The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (86 page)

After winning the hearts and minds of Denver, Roosevelt was off to the New Mexico Territory, where statehood was still pending. When Roosevelt had attended the Rough Riders’ first reunion in 1899 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, he hadn’t had time to visit the Old Spanish mission town of Santa Fe, which was off the beaten path. Originally, Santa Fe was meant to be a booming railroad stop on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line, but the civil engineers instead chose Lamy, to its south. Now, after finally seeing the fascinating San Miguel chapel (oldest edifice in the United States), Loreto chapel, and La Fonda on the Santa Fe Plaza, Roosevelt better understood why the archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett (then age thirty-nine) wanted these sixteenth-century structures saved for posterity. Furthermore, to Roosevelt’s mind New Mexico was the pocket where many other prehistoric treasures were kept. Hewett was pushing for the timeworn ruins of the Pajarita plateau, in particular, to become a national park. Congressman Lacey had visited the Pajarito in 1902, with Hewett as guide. Forging a formidable league, Lacey and Hewett reported to Roosevelt that the pot hunters and artifact vandals had to be put out of business. Hewett started working on a special report offering ideas on how to stop the desecration of these New Mexican sites once and for all.

Although he was in Santa Fe for only three or four hours, Roosevelt made it a point to visit the New Mexico Historical Society’s museum, probably with the idea of writing another volume of
The Winning of the West
, about Kit Carson, during his postpresidential years. Santa Fe intrigued Roosevelt because it had been permanently settled in 1610, before either the founding of Jamestown or the Pilgrims’ landing in Plymouth. Roosevelt knew he would have to move quickly to save New Mexico’s earth-toned adobe buildings. That safeguard task would indeed become a priority following the 1904 election. Wearing a white Stetson, he was playing Pat Garrett in the land of Billy the Kid. Speaking to some 10,000 people in front of the territorial capitol, Roosevelt proclaimed the benefits of “forest preservation.” Having huge reserves, he said, would be a
prerequisite
to New Mexican statehood.
⁷³

In the old town of Albuquerque Roosevelt, with Governor Miguel Otero at his side, inquired about the various southwest Indian ruins in the territory that Congressman Lacey had been pestering him to preserve, such
as Chaco Canyon and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The tireless Hewett, in a series of fine articles, had proposed establishing national cultural history parks in the Southwest. Hewett warned that vandals were looting pottery and old cooking utensils from the sites, sometimes using dynamite to blow holes in archaic dwellings. Without federal protection
soon
, there would be nothing left of these antiquities and their sites. In Utah, reports were coming out about petroglyphs 4,000 years old.
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Hewett, whose nickname in archaeological circles was “El Torro,” had legions of friends—and enemies. Roosevelt was squarely in the camp of his friends. Even though Hewett was disliked by governors, ranchers, and landowners in New Mexico, Roosevelt saw him as a territorial treasure in his own right. All of Roosevelt’s communication with Hewett was through Lacey. Generally speaking, Roosevelt supported saving all the prehistoric ruins in the Southwest as quickly as possible.

New Mexico’s current motto, “Land of Enchantment,” is not its first. An earlier motto was “The Land of Sunshine,” which Roosevelt found appealing and true.
⁷⁵
The mild, dry weather of New Mexico served as a balm. Little girls dressed in wedding-dress white made sweet appeals to Roosevelt for New Mexico’s statehood, singing patriotic ballads for his pleasure. All the president could do was beam. He gave a spectacular speech in the Old Town followed by luminaries at sunset around the plaza casting everything in a golden glow.

Then, leaving Albuquerque at dusk, the Pacific Coast Special headed for the Grand Canyon. A quick stopover was made in the Painted Desert during the early morning. Roosevelt had time for nothing more than a few inhales and a surveyor-like scan of the flatness. Congressman Lacey had been telling Roosevelt about the Petrified Forest of Arizona and the president now got a feel for the topography under the entrancing moonlight. (A few years later Muir would come to the Petrified Forest to study fossils and draw up a map for upholding the area as a national park.) Arriving in Flagstaff at nine o’clock on the morning of May 6, waking up to the light of the sun, Roosevelt felt well rested. Surrounding him were Merriam’s San Francisco Peaks (where Merriam, as head of the Biological Survey, had first discovered this stratification of life zone in 1898). In Flagstaff, the world was full of geological possibilities. Roosevelt had clearly left the hysteria of national politics back in Washington, D.C., 1,900 miles away. He felt isolated and happy. Glory to the West! Glory to John Wesley Powell! Glory to the Arizona Territory! Glory to the Grand Canyon, which at long last he was going to see! Roosevelt was in a glorious frame of mind.

Roosevelt standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with Governor Brodie of the Arizona Territory
.
T.R. standing at the Grand Canyon. (
Courtesy of the National Park Service
)

V

The president’s arrival at the Grand Canyon (or the Big Ditch, as locals called it) on the morning of May 6 would, in retrospect, become one of the greatest days in environmental history. The Grand Canyon seemed as if it had been born of a cataclysm, with no eyewitnesses or reliable records. Amaranth in color, with a weird purple-orange glow, it also seemed cosmic, full of yearnings and teachings. In
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
Roosevelt called the Grand Canyon “the most wonderful scenery in the world.” He also declared that “to all else that is strange and beautiful in nature the Canyon stands as Karnak and Baalbec, seen by moonlight, stand to all other ruined temples and palaces of the bygone ages.”
⁷⁶

Many Rough Riders were there that May to stand and gaze at the canyon with him. David Warford was among them.
⁷⁷
It is not hyperbole to say that Roosevelt’s jaw dropped in disbelief. The geologist Clarence Dutton—whose
Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District
Roosevelt had recently read—called this dynamic chasm of the earth’s surface “a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery,” adding that “its full appreciation is a special culture, requiring time, patience, and long familiarity for its consummation.”
⁷⁸
Roosevelt now understood what Dutton meant. He had long suspected that the Grand Canyon was the premier natural wonder in America, and now his hunch had been confirmed. He was
dying to learn more of its geological secrets. Staring over the ledge of the Grand Canyon made the heart stop at the
immensity
of it all.

What disturbed Roosevelt, however, was that the Arizona territory was
debating
whether to preserve the canyon or mine it for zinc, copper, asbestos, etc. Preservation in this case was so obvious that even engaging in debate seemed almost criminal. To Roosevelt, the Grand Canyon was beyond debate by the locals: it must become the exclusive property of the United States to be saved for future generations. Roosevelt immediately resolved to make it a national park following the 1904 election. Thereafter, only horse trails would be allowed. “In a few places the forest is dense,” Roosevelt wrote, “[but] in most places it is sufficiently open to allow a mountain-horse to twist in and out among the tree trunks at a smart canter.”
⁷⁹

Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Grand Canyon was uncompromising: he flat-out refused to let corporate avarice or citizens’ ineptitude desecrate the greatest American treasure. He’d go through all the proper motions of getting Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park, and if it refused, an executive order would prevail. Roosevelt vowed to make sure that Arizona’s developers never drilled an inch of the Grand Canyon. He hoped his presidential visit would start a widespread grassroots movement to preserve it all—every damn acre in the 1,904 square miles—for perpetuity. Public education in Arizona had to be initiated at once. Too many Arizonans simply looked at the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt scolded, instead of
living
within its geological essence. The Rough Riders who greeted Roosevelt—by and large the most popular public figures in Arizona—were his first line of preservationist defense. They would ride over any ridge for their beloved colonel. Now, in a public forum, Roosevelt suddenly found himself asking them to crusade with him again, this time on behalf of preserving the magnificent Grand Canyon, which developers denigrated as useless, like Death Valley.

“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it,” Roosevelt, at the rim, urged the crowd of Arizonans. “In your own interest and the interest of all the country keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you won’t have a building of any kind to mar the grandeur and sublimity of the cañon. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children’s children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see.”
⁸⁰

This speech, for which all the leading Arizonan politicians were in the audience, marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s ceaseless determination
to save the canyon from destruction. Overawed by its immensity, enjoying even the ground squirrels running across the naked rock, Roosevelt was in rapture. There is something about the Grand Canyon’s power that makes one consider immortality. It was grander than all the music Roosevelt had heard; it was finer than all the Transcendental poetry he had read. John Burroughs had written in
Locusts and Wild Honey
about the gospel of the ledge, which was nothing less than “eternity” Roosevelt now understood what Oom John had meant.
⁸¹
To Roosevelt’s mind this ledge was a no-growth zone. If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president, his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents. Middle Granite Gorge, the Redwall Cliffs of Havasu Falls, Kaibab Plateau, Marble Canyon, Mount Trumball—all topographically part of what would become the Grand Canyon National Park—became treasured places that miners or loggers would never lay to waste, thanks to Roosevelt’s strenuous advocacy. Even industrial activity anywhere near the Grand Canyon wasn’t acceptable to Roosevelt. If Carlyle was correct in saying that all history is forged by the deeds of great men, then Roosevelt earned his place in the American pantheon by simply refusing to let commercial interests desecrate the Grand Canyon.

Clearly, to Roosevelt the Grand Canyon was more than a weather-worn chasm or scarred ledge cutting deep into a mountainous region. It was one the world’s most spectacular examples of the power of erosion. Time was on display at the canyon as nowhere else. At the comfortable El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim, Roosevelt—seeing the Grand Canyon as a symbol of unifying nationalism after the Civil War—told a reporter for the
New York Sun
that it was one of the “great sights every American should see.”
⁸²
Once again, the president sounded like a Baedeker guide to the West. Instead of considering the canyon as just a singular natural wonder (like Crater Lake or Wind Cave), he saw it as an irreplaceable part of the Colorado Plateau landscape, which covered approximately 13,000 square miles in northern Arizona, western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and eastern Utah. At meetings of the Boone and Crockett Club he used to insist that Yellowstone was the finest geological site in America, but now he knew better. Taken as a whole, the Colorado Plateau included the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Glen Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, the Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Arches, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, San Francisco Peaks, Oak Great Canyon, and dozens of other sedimentary attractions. What a
stunning terrain! What a watershed! Although Roosevelt had extensive experiences in the Dakota Badlands moonscape, the Colorado Plateau was beyond anything he’d ever fathomed.
⁸³

The plant life around the Grand Canyon also greatly interested Roosevelt, despite his weakness in the realm of southwestern botany. He could identify only 100 or so of the 1,500 species of plants found around the canyon’s rim. He could, however, name most of the 300 types of birds that inhabited the area. The sharp-skinned hawk flying above the South Rim he knew would be headed to Central America come fall, and the broad-tailed hummingbirds that whirred about the Hotel Tovar had arrived because the persimmons had started to bloom. The Townsend’s solitaires and Clark’s nutcrackers simply did not migrate: they changed elevations as the weather changed.
⁸⁴
He didn’t have to be William Rand or Andrew McNally to know that the abrasive Colorado River didn’t start or end in the Grand Canyon. But an impressive 277 twisting miles of the Colorado coursed through the Grand Canyon; it was considered the most exhilarating whitewater run in the American West. Peering down at the immense canyon floor, Roosevelt understood that a working naturalist would try to comprehend the ecosystem from the bottom up. Unfortunately, as a president on the run, he didn’t have the time for a careful scientific approach. But the Grand Canyon was the vortex of America’s four great deserts—Great Basin, Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahuan—and this explained why dozens of cactus species, all amazingly adaptable, many still without names, appeared all around him on the rim. And he vowed to return to the Grand Canyon with his sons.