The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (75 page)

Traditionally, Americans like “firsts” and the “biggest,” “widest,” or “tallest” of anything. So the fact that the
Times
and other newspapers had declared Crater Lake the
deepest
greatly helped Steel’s preservation efforts. Oregonians, like everybody else, enjoyed bragging. Dutton helped Steel in another fundamental way. In a long letter to Powell, published in part by the
Times
, Dutton described the geological uniqueness of the lake, mentioning “splendid examples” of glacial striation and rare submerged cinder cones 800 to 1,200 feet high. Many readers probably skipped over Dutton’s engineer-like prose about pumice and tufa, but one effect of his findings was to make the entranced Crater Lake the Yellowstone of the Pacific Northwest.
¹²

Taking a lesson from the John Muir School of Publicity, Steel, with the U.S. Geological Survey report at his side, started introducing Portlanders to the importance of conservation, as simply as possible. Having met with Muir at Mount Rainier, Steel learned how to lobby effectively on behalf of nature. Steel relied on inoffensive efforts (like those of the Sierra Club), aimed at raising consciousness about Crater Lake and other sites in the Cascade Mountains. For starters he organized an Alpine Club (which predated the Sierra Club) and participated in the first nighttime
illumination of snowcapped Mount Hood, accomplished with red fire and flares. After having a Portland summit meeting with Muir in August 1888 on strategies of preservation, he released rainbow trout into Crater Lake, hoping to win the support of sportsmen throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Two years later Steel published his first and only book, appropriately titled
The Mountains of Oregon
. Nobody would ever say that Steel wrote with the eloquence of Burroughs or Chapman, but
The Mountains of Oregon
dutifully presented the geological wonders of Crater Lake, reading like a fanciful lawyer’s brief for granting it national park status. Yawning chasms, high precipices, weird grandeur, hanging rocks, immense cliffs—the book was filled with enraptured descriptions which leaned toward the style of come-ons for roadside attractions. Mainly, Steel was at pains to explain just how large Crater Lake was; he called it an “immense affair” that would dwarf Chicago and Washington, D.C., combined. Photographs of such Crater Lake sites as Mill Creek Falls and Vidae Cliff were included, complementing the prose. There was even a photograph of himself, sitting with fellow Oregon conservationists, his dark, pointed beard suggesting that he was a Burroughs or Muir in the making. The climax of
The Mountains of Oregon
came when Steel said that even though the Crater Lake area was teeming with game—deer, bears, and cougars—he refused to hunt because the “grandeur and sublimity of the surroundings” filled him with awe.
¹³

Upon receiving a copy of
The Mountains of Oregon
Muir wrote to Steel that he was impressed by the “interesting and novel mountain material” four years later Muir—the bard of Yosemite—published his own riveting work
The Mountains of California
.
¹⁴
As propaganda,
The Mountains of Oregon
—a hodgepodge of miscellaneous pieces—worked beautifully. Even timber barons liked seeing the magnificence of their own backyard. In 1893, in large measure as a result of Steel’s six years of lobbying, a 4-million-acre Cascade Range Forest Preserve was established in Oregon. The forest reserve encompassed land more than 300 miles long, from the Columbia River to the California state line; it was the largest protected wilderness area in the country. It was a triumph for the intensely focused conservationist against the timber speculators.
¹⁵

When Roosevelt was elected vice president in 1900, Steel was a forty-six-year-old Republican diehard with unimpeachable conservationist credentials. No firm information exists about whether he knew anything of Roosevelt’s pro–national park convictions. He was a longtime bachelor known for weekend forays into vagabondage, devoted night and day to
the cause of Cascades preservation, and the wheel of fortune was starting to turn his way. That February he had married Lydia Hatch, who was said to be the one and only love of his life. Besides having his wedding reported in the Portland press, Steel started receiving communitywide praise for his program to introduce rainbow trout into Crater Lake. Reports from southern Oregon indicated that his “planting” of rainbow trout had worked; the trout were flourishing, easily surviving the bitter-cold winters (skeptics had feared that this was impossible). Steel, in essence, had provided a welcome twist to wildlife reintroduction efforts, which usually were like those of the Boone and Crockett Club. For in the case of Crater Lake, there was no “re” to be concerned about. Recognizing that the clear waters were ideal for trout, he introduced them to a new habitat in the Cascade Mountains. Congratulatory letters came his way from anglers all over America.

Ironically, Crater Lake’s fortunes took a turn for the better when President McKinley was assassinated. With Theodore Roosevelt as president, the chance that it might become a national park was increased tenfold. Over the years Steel had made many friends in the burgeoning conservation movement from coast to coast, mailing copies of
The Mountains of Oregon
to judges and legislators in the hope of teaching them about the pristine Cascades.
¹⁶
Of all the valuable contacts Steel had cultivated, however, none outshone Gifford Pinchot. In 1896 Steel had an opportunity to take Muir and Pinchot on a camping excursion to Crater Lake. Although Muir was only moderately impressed, Pinchot was knocked out by the sparkling blue water glistening in the midday sun. As he wrote in his memoir
Breaking New Ground
, “Crater Lake seemed to me like a wonder of the world.”
¹⁷

Further bolstering Steel’s effort to create a national park was the fact that neighboring Washington state had won a campaign to have 14,411-foot Mount Rainier become a national park in 1899; the park was so large that it created its own weather system and sometimes received 1,000 inches of snow annually.
¹⁸
Playing on the rivalry between the two Pacific Northwest states, Steel reminded Oregonians that Crater Lake was every bit as gorgeous as the peaks of the Tatoosh range. Whenever Steel’s sales pitch for Crater Lake was falling flat or a setback occurred, he knew Pinchot was available for encouragement. No sooner had Roosevelt delivered his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1901 than Steel solicited letters of endorsement from Muir, Pinchot, and others. Muir begged off—he was preoccupied with his own agenda in Yosemite—but Pinchot rallied to Steel’s side like a knight in shining armor. “You ask me why a
national park should be established around Crater Lake,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on February 18, 1902, in a letter intended for public dissemination. “There are many reasons. In the first place, Crater Lake is one of the great natural wonders of this continent. Secondly, it is a famous resort for the people of Oregon and of other states, which can best be protected and managed in the form of a national park. Thirdly, since its chief value is for recreation and scenery and not for the production of timber, its use is distinctly that of a national park and not a forest reserve. Finally, in the present situation of affairs it could be more carefully guarded and protected as a park than as a reserve.”
¹⁹

By procuring this testimonial from Pinchot and using it as exhibit A when presenting the Crater Lake bill to Congress, Steel had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. Quite naturally Roosevelt would defer to Pinchot’s wisdom about the Oregon backcountry. Steel met a formidable roadblock—Speaker of the House David Henderson, a heavy-fisted politico from Iowa. Ticked off because Steel and Pinchot were foisting a national park on Congress even though T.R. had been president for only a few months, Henderson, representing the antiunion Midwest and western timber-mining interests, offered an adamant “no.” By dint of his intimidating seniority he blocked the bill from even being debated. As the first U.S. congressman from west of the Mississippi River to serve as House Speaker, Henderson was mistrustful of federal interference with the free enterprise system. Cranky for a midwesterner, Henderson, whose obstinacy could quickly turn to fury, had worried that Roosevelt had gone too far in pushing natural resource preservation in his First Annual Message to Congress. But at heart Henderson—who had been a valorous colonel in the Civil War and had lost a leg in 1863—was supportive of Roosevelt’s militarism.
²⁰
With a little arm-twisting by the new president, Henderson, bristling all the way, reluctantly capitulated. After all, in the context of picking and choosing fights Crater Lake hardly seemed worth crossing swords with the Roosevelt administration.

It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had backup support for the Crater Lake bill from Congressman John Lacey—also from Iowa—who worked mightily on getting Henderson to change his mind. Lacey had visited Oregon in 1887. He was immediately drawn to the Cascades, and he understood that the Pacific Northwest forests were the greatest in the world. Places like Mount Hood and Crater Lake, he knew at once, should be saved for posterity. The slow, sad death of the great trees as a result of wildfires sickened him. “The whole country was covered by a pall of smoke from the burning forests,” Lacey recalled to the
Chicago Tribune
. “This
was more wicked than the destruction of our forests on the Atlantic only because the great woods of the Pacific are finer, and for the further reason that they are our last.”
²¹

Double-teamed by Roosevelt and Lacey, Henderson acquiesced and did an about-face, and the Senate passed HR 4393 on May 9. “You give me more thanks than my small share in getting the Crater Lake bill passed deserves, but I am sincerely glad it has got along so far,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on May 15. “There is no doubt, in my judgment, that the President will sign it.”
²²

Although Pinchot wouldn’t lead the U.S. Forest Service for three more years, the impressive power he exerted in creating Crater Lake National Park was a prelude of grand conservation achievements to come. Not only did the utilitarian Pinchot enter the preservationist domain with Crater Lake, but he solidified his alliance with Steel. Mountaineers in arms, both men loathed the reckless way the General Land Office (GLO) of the U.S. Department of the Interior was dealing with the unexplored Cascade Mountains. The saving of Crater Lake was a marker in the conservationists’ struggle in the Pacific Northwest, an early indicator that the Roosevelt administration was going to play hardball against the shameful unregulated timbering. Just as important, Pinchot had found a “world wonder” for his boss to establish as America’s sixth national park, one which wasn’t mired in too much controversy. The word “wonder,” in fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was
the
term conservationists used in public discourse to save wilderness sites. A mere forest or lake might seem commonplace, but a “wonder” might bring much needed tourist dollars into local towns. And it worked! Using the U.S. Geological Survey as their base, the tag team of Pinchot and Steel tried to insert the words “deepest” and “wonder” into any public conversation about Crater Lake.

When President Roosevelt signed the Crater Lake bill on May 22—setting aside 240 square miles—he was proud. America had its sixth national park, and its first in Oregon.
*
Crater Lake was saved for both “great beauty and scientific value.”
²³
Earlier that day Roosevelt had participated in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery honoring the soldiers killed
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War; he was one of 500 veterans present.
²⁴
The signing of the bill saving Crater Lake took only five or ten minutes of his busy schedule that afternoon; it was incidental. Still, it was a rewarding few minutes. A sentimentalist at heart, Roosevelt now knew what it must have felt like to be Ulysses S. Grant thirty years ago, creating Yellowstone. As a courtesy, Roosevelt had the signing pen shipped to Steel in Portland as a well-deserved souvenir. Applauding Roosevelt and the U.S. Geological Survey for the first-rate report, the
New York Times
described Crater Lake as a natural wonder whose “grandeur” rivaled “anything of its kind in the world.”
²⁵

II

Inspired by the saving of Crater Lake, President Roosevelt looked for another natural “wonder” to designate as a national park. The whole notion of “scenic nationalism” was in vogue.
²⁶
During the 1880s, while living in the Badlands, Roosevelt had perhaps heard about a site in the Black Hills: a “hole that breaths cool air,” considered sacred by the Lakota people.
²⁷
It was known as Wind Cave, and the Lakota believed that a beautiful woman—the “buffalo woman”—had once floated out of it to give her people bison. Other tribes believed that a demon or dragon lived in its depths. Some Native Americans believed that the cave had magical powers, that it could predict weather. They weren’t completely delusional: the cave opening did serve as a sort of primitive barometer. When the weather was good, air would blow into the cave. However, when a storm approached the low air pressure caused higher pressure to swell inside the underground cavern, causing air to be forced out in a loud, dramatic fashion.
²⁸

Even though Wind Cave is one of the longest underground mazes in the world (encompassing more than 130 miles of passages), when Jesse and Tom Bingham stumbled upon it while deer hunting in 1881 there was only one entrance: a twelve- by ten-inch “blowhole.”
²⁹
As legend has it, the air pouring out of the hole blew the Binghams’ cowboy hats off their heads, like a gust off Lake Michigan. Hoping that they had discovered a gold mine, the Binghams returned to Wind Cave the following day with curious friends, only to have their hats now sucked into the maw of the cave; the wind had shifted 180 degrees in less than twenty-four hours. The Binghams were afraid to explore the cave. Perhaps they would be attacked by bats or snakes. But Charlie Crary wasn’t hesitant. Boldly he climbed into the blowhole, as if he were Professor Lidenbrock in Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
. He unraveled a reel of twine
so that he could find his way out, and he emerged from Wind Cave unscathed and almost stuttering with excitement. His mind was dazzled by the elaborate, delicate, honeycomb-patterned boxwork he had encountered, fragile crystals deposited around like glitter. In his historical study
The National Park
, Freeman Tilden matter-of-factly describes the cavernous rooms as “lacy compartments.”
³⁰