The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (74 page)

Roosevelt’s preservationist instinct concerning Puerto Rico didn’t stop with Luquillo. On July 22, 1902, seemingly arbitrarily, he declared Miraflores Island in the harbor of San Juan off-limits to anything but a forest reserve and a future quarantine hospital for U.S. Marines.
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In 1906 Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot, asking him to go to Puerto Rico quickly and “oversee what is being done in forestry.” Pinchot went and recommended that Culebra Island be declared a wilderness preserve.
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Following Pinchot’s recommendation—and that of the Florida Audubon Society—on February 27, 1909, just before leaving the White House, Roosevelt did something dramatic on behalf of Puerto Rican wildlife. By an executive order he declared the entire island of Culebra a national wildlife refuge. This crab-shaped dollop, about seventeen miles east of the mainland, was
(and remains) a pristine reef with a staggering array of Technicolor coral and fish. He was impressed by the large colonies of brown boobies, laughing gulls, and sooty and noddy terns that lived on Culebra; and once he learned that more than 50,000 sea birds used it as a sanctuary he forbade the U.S. Navy to conduct further military exercises there. Even as ex-president, Roosevelt didn’t forget Puerto Rico. He worked in tandem with the naturalist Henry Fairfield Osborn to found the New York Zoological Society’s Department of Tropical Research. Besides collecting data on endangered species and rare plant life, the new department established Kartabo Station in British Guinea (now Guyana), considered the first on-the-spot rainforest research facility in the western hemisphere.
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Owing to President Roosevelt’s foresight and action, when the Luquillo National Forest celebrated its centennial in 2003 the Puerto Rican parrot was still surviving—though barely. And the forest had expanded to 28,000 protected acres. In April 2004 Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, urged by environmental groups and Puerto Rican constituents, introduced a bill to add further environmental protection measures to save endangered species in the Luquillo (in 2007 it was renamed El Yunque National Forest). Clinton lamented the decline of the endangered Puerto Rican parrot. “Today,” she said, “there are fewer than thirty-five of these parrots.”
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But she added that with the increased financing of two entities essentially created by Roosevelt—the National Forest Service
and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the parrots might once again thrive in the most spectacular rain forest in the Caribbean. At the USDA-run visitor center in the Yunque National Forest a huge blown-up copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 proclamation declaring Luquillo a national forest has been installed as an exhibit.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. with a favorite parrot.
Ted Roosevelt Jr. with parrot. (
Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
)

Hearing about the beautiful parrots in both Puerto Rico and the Philippines fascinated Roosevelt to no end. Parrots, he believed, were deeply complex creatures with the intelligence of a human three- to five-year-old. Their startling plumage was far more interesting to him than a luminous splash in a painting by Monet or Renoir. Before long, unable to resist, the president acquired parrots as pets. “Loretta, the parrot, has fairly become one of the household,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit in January 1904. “I had no idea that parrots could become so social and intelligent. The other day Archie was in bed with a headache. I found Mame sitting beside the bed and Loretta in her cage between them on my bed. She was having a most lovely time, with the feathers on her head and neck ruffled up, chuckling and talking away in low tones, and alternately shaking hands with first one and then the other of her companions. She was evidently as pleased as she could be, and upon my word, of the three I felt as if at the moment she was intellectually taking the lead herself.”
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Besides Loretta there was also a blue-yellow macaw known as Eli Yale (kept in the greenhouse), which Roosevelt said “looked as if he came out of
Alice in Wonderland
.”
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Roosevelt loved teaching Eli Yale—so named because its colors were those of Yale University—words like “dee-lighted” and his children’s names. Sometimes it would scream and make a piercing flock call. Occasionally after White House dinners, Roosevelt would head out to the greenhouse to feed both Eli Yale and Loretta table scraps, particularly dried fruits and vegetables. Both parrots were friends with the well-fed domestic hen Baron Spreckle, who Roosevelt noticed was starting to act like a parrot. Having these birds around the White House and Sagamore Hill helped keep Roosevelt engaged as a Darwinian zoologist—or, as Edith claimed, returning him to his boyhood. “If all the animals and birds which have been sent by admiring friends as gifts to the President and members of his family had been allowed to remain at the White House,” a popular magazine surmised, “that historic old structure might easily be turned into a menagerie and the grounds surrounding it into a zoological park.”
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I

F
orest reserves weren’t all that President Roosevelt was preserving for prosperity. As a fervent enthusiast of national parks, Roosevelt hoped to establish a few new ones during his tenure as president. Only five national parks existed in the spring of 1902—Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, Yosemite, and Mount Rainier—and he was eager to establish a sixth. The National Park Service would not be created until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, so all five of these national treasures were managed independently by the Department of the Interior. The Organic Act’s high-minded mandate was to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild-life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But in 1902 the national parks were run by the U.S. Army (Mount Rainier being an exception), with the commanding officer of the troops serving as superintendants, reporting directly to the Secretary of the Interior.
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All other things being equal, President Roosevelt’s first choice for a new national park was the Grand Canyon plateau—then a national forest in which extraction was allowed. Roosevelt had first learned of the Grand Canyon when he read Major John Wesley Powell’s harrowing account of journeying down the Colorado River between 1869 to 1872 as a teenager. There was nothing that President Roosevelt didn’t like about the self-taught Powell—a feisty one-armed Civil War veteran and brave explorer who went on to found the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology. To Roosevelt the Grand Canyon was an immortal landscape. Just as Yellowstone had been ballyhooed in magazines and periodicals during his youth, in 1902–1903 the Grand Canyon was being touted as an unrivaled natural wonder. Gorgeous photographs of the deep gorge with snow around its rim appeared in the popular press, anticipating the heroic work of Ansel Adams (who was born in 1902). One of America’s finest landscape painters—Thomas Moran—celebrated the Grand Canyon in canvas after canvas, to great critical acclaim.

Opposition against declaring the Grand Canyon a national park, how
ever, was fierce. Arizona was a mining territory, where rock blasting was pervasive. Mining claims had already been staked (with encouragement from the U.S. government) for the chance to extract from the Grand Canyon zinc, copper, lead, and asbestos. The Roosevelt’s idea of withdrawing the nearly 300-mile Colorado River gorge from the private sector was anathema to many in Arizona, including the governor of the territory, Nathan Oakes Murphy. Murphy had journeyed to Washington, D.C., in 1902 to lobby against all of Roosevelt’s irrigation and federal forestlands projects. An antigovernment zealot, Murphy wanted to oust Arizona’s Indians from federal reservations so that the land could be sold to Anglo settlers. Popular in the southern counties of Maricopa and Pima, Murphy fancied himself as the voice of small-time miners and land developers. You might say he was allergic to anything stamped “Interior” or “Agriculture.”
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The Tucson Daily Citizen
, in fact, deploring his anti-Roosevelt, anticonservationist bias, fulminated that Murphy “should have retired from the Governorship of Arizona before undertaking to promote the interests of the water stealers and land grabbers. He should have divested himself of his official character before entering the lobby to advocate private monopoly at the expense of public interests.”
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Roosevelt employed cartoonists like Ding Darling to help promote his grand vision for national forests throughout the American West
.
“Use Forest Reserve Tonic.” (
Courtesy of Ding Darling Estate
)

Realizing that turning the Grand Canyon into a national park was an undertaking strewn with hurdles, Roosevelt looked for a softer, less controversial natural legacy to preserve. Turning to Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot for advice, Roosevelt was told that Crater Lake in southern Oregon was perhaps an ideal choice for a relatively conflict-free national park. In hindsight, Pinchot unquestionably gave the president excellent advice. Pinchot’s idea was to save Crater Lake quickly and then have the president journey by train to the Grand Canyon to stir up public sympathy for creating a national park there.

The party of twelve prospectors who discovered Crater Lake in June 1853 saw its loveliness with fresh eyes, and it cast a spell on them.
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In 1865, the Sprague and Stearns expedition reported on the amazing site to the public at large. Nearly five miles in diameter, situated in the Cascade Mountains, about two hours by horse northeast from Medford (a Klamath County depot juncture for the Oregon and California railroad), Crater Lake was the result of a volcanic eruption. No lake anywhere else was as chameleon-like blue in changing color as this natural wonder. The lake’s edges, for example, owing to the westering light, were sharp turquoise while its center appeared to be a bottomless indigo blue.
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Even colorist as fine as Marin or O’Keeffe would have been hard pressed to replicate its myriad hues of blinding blue. Everything about the elliptical site suggested geological aberration. In the pre-Columbian era a horrific eruption had capsized the peak leaving an immense cavity. Over the millennia, melting snow and rain filled the 2,000-foot-deep crater.

With a depth of 1,943 feet, Crater Lake was far deeper than any of the Great Lakes—deeper, for that matter, than any other lake in the United States. To Native American tribes—specifically the Klamath and Modoc—this freshwater lake was a sacred site, the opening to an underworld where a giant supposedly ruled with saber and spear. Myths about Crater Lake abounded. The Klamath and Modoc believed that Wizard Island, in the middle of the lake, was the giant’s decapitated head. According to another myth the ruling deity of Crater Lake was an oatmeal-colored creature like the Loch Ness monster. In still another myth, the supposedly “unreachable bottom” was where evil spirits or sea devils resided in lodges.
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Many a natural site holds a mystery, but Crater Lake was perhaps unique in that people who had looked down at the extinct volcano basin from the twenty-mile circle of cliffs often felt haunted by the visual memory, as if they themselves had witnessed the ancient cataclysm—the lava streams ripping off the mountaintop—which had occurred in the
area 7,700 years before. Out of such volcanic disruption in the Cascades was born one of the prettiest lakes in America, the equal of Lake George in New York and Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada. Even though the temperature of Crater Lake was low, it seldom froze in wintertime.
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President Roosevelt himself had never visited Crater Lake—and never would. But he had heard from Gifford Pinchot about the extraordinary efforts of an indefatigable Oregonian conservationist determined to save it. Just as Yellowstone had George Bird Grinnell and Yosemite had John Muir, Crater Lake had William Gladstone Steel. Born in Strafford, Ohio, seven years before the Civil War, Steel had first heard about Crater Lake while living in Kansas as a youth. He said he had read a reverential story about the supposedly bottomless freshwater lake in a Topeka or Wichita newspaper, in which a noontime sandwich was wrapped. The story stuck with him. Steel’s transient parents, stricken by “Oregon fever,” steadily went westward, eventually moving the family to Portland, a regional hub town of about 1,000 people along the alluvial Colombia River. (In the nineteenth century Portland was often called “Stump Town” do to excessive area-wide lumbering.) After growing up in the Midwest region Steel was enthralled by the thought of exploring the green mountain valleys of the Pacific Northwest. Upon graduating from high school, between jobs, Steel took to exploring both the high and the low country of Oregon. No slope or ravine was too mundane for his hiking-boots.
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Crater Lake Nation Park in Oregon was saved by the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt called it “an heirloom.”
Crater Lake National Park. (
Courtesy of the National Park Service
)

In 1881, at age twenty-seven, Steel started a promotional journal with his brother George. They filled its pages with geographical data and called it
The Resources of Oregon and Washington
. The Pacific Northwest was a densely forested geological wonderland, and the Steel brothers wanted to inventory the far-flung natural resources. Their articles were aimed not at tourists but at mining companies, timber titans, and fish-canning outfits, which were just starting to cast an eye on the region. The brother’s business partner, Chandler B. Watson, had visited Crater Lake in 1873 and was full of its praise. Remembering the story about Crater Lake in the newspaper that had wrapped his sandwich, and always game for a fun week-long trip, Steel traveled 250 miles to the remote site, arriving on August 15, 1885. He wanted to see its reported splendor with his own eyes; it proved to be the turning point of his life. Captain Clarence E. Dutton of the U.S. Army would likewise become bewitched by the lake.

Journeying back to downtown Portland from Crater Lake, Steel developed plans to create a national park out of the “awe-inspiring temple.” Gripped by the lake’s spellbinding blueness, for the next seventeen years he became a monomaniac on the subject. Intensive cultivation of new conservationist tactics became his focal point. Tall and balding, with the physique of a downhill skier, Steel was extremely well liked in Portland’s social circles. Although he wasn’t a first-generation Oregon Trail pioneer, he was treated like one, receiving invitations to all the important civic functions and town hall meetings in the Willamette valley. Officially, Steel was superintendent of postal carriers in Portland, a job which allowed him to rub elbows with everybody of consequence in town. He was respected for his self-control, and his status was enhanced by his ambitious brother George, who had married money and became postmaster. Marshaling data about how the new Yellowstone National Park was attracting tourists from the east coast to Wyoming and Montana, Steel also consulted with lawyers and judges to learn the ropes of the legislative process.
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“To those living in New York City,” he boasted, “I would say, Crater Lake is large enough to have Manhattan, Randall’s, Ward’s, and Blackwell’s Islands dropped into it, side by side without touching the walls, or, Chicago or Washington City might do the same.”
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After diligently doing his homework, Steel spearheaded an effort to have two bills concerning Crater Lake National Park introduced in Congress. There was a rumor in Portland that homesteaders and developers wanted to acquire Crater Lake so as to log the surrounding tracts of mountain hemlocks, white bark, red firs, and lodgepoles, and even sweeping pockets of ponderosa pine. Steel’s first plan of action was to
have the U.S. government reserve the townships around the lake to prevent exploitation or settlement. If that could be accomplished, the next step was to have the U.S. Geological Survey map and scientifically analyze the enthralling terrain. Then, very quickly, perhaps within the year, a national park could be established.

Never one to let a lag develop between his musings and action, Steel boned up on the law and traversed the countryside to find support. He was successful in persuading the U.S. Geological Survey, headed by Powell, to make a complete inventory of Crater Lake. For approximately a month Captain Dutton, accompanied by an able party of geologists and soldiers, lived along the shores of Crater Lake, an area, according to the
New York Times
, rarely seen by white men. The
Times
recounted in vivid detail the hardships endured by Captain Dutton’s survey team: donkeys pulling canoes for more than 100 miles up snowbound mountain ridges; pulley ropes dropping the boats down sheer cliffs; measurements of depth taken with the most advanced nautical equipment available west of Denver. After surviving the howling winter winds, Dutton sent Powell a detailed letter about their findings. He declared that as a result of more than 150 soundings aimed at surveying the lake’s bottom he believed the depth was 2,005 feet, making Crater Lake, as the
Times
put it, the “Deepest Body of Fresh Water on the American Continent.”
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