The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (87 page)

Insisting on seeing the sun set from the Grand Canyon’s north rim, the warm sky ablaze with ragged bands of orange, pink, and purple, Roosevelt leaned over the ledge to soak in the drama. His train didn’t leave for Barstow until six o’clock that evening, when the dusk would have thickened. Night comes to northern Arizona fast, as if someone were blowing out a candle. Back at the White House twenty-eight days later, he kicked himself for not having allowed two or three free days to explore the canyon. At the very least, he wished Oom John had been at his side during his unforgettable afternoon there. They could have philosophized about ledges. What was becoming clear from the looping 14,000-mile railroad journey was that the beauty of the American West—the real West—once again had Roosevelt spellbound. From the Grand Canyon onward to Los Angeles, all of Roosevelt’s speeches promoted, with intense vitality, the holy trinity of irrigation, forestry, and preservation.

VI

Roosevelt was immediately mesmerized by the high, dry light and yellowish shadows of southern California’s deserts, mountains, valleys, forests, and ocean. No wonder so many people were seeking out its charms. Aridity was a problem for California, so the more forest reserves the state had, the better off it would be. After Roosevelt crossed the Mojave, his pulse quickened as his train approached the San Bernardino Valley. A skirting of timber could be seen in all directions. In his speeches, he became blunt and outspoken about keeping paradise intact. Wherever Roosevelt went in southern California that May, his popularity with children was unprecedented for a politician—they adored him. Too young to remember Lincoln or the generals of the Grand Army of the Republic, boys aged five to fifteen had adopted President Roosevelt as their generation’s George Washington. They knew nothing of Yorktown or Chancellorsville but everything about the gallantry at Kettle Hill. They were in awe of their top-hatted hero, who shouted “Dee-lighted” and “Bully!” from platforms with a theatrical roar, as if he were giving the Rough Riders the order to “Charrrge!”

Riverside. Pomona. Claremont. Pasadena. Los Angeles. Strangers came up to Roosevelt offering their goodwill. Carrying himself straight as a ramrod, the president enjoyed being a moral exemplar—he was the heir of Lincoln and Emerson with a dash of Boone for good measure. Someday historians, he knew, would tell hundreds of stories about his frenetic time in southern California, so he leaned into his own character even more extravagantly than usual. In city after city he was greeted like an American immortal, never to be laid low. On soapbox after soapbox he whipped up Californian onlookers with fine Bryanesque oratory. They could almost burn calories just watching his body language. No American president had ever expressed America’s identity in such a flamboyant, kinetic way. Whether he was lunching at the Westminster Hotel or participating in the annual Fiesta de las Flores, Roosevelt was in love with southern California, particularly the San Gabriel Mountains, which spilled in all directions. Somehow the sky over the 165,000 square miles of California seemed to dance differently from the sky in the east, Roosevelt thought, showcasing shades of blue, purple, red, and gray he’d never known before in his brief acquaintance with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.
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“I am glad, indeed, to have the chance to visit this wonderful and beautiful State,” he told a crowd of 10,000 in front of the Hotel Casa Loma in Redlands. “But for the country itself, though I had been told so much
of its beauty and its wonders, I had never realized or could not realize in advance all I have seen. Coming down over the mountain, I was impressed with the thought more and more of what can be done with the wise use of water and forests of this State. The people have grown to realize that it is indispensable to the future of the country to conserve, properly to use, the water and preserve the great mountain forests…. I think our citizens are realizing more and more that we want to perpetuate the things both of use and beauty. Beauty surely has its place, and you want to make this State more than it even now is—the garden spot of the continent.”
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Such rapturous talk about California continued as Roosevelt headed north along the Pacific coast with the powerful Transverse and Santa Lucia ranges looming on the eastward side of the tracks. Ventura. Montecito. Santa Barbara. San Luis Obispo. To promote the Santa Inez and Pile Mountain forest reserves, Roosevelt asked that the U.S. government rangers serve as his special guard. This was a smart, visual way to help locals understand that rangers were akin to the police. According to the
New York Times
Roosevelt was in his “best spirits” ever, enthralled by the Pacific blue and bleached skies, the wildlife-thick Channel Islands, the pock-marked Franciscan missions dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the flocks of gulls. And for once, reporters didn’t have to hurry up and wait. They could bank on Roosevelt’s punctuality. Perhaps because Roosevelt was praising Catholics while he was in California, the Vatican announced that a special goodwill letter was on its way to the White House from Pope Leo XIII.
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By the time Roosevelt arrived in Santa Clara County, most Californians were eager to impress him. Already he had become close to the locals. His almost magical personal charm had worked wonders. Californians in effect crowned him king of the sequoias. With U.S. Army forest rangers at his side he toured the gorgeous seaside sites around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. There were shifting seascapes, coastal pines, crashing waves, expansive ocean views, hulking rocks, dizzying cliffs, and grass-covered headlands ornamented with purple and yellow wildflowers. Seeing the Pacific Ocean in all its glory buoyed Roosevelt; it allowed him to believe that all his pro-western expansionist views since childhood had been spot-on. Could anybody imagine America without California? With a burst of nationalistic enthusiasm, Roosevelt proclaimed that every seal rock or lone cypress he saw was a U.S. treasure. The groves of sequoias, in particular, filled him with unmitigated joy. No photograph, he said, could possibly do them justice. “You have a wonderful State,” Roosevelt
proclaimed on May 11. “I am glad to see your big trees and to see that they are being preserved. They should be, as they are the heritage of the ages. They should be left unmarred for our children and our children’s children, and so on down the ages.”
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Accompanying Roosevelt on this leg of the California tour was Columbia University’s president Nicholas Murray Butler, whose unobtrusive intelligence the president enjoyed. (Butler didn’t seem to mind that Roosevelt, on May 14, received an honorary law doctorate from a rival of Columbia, University of California–Berkeley.
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) Following an alfresco luncheon in Santa Cruz with naval reservists, Roosevelt, as he would do again in the coming days, threw away his planned remarks and spoke spontaneously about the ethical imperative of saving sequoias and redwoods. They seemed rarer to Roosevelt than a centaur, a hippogriff, or a winged donkey. “This is my first glimpse of the big trees. I desire to pay tribute to the associations, private owners, and State for preserving these trees.”
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However, Roosevelt believed that the redwoods’ protectors—well-meaning conservationist citizens all—had demeaned the lordly trees by hammering placards on them such as “Big Pete,” “Old Fremont,” or “Uncle John.” The sight of these advertisements fretted and annoyed Roosevelt. Even though he posed in front of one bearing such a sign—“Giant”—he thought the practice tasteless. “Let me preach to you a moment,” Roosevelt said. “All of us desire to see nature preserved. Above all, the trees should not be marred by placing cards of names on them. People who do that should be sternly discouraged. The cards give an air of ridicule to the solemn and majestic giants. They should be taken down. I ask you to keep all cards off the trees, or any kind of signs that will mar them. See to it that the trees are preserved: that the gift is kept unmarred. You can never replace a tree. Oh, I am pleased to be here among these wonderful redwoods. I thank you for giving me this enjoyment. Preserve and keep what nature has done.”
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Then Roosevelt requested that he be given private time alone in a redwood grove for reverie. After all, he was in one of God’s great cathedrals, and he wanted to wander in solitude, listening only to the song sparrows and orange-crowned warblers in absolute allegiance with enchanted nature. Truly he was in a state of astonishment, looking upward as the elfin light beamed in between the sequoias. The trees had a dwarfing effect; a single redwood weighed about 3,000 tons. To Roosevelt they were priceless when standing tall and irrecoverable if fallen. As the president disappeared deeper into the forest his personal secretary, William Loeb, led a
spontaneous community effort to remove all the commercialized signs that had desecrated the trees. When he returned from his hike, Roosevelt accepted the honor of having a redwood named after him. There was, however, a nonnegotiable condition: no sign reading “Roosevelt Tree” would ever be posted. He couldn’t stomach such an insult in his name. Everybody agreed to the terms, and that vaguely comforted the president. Still, he warned that thirsty timber jackals would someday come after the sequoias with industrial saws. Californians, he believed, had a patriotic obligation to defend them.

Following a conservation speech in San Jose, Roosevelt asked that more redwoods be added to the itinerary. He simply couldn’t see enough of these ancient sentinels. Each tree—some had a diameter of thirty feet—had its own wondrous personality. The redwoods dwarfed all the trees of the Catskills and the Adirondacks. While he was touring the Santa Cruz mountains, especially those near Boulder Creek and Felton, he started calling the redwoods “giants.” During the coming days he would meet fruit growers, ranchers, fishermen, and a woman from Watsonville who had thirty-four children. He spoke at Stanford University and in affluent Burlingame (commonly called “City of the Trees”). But all he could
really
talk about was the utter majesty of the
Sequoia sempervirens
, which John Steinbeck would later call “ambassadors from another time.” (Or, as Burroughs was fond of saying, they were “living joys, something to love.”
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) It sickened Roosevelt to think that redwood raiders were clear-cutting these old-growth trees for house decks and unnecessary porches (redwood was a prized luxury wood because it didn’t rot). In a speech on May 13 at Stanford University, where the president of the university, David Starr Jordan, introduced him, Roosevelt gave a long address about Congress saving the wilderness heritage. The coastal hills and groves of California, Roosevelt said, needed increased permanent preservation by the federal government.

When Roosevelt arrived in San Francisco for a three-day visit, more than 200,000 people lined the streets to see him. They admired his courage on the battlefield, his reforming spirit, his pluck, his humor, and his ambition, and they were impressed by his national celebrity. San Francisco also held a parade in his honor, but the main event was a dedication of a monument to Admiral Dewey at Union Square. For this dedication, sleeping mats had been unrolled on the sidewalks so that women wouldn’t get their dresses dirty. Everyone waited for the president’s triumphant wave of the fist—a gesture he had adopted since his days of boxing at Harvard. The entire Bay Area seemed aroused by the event. Civil War
veterans offered snappy salutes to Roosevelt as if he were the head of an old soldiers’ home—a position far more impressive to them than the presidency. In the most pugnacious speech of his western trip, delivered from a hastily constructed platform at the Mechanics’ Pavilion, Roosevelt declared that America’s destiny was on the Pacific Ocean. “Before I saw the Pacific slope I was an expansionist,” he said, “and after having seen it I fail to understand how—any man confident of his country’s greatness and glad that his country should challenge with proud confidence our mighty future—can be anything but an expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the progress of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the history of the world.”
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And the Californians cheered: the oyster pirates from Oakland, the grape growers of Napa Valley, the lumbermen from Marin County, the ragtag orphans from North Beach, the horse breeders from the San Joaquin Valley, the naval officers stationed at the Presidio, the old-time rustics from Point de Reyes, the fishermen from Sausalito, the dandies from Nob Hill, the restaurateurs from Chinatown, the academics from Berkeley, the avocado growers from Fallbrook, the raisin pickers from Fresno, the eggheads from Menlo Park, the flower merchants from Ventura, the old-time miners from the Sierras, and the buffalo soldiers providing backup Secret Service duty, in addition to every state bureaucrat and politician able to walk. A few Rough Riders had ventured north from Arizona—using their veterans’ pensions for train fare—hoping to rekindle remembrance of and pride in the Spanish-American War. And nature helped Roosevelt out. The May inrush of Pacific breeze stimulated the rally like a tonic. Newspapers tried to capture the collective energy of the throng, which hummed with the force of a bass organ pipe from Union Square all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

That May 13 in San Francisco marked the apogee of Roosevelt’s eventful days as president. All his nationalistic notions, it seemed, were pulled together into a credible narrative for the United States. To Roosevelt the main thrust of American history was western expansionism. The wars with Indians, redcoats, Mexicans, and Spaniards had been worth it. With the building of the Panama Canal the United States would have a two-ocean navy. With Hawaii and the Philippines the nation had steppingstone ports for the fabled China trade. America wasn’t going to be denied its economic empire. And California, he believed, was the gold star of empire. Of course, national politics was full of drum-beating American expansionists, imperialists, and proponents of manifest destiny. What was unique about President Roosevelt was his righteous insistence that Yel
lowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the redwoods, Mount Olympus, the Painted Desert and so on were the rightful trophies of expansionism. As a conquering conservationist-preservationist he wanted them all saved. At a banquet at Cliff House, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt vowed that the aboriginal American spirit toward the wilderness had to flourish in the twentieth century. Nature was the great replenisher for the American people. His spirit deeply inspired by the beauty of the West, Roosevelt was a rare instance of constructive hyper-Americanism, since his message was that your state has something far more valuable than gold: green forests, sour green glades, box canyons, high plateaus, granitescapes, and lookouts around every bend. When it came to nature preservation, Roosevelt gushed a positively progressive effect onto the collective American psyche.