepreneurs trying to make a quick buck out of Yellowstone were frowned on by Roosevelt. For example, Edward Waters of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, operated a buffalo-elk zoo (even getting a permit to exhibit Crow Indians) but was eventually forced to shut down his roadside operation. As purists, Roosevelt and Grinnell even wanted to prohibit steamboat tours of Yellowstone Lake. “In protecting the beautiful wonders of the Park from vandalism,” Captain Anderson noted, “the main things to be contended against were the propensities of
women to gather specimens, and of men to advertise their folly by writing their names on everything beautiful within their reach.”
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Overnight Roosevelt’s beloved bears had a sanctuary, and they were on their way to becoming a great tourist attraction.
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At the Fountain Hotel in the park, black bears started showing up regularly at the kitchen garbage dump, begging for leftovers. Their panhandling became almost as reliable as Old Faithful, and a new tourist attraction. “The preservation of the game in the Park has unexpectedly resulted in turning a great many of the bears into scavengers for the hotels within the Park limits,” Roosevelt wrote with self-evident glee of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act a few years later. “Their tameness and familiarity are astonishing; they act much more like hogs than beasts of prey. Naturalists now have a chance of studying their character from an entirely new standpoint, and under entirely new conditions. It would be well worth the while of any student of nature to devote an entire season in the Park simply to study of bear life; never before has such an opportunity been afforded.”
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The passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act of 1894 impelled Roosevelt to push for more U.S. government protection over the national parks. There was scant chance wildlife would last, he believed, if U.S. Army guards didn’t patrol California parks like Sequoia, General Grant, and Yosemite as protectors. In Yosemite, grazing sheep—domestic animals that John Muir denigrated as “hoofed locusts”—were ruining the integrity of the park’s valleys. Instead of merely chasing the flocks off the U.S. government property, Roosevelt wanted illegal shepherds arrested, handcuffed, and marched to jail. For the wondrous California parks to survive, Roosevelt believed, the U.S. Army also needed to be trained in stocking fish, fighting forest fires, and planting trees.

Although Roosevelt still grumbled that the Northern Pacific was trying to “segregate” Yellowstone, in truth the railroad industry was becoming a fierce proponent of establishing national parks throughout the West. The Southern Pacific Railroad company had even helped push the Yosemite bill through Congress. The railroads saw big tourist dollars in luring easterners to see the wonders of Yosemite as well as the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, and so on.
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John Muir himself embraced the notion of tourists coming to visit Yosemite by passenger train. “Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms,” he wrote, “mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arranged more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas—even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of our times.”
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Whether or not Muir influenced Roosevelt’s thinking remains unclear; what we do know, however, is that Roosevelt soon dialed back on pounding the railroad industry. Nevertheless, he continued to assail the avarice of timber barons, illegal game hunters, metallurgical fiends, real estate dealers, and souvenir poachers bent on disregarding the U.S. government’s “No Trespassing” postings. With a gleam of white teeth, Roosevelt attacked the “baseness of spirit” of such Coloradan politicians as Senator Teller and Governor Davis Waite with a steady barrage of invective. Tired of Rooseveltian theatrics, they, in turn, wanted to clap a chloroformed bandana over his mouth once and for all. While John Burroughs preferred fellowship over invective, he knew the “great cause” of wilderness protection needed the bluntness of his new friend’s militant temperament. “Roosevelt was the man of the clenched fist,” Burroughs wrote years later in
The Last Harvest
, “not one to stir up strife, but a merciless hitter in what he believed a just cause.”
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Roosevelt continued to push his conservationist agenda forward. He soon wrote to Captain Anderson that the new legislation could be improved. President Cleveland’s protection act was “by no means as good,” Roosevelt maintained, as what the Boone and Crockett Club demanded. The bill, he feared, had ambiguous overtones. With unabated ardor, Roosevelt wanted opprobrium names and public humiliation hurled at dishonorable men like Howell through Wyoming’s newspapers. W. Hallett Phillips of the Boone and Crockett Club wrote to Captain Anderson, in fact, saying that “Roosevelt says you made the greatest mistake of your life in not accidentally having that scoundrel [Howell] killed and he speaks as if he would have shot him on the spot.”
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Regardless, Roosevelt couldn’t deny that the Yellowstone Game Protection Act was a giant leap in the right direction. To cough up $1,000 or spend two years in jail—the harsh penalty suddenly imposed on poachers for merely shooting an elk or deer on U.S. government property—was a serious deterrent in 1894. At the end of this letter to Captain Anderson, Roosevelt admitted that Cleveland’s act was “a good deal better than the present systems,” adding that “at least [it] gives us a groundwork on which to go.”
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Another worry for Roosevelt after May 7 was his fear that Yellowstone buffalo—believed to be among the last remnant herds in the United States—would still fall prey to poachers if the number of U.S. Army personnel in the park wasn’t dramatically increased more than the act provided. There were fewer than twenty buffalo in Yellowstone—with its high altitude and harsh winters the park wasn’t a natural environment for them, but inside the park they were now protected. Roosevelt kept grap
pling with the larger question of how to save the buffalo in the long term. The Smithsonian Institution was floating a plan that involved fencing them in, which he was lukewarm about. Before long, Roosevelt started touting the notion of breeding buffalo in zoos and then reintroducing them throughout the western forest reserves, particularly in their traditional grounds like the Black Hills, Pine Ridge Reservation, Flint Hills, and Wichita Mountains.
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