The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (69 page)

The selection of Elliot, Van Dyke, and Stone as coauthors of
The Deer Family
represented three distinct sides of Roosevelt’s conservationist persona, though perhaps the president did not realize this. There was the intrepid Elliot, the man of letters, naturalist, and globe-trotter, known for the precision of his scientific work in ornithology and mammalogy (but also heartily equipped to endure leeches and snakebites). The dominant strain of the big game hunter–naturalist was represented more than adequately by the indomitable Van Dyke, who was roaming the West Coast in search of bears, as he had done in Montana. Like Roosevelt’s, Van Dyke’s prose was action packed, yet careful about wildlife observations. Being a naturalist explorer was an occupation that the president coveted more than any other. Recognizing that the Artic Circle was one of the last frontiers, Roosevelt, from temperate Washington, D.C., chose Stone, who had exhibited the grit, individualism, and adventurousness in the wild taiga and tundra at the top of the world, tethered to a dogsled. They shared a fundamental attitude of no retreat. Clearly Stone, like the president himself, had learned to overcome wind chill, distance, and isolation while still managing to read Tolstoy on a inflatable mattress by quiet candlelight in a makeshift outpost shack.

Bookstores throughout the United States set up displays of
The Deer Family
, complete with handsome illustrations of sixty-seven-inch Alaskan moose antlers and Wyoming antelope grazing on the open range. And al
though Van Dyke, Elliot, and Stone were coauthors, the dark green cloth cover read only: “
The Deer Family
by Theodore Roosevelt and Others.” In fact, President Roosevelt had written only one-third of the book, but his lively chapters were far and away the most popular. Upon opening
The Deer Family
the reader immediately encountered a brief “Foreword” by Theodore Roosevelt—written in June 1901, when he was vice president. “This volume is meant for the lover of the wild, free, lonely life of the wilderness,” he wrote, “and of the hardy pastimes known to the sojourners therein.”
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Roosevelt’s chapters in
The Deer Family
are beautifully written, combining a nearly childlike rapture for hunting with an adult conservationist philosophy.
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Not only did the president offer compelling scientific details of the exact bifurcations of a mule deer’s main prongs or the pugnacity of elk herds; he made his field observations discernible to the average American. When writing about these mammals the president insisted on biological precision, seamlessly weaving into his narrative a steady succession of scientific facts, big-bored .505 Gibbs flashbacks, and earthy descriptions of Western scenery. In
The Deer Family
were echoes of the naturalist prose that Roosevelt had first showed off in
The Wilderness Hunter
, to the hearty approval of John Burroughs. For example, here is Roosevelt on the North Dakota prairie in
The Deer Family
:

Nostalgic passages like these, in which the writer is hungering for open spaces, made
The Deer Family
a minor best-seller for three or four weeks. Literally every review the book received was respectful. From the perspective of time, 100 years after it was written,
The Deer Family
—even more than
The Wilderness Hunter
—may be the most important of all Roosevelt’s books for our understanding of his evolved views on conservation. No longer does Roosevelt regale readers with his derring-do across the immensity of the continent. Nor does he champion mountain men in nativistic, white-man’s-burden fashion. In
The Deer Family
, Roosevelt—speaking as a U.S. president—became an environmental crusader and
scold. Derision toward unsportsmanlike hunters was more amplified than in his previous outdoor books and essays. “The big game hunter should be a field naturalist,” Roosevelt wrote. “If possible, he should be an adept with the camera; and hunting with the camera will tax his skill far more than hunting with the rifle, while the results in the long run give much greater satisfaction. Wherever possible he should keep a note-book, and should carefully study and record the habits of the wild creatures, especially when in some remote regions to which trained scientific observers but rarely have access. If we could only produce a hunter who would do for American big game what John Burroughs has done for the smaller wild life of hedgerow and orchard, farm and garden and grove, we should indeed be fortunate.”
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He urged all sportsmen to immediately become naturalists, keeping detailed notes about wildflowers, prairie grasses, and swamp fronds. Even if the would-be hunter didn’t “possess the literary faculty and powers of trained observation necessary for such a task,” Roosevelt instructed, he could nevertheless “do his part toward adding to our information by keeping careful notes of all important facts which he comes across.” Attempting to create North American field guides from the ground up—something akin to the later regional WPA guides—Roosevelt wanted everyday citizens to partake in inventorying the nation’s natural resources. “Such note-books would show the changed habits of game with the changed seasons, their abundance at different times and different places, the melancholy data of their disappearance, the pleasanter facts as to their change of habits which enable them to continue to exist in the land, and, in short, all their traits,” he wrote. “A real and lasting service would thereby be rendered, not only to naturalists, but to all who care for nature.”
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Unbeknownst to Roosevelt’s opponents in spring 1902, his desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had already become a rubber-stamp center for any serious-minded conservationist or natural resources specialist with an honest agenda. Already he was thinking of how best, with a modicum of good sense, to repopulate a federal forest reserve with his Bronx Zoo bison. Regularly, he was staying in touch with William T. Hornaday. Together they also had high hopes of someday creating a national elk reserve near Yellowstone. “Surely all men who care for nature, no less than all men who care for big game hunting, should combine to try to see that not merely the states but the Federal authorities make every effort, and are given every power, to prevent the extermination of this stately and
beautiful animal,” he wrote of elk. “The lordliest of the deer kind in the entire world.”
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Although this is a chicken-or-egg situation, the Bronx Zoo had made a special effort to advertise its elk, mule deer, caribou, and moose as all being part of what it called “The Deer Family.” Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm of Hornaday and Roosevelt, the zoo was failing in its efforts to breed moose and caribou in captivity. The sultriness of New York City in summer was, as Hornaday later noted, “decidedly inimical” to the project. “This densely humid and extremely saline atmosphere is about as deadly to the black-tail, caribou and moose as it is to the Eskimos,” Hornaday wrote, “and thus far we have found it an absolute impossibility to maintain satisfactory herds of those species in the ranges available for them.”
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It wasn’t enough to breed buffalo or elk in captivity. Big game refuges were needed in their western habitats. Worried about a band of dwarf elks in Kern County, California, Roosevelt had the Biological Survey move them to Sequoia National Park, where the Department of the Interior assumed the responsibility for their case.

Furthermore, on January 7, 1902, the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club issued its final report on how to create wildlife refuges. Washington insiders called it the Roosevelt Report (knowing full well that the president would adopt the club’s recommendations). At the core of the final report was the belief that U.S. game reserves should be established
inside
national forests. For example, President McKinley had established Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains Forest Reserve in 1901 to protect natural resources. The Boone and Crockett Club’s report suggested that
part
of this forest could become a buffalo or deer preserve. Because the U.S. government already owned the Wichitas, it had the authority to fence off thousands of acres to save vanishing wildlife. The report also recommended that the economic needs of locals always be factored in when policy recommendation were made.
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Prudence, of course, was the tenor of President Roosevelt’s directives regarding forest preservation and wildlife protection. As an accidental president, coming into power because of McKinley’s death, Roosevelt wanted to avoid unnecessarily kicking over a hornets’ nest. Senators from Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Utah, and Colorado already had their long knives out for him. He had to move with caution concerning the regulation of game animals and birds in any new forest reserve he created, to avoid an outcry of states’ rights sentiment. His strategy was to start slowly with just one or two forest reserves, where the political opposition
would be next to nil. Then, if he was elected in his own right in 1904, depending on the magnitude of his electoral mandate, he would act more boldly and decisively, taking head-on what he called in
An Autobiography
the “great special interests” of the Far West that were destroying nature “at the expense of the public interest.”
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As of 1902 the United States had approximately 43 million acres of forest reserves at its disposal. Roosevelt, with Pinchot at his side, wanted the Forestry Bureau to quickly double or triple that amount. From a long-term planning perspective Pinchot hoped to persuade Roosevelt to transfer the Division of Forestry from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture (he accomplished this goal with the Transfer Act of 1905).

IV

Throughout the first six months of 1902 the president fought for the federal government’s “conquest” of the arid lands of the West. Increasingly this involved irrigation. He believed instinctively that the huge undertaking of constructing large dams and reservoirs was an obligation of the federal government because its scope was beyond the capacity of private enterprise.
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Wanting to build on John Wesley Powell’s recommendations for the Geographical Survey, Roosevelt fought tooth and nail for land reclamation through hydrological advancements such as dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts as if he himself were the editor of
Irrigation Age
. (Ironically, Powell actually believed in decentralized irrigation,
not
huge, federally run Rooseveltian dams.) Rivers could be redirected, Roosevelt believed, so as to build sustainable western communities in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, and New Mexico. Although he had promoted saving bird habitats, Roosevelt seemed totally ignorant of the potential downside of advanced hydraulic drilling on the desert ecosystem. Filled with good intentions, the shortsighted Roosevelt was, sadly, unable to envision how potentially harmful the dams were to the western environment he so loved.
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Yet the goal of turning arid land to fields of green was, from a human development perspective, ennobling.

Of course, Roosevelt wasn’t working in a vacuum. Many western politicians approved of selling public lands in sixteen western states to fund ambitious irrigation projects. Every politician west of Kansas City or Bismarck, it seemed, was floating a how-to-do-it irrigation bill. The idea was that once settlers prospered on the irrigated western lands, they would help repay the cost of the hydraulic projects by contributing to a revolving fund (something like the later Social Security system). Roosevelt and his followers believed these large-scale irrigation projects would dramati
cally transform the western economy, landscape, and farming. The days of decaying lumber would be over. As Roosevelt had stated in his First Annual Message, the federal government needed to create “great storage works” for water. Wise irrigation laws should be adopted in the West—laws that issued clear titles for water rights.
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Doing all this reclamation legwork for Roosevelt were Pinchot and the young hydraulic specialist Frederick H. Newell, who in June 1902 became chief engineer under Charles D. Walcott, then director of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Pinchot and Newell actually did the job,” the president joked, “that I and the others talked about.”
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(Later, in 1907, when Walcott left the Reclamation Service to head the Smithsonian Institution, Roosevelt had Newell serve as director of a new Department of Interior Reclamation bureau.) In his unpublished memoir, written in 1927, Newell explained his commitment to Rooseveltian conservation, inspired, in part, by growing up in the lumber town of Bradford, Pennsylvania. With an aptitude for geology, Newell attended MIT, graduating in 1885 with a degree in mining engineering.

In 1888 he started working for John Wesley Powell and became Powell’s right-hand man. A regular at the Cosmos Club, Newell was invited, along with Pinchot, to become a member of the “Great Basin Lunch Mess,” where intense discussions were held on western rivers, forestlands, geographical surveying, and soil conservation. As an author Newell was almost as prolific as Roosevelt—only there was no romance of nature in Newell’s utilitarian volumes, such as
Oil Well Drillers
(1888),
Agriculture by Irrigation
(1894),
Hydrography of the Arid Regions
(1891), and
The Public Lands of the United States
(1895). When modern-day environmental activists attack Pinchot, they often attack his sidekick Newell as well. Whereas Pinchot enjoyed hiking, Newell found pleasure in dynamiting. Unlike others in Roosevelt’s inner circle, Newell never wrote about the inherent beauty of nature. There was the kind of vacancy in Newell’s eyes, that a novelist such as Melville might have described as soullessness. As an entrepreneurial engineer he solely wanted to make money off the land. He had an inability to say
no
to western politicians. Newell initiated canals and dam projects, at such a rapid pace, that many failed owing to untested soils and unfeasible transportation. Only on his deathbed did he realize that federal reclamation—to which he had devoted his entire life—was unnecessary and even seriously damaging to much of the arid West.
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