The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (93 page)

By now George T. Emmons was sending Roosevelt regular reports about wild Alaska. They were all well-crafted, rational, and succinct. Roosevelt seemed to relish learning that the lumber companies of the territory were furious over the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve decree of 1902. Letters of protest arrived at the White House from a Protestant missionary in Fort Wrangell and a businessman in Ketchikan. A U.S. congressman took up the crusade to save Alaskan commerce from the conservationism of Emmons and Roosevelt. And, of course, the Indians were opposed to the federal government’s engaging in land grabs. Roosevelt’s response to all this blowback was predictable. On September 10, 1907, he created the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest in Southeastern Alaska, the largest ever formed. On July 1, 1908, he merged the Alexander Archipelago with the Tongass. The new Tongass National Forest—eventually 17 million acres—was a historical feat. The fjords, glaciers, and Coast Range forest were preserved.

On July 23, 1907, Roosevelt put aside another 5.4 million acres of Alaska as the Chugach National Forest. After the Tongass, it was the
second-largest national forest in America. Concerned about the wildlife in the eastern Kenai Peninsula, Prince William Sound, and Copper River delta, Roosevelt was starting to envision Alaska as one vast wilderness refuge. It would become a place for urban dwellers to replenish their spirits. Meanwhile, to protect the Chugach and the Tongass from despoilers Roosevelt approved of ranger boats to patrol the 10,000 miles of gorgeous coast, which would soon become popular with cruise lines. As Roosevelt envisioned them, these patrol boats would be something like traveling ranger stations. In Roosevelt’s Alaskan parks the motorboat had replaced the saddle and pack horses. As one early ranger in the Tongass declared, “The Alaskan ranger is just as proud of his boat as the Bedouin horseman is of his steed, and the ranger boats in Alaska are the most distinctive craft sailing the waters.”
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In 1908 the Roosevelt administration had a sixty-four-foot, seventy-five-horsepower yacht designed in Seattle to use for Forest Service duty.

Ever since his 1903 trip to California, where he saw the splendor of fogbound San Francisco Bay with the Farallon Islands rising out of the blue Pacific, the president had grown even more interested in all things Japanese. In California in 1904 there was a lot of xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment, and Roosevelt hoped to curb its ugliest manifestations by talking publicly about Japan’s virtues; that is, he hoped to ease the cultural clash. Tension was extremely high between Japan and Russia throughout the election year, over territory in Asia. On February 1 the Russian czar had said, at a dinner in the Winter Palace, “There will be no war” but a week later Japanese troops landed at Chemulpo in Korea. Japan then torpedoed the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, stunning the Russian authorities. Privately, the president liked seeing Tokyo exhibit its naval power, which was a sign of national greatness. Although, wisely, on February 11 he declared U.S. neutrality with regard to the Russo-Japanese War, he immediately started working the back channels of diplomacy, hoping to arrange for a cease-fire between the two warring countries.

An old friend of Roosevelt’s from Harvard, Kentaro Kaneko, was in the United States in early 1904, and the president feted him. To Roosevelt, Kentaro had an irresisible combination of “fine national loyalty” and “Samurai spirit.”
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Roosevelt believed the United States had much to learn from Japan, especially how to properly manage city slums; but that the Japanese, for their part, needed to find “the proper way of treating womanhood.” The Japanese island of Hokkaido had also become a hot topic for naturalist discussions at the White House. Photographs of steaming mountain peaks, active volcanoes, and beech forests that cap
tured the Japanese “garden spirit” enthralled the president. On hikes in Rock Creek Park, often with Pinchot at his side, Roosevelt, while rock climbing, would go on and on about samurai literature he had just read. That spring influenced by Japanese rice-paper drawings on display in Washington, Roosevelt began writing about flowers of the Potomac River basin—the locust trees with white blossoms and honeysuckles moving conspicuously around the south portico. He admired the way the Japanese brought nature into everything they did, filling vases with chrysanthemum flowers and growing miniature bonsai trees in offices. Although he was not a specialist on Asia, he knew something about Japanese folk ways, and he understood that Japanese artists considered humans part of nature; they cultivated the high art of thriving in harmony with animal life. Oddly, Roosevelt encouraged Russian expansion in Asia, hoping that Tokyo wouldn’t “lump” Americans together with Russians as “white devils” and as Japan’s “natural enemies.”
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From the White House, the president kept watch on the Japanese fishermen and plumers who were slaughtering wildlife around the Midway atoll. In 1859, Captain Nick Brooks had claimed the guano island of Midway for the United States. There was a marketplace demand for bird fertilizers in California, and at Midway the excrement was readily available for scooping up by the boat load. All was peaceful at Midway until President Roosevelt learned in 1903 that Japanese seafarers were killing the albatross which bred on the island. Immediately, Roosevelt dispatched twenty-one Marines to Midway to protect the albatross from slaughter.
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III

In March 1904 Pinchot had presented Roosevelt with a report which claimed that the western states and territories with the most public land were “progressing rapidly in population and wealth.” In other words, the larger the forest reserves, the more prosperity for a state or territory. The report recommended that the Timber and Stone Act and the Desert Land Act be repealed, only to prove that land was indeed being irrigated. But as a trade-off the administration called for many new forest reserves. “From 1902 to 1905, over 26 million acres were added to the national forests, and many of the reserves contained good grazing and agricultural land,” the historian Donald J. Pisani wrote in
Water, Land, Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920
. “No westerner could be sure where the process would end. Because they threatened to limit access to the public domain, both repeal of the land laws and reservation were perceived as threats to economic opportunity.”
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On April 30, 1904, President Roosevelt officially opened the Saint Louis World’s Fair that commemorated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase (the ribbon-cutting had been delayed for a year owing to construction difficulties at the fairground). A decade earlier at Chicago’s World Fair, Roosevelt had been an attraction himself, greeting guests at the Boone and Crockett Club’s log cabin, and extolling the virtues of western expansion. Now, in Saint Louis, pushing a golden button to open the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, he visited some of the nearly 150 miles of exhibits, including a stuffed Roosevelt elk. This fair popularized the hot dog, ice cream cones, iced tea, and sweet rolls. The world’s largest pipe organ thundered out songs that Roosevelt heard enthusiastically, including the triumphalist “Hymn of the West,” which was sung in his honor.
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Although Roosevelt did not overly admire Thomas Jefferson, considering him vastly overrated, he nevertheless sang Jefferson’s praises at the fair. If Jefferson had done nothing else, Roosevelt believed, acquiring the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon had been enough to ensure his greatness. The whole continent, from coast to coast, was in Jefferson’s debt. This was the same theme he had touched on the previous year when he visited Saint Louis as part of his Great Loop tour. And now, with all eyes on Missouri, that May the Olympic Games opened in Saint Louis. The United States won eighty out of 100 gold medals, though it should be noted the a separate competition was held for “uncivilized tribes” (that is, dark-skinned people).

While all these distractions were going on in Saint Louis, Roosevelt, on June 3, created his third national park: Sully’s Hill, on the south shore of Devils Lake in North Dakota, named after the Indian fighter General Alfred Sully—whose fierce battles with the Sioux peoples Roosevelt knew well. The 780-acre parcel along Devils Lake was a densely forested haven for such migratory waterfowl as wood ducks, Canada geese, American white pelicans, mallards, hooded mergansers, and dozens of other species.
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Because Sully’s Hill National Park was transferred to the National Wildlife Refuge System in 1914 (it is managed today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), it has been largely ignored by historians of American conservation. Its remote site and the fact that it’s named after a general known for Indian massacres have also given this park, in a sense, an orphaned status. Only the WPA guide for North Dakota has ever really done this hilly, serene woodland justice.
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But Roosevelt felt that by signing a proclamation for Sully’s Hill that June, he was accomplishing many goals. For starters, he was beloved throughout North Dakota, like
a favorite son. (He won the state in the 1904 presidential election by a landslide.) Roosevelt’s act on behalf of Sully’s Hill met with virtually no resistance. He was saying that North Dakota had subtle “wonders” equal to those in California, Oregon, and Wyoming. Since first visiting Fargo in 1880, Roosevelt had been enthusiastic about the Red River valley of Minnesota–North Dakota; and the tiny lakes around Sully’s Hill offered a chance for him to save a migratory bird area he treasured. Also, the wooded glacial moraine mounds of Sully’s Hill were in stark contrast to the surrounding prairies. It was an oasis for wildlife.

But mainly President Roosevelt, from reading so much about ornithology, knew that the Devils Lake area (of which Sully’s Hill was a part) provided essential bird breeding grounds in the Central Flyway. Sully’s Hill, in particular, was a favorite inland breeding ground of the American white pelican. If his administration was going to save pelicans in Florida and other Gulf states, he likewise needed to preserve the species’ northern wetlands and prairie habitats.
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Although there is no documentary evidence, Roosevelt may have created Sully’s Hill National Park in solidarity with the American Civic Association. That same June, the association, under the conservationist leadership of the newspaperman J. Horace McFarland of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, initiated a well-publicized effort for America to create more national, state, and municipal parks. A devotee of Roosevelt’s philosophy of the strenuous life, McFarland urged that all politicians should adopt parks in their home districts. The Boone and Crockett Club had inventoried all federal and state parks and, embarrassingly, North Dakota had none; making Sully’s Hill a national park changed that.
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“The steep forested hills within Sully’s Hill are a unique island of trees in North Dakota’s sea of prairies,” a local wrote in
Outdoors
magazine, “and many people enjoy the fall colors during September and October.”
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Even while campaigning Roosevelt found time to stay involved in conservation efforts regarding the Boone and Crockett Club, Sully’s Hill National Park, Alaskan lands, California’s trout, Virginia’s flowers, and the Washington Mall. And his efforts in the movement to protect wild birds increased greatly. Pelican Island had merely whetted his appetite for more federal bird reservations. Edward Howe Forbush, founder of the Massa
chusetts Audubon Society and author of
Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States
, had just released an alarming special report about the diminution of various species along the Atlantic coast. From Oyster Bay that July, the president wrote to Forbush about the wood thrushes, catbirds, meadowlarks, robins, song sparrows, chirping sparrows, and Baltimore orioles he found along the cove near Sagamore Hill. While these species seemed to be thriving on Long Island, Roosevelt worried about New England. “Are the birds,” Roosevelt asked Forbush, apparently with fingers crossed, “recovering their ground?”
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Roosevelt had encouraged states to form their own bird sanctuaries and forest reserves. Worried about the overharvesting of the Great Lakes pine forests, Roosevelt pleaded with the governors of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to create state-run reserves. Following his bear hunt in Mississippi, Roosevelt also pleaded with southern states to develop forestry programs. In 1904 Louisiana became the first southern state to do so; the last one was Arkansas in 1931. Under Pinchot’s leadership close cooperation between federal and state forest units was encouraged.
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That summer at Oyster Bay, even under the pressure of the 1904 presidential election, Roosevelt found time to write James Rudolph Garfield. It was Garfield who taught Roosevelt the point-to-point walk—how you never let any obstacle get in the way when on a hike. Besides being a hunter and birdwatcher, Garfield loved the outdoors life almost as much as Roosevelt did. And although Roosevelt was only seven years older, he felt very paternalistic toward Garfield, whose father, President Garfield, had been assassinated. “Our imitation of your point-to-point walk went off splendidly,” Roosevelt wrote to Garfield on July 13. “I had six boys with me, including all of my own excepting Quentin. We swam the millpond (which proved to be very broad and covered with duckweed), in great shape, with our clothes on. Executed an equally long but easier swim in the bay, with our clothes on; and between times had gone in a straight line through the woods, through the marshes, and up and down the bluffs. The whole thing would have been complete if the Garfield family could only have been along. I did not look exactly presidential when I got back from the walk.”
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In his letters during the summer of 1904, Roosevelt seemed prouder than ever of his work initiating conservation. Having established three new national parks in fairly short order, President Roosevelt, following Sully’s Hill, checked up on Yellowstone regarding wildlife protection management. Buffalo Jones reported back to him that the grizzlies at Yellowstone were thriving, and as a result a new problem had arisen: the bears
were rummaging through garbage dumps at an amazing rate and getting tin cans stuck in their teeth and paws. “As many as seventeen bears in an evening appear at my garbage dump,” Jones wrote to Roosevelt. “Tonight eight or ten. Campers and people not of my hotel throw things at them to make them run away. I cannot, unless there personally, control this. Do you think you could detail a trooper to be there every evening from say six o’clock until dark and make people remain behind a danger line laid out by Warden Jones? Otherwise I fear some accident. The arrest of one or two of these campers might help.”
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