Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (14 page)

To some degree, they had to be tougher. Female explorers were often ostracized and denigrated by their male peers (one of Archibald’s fellow travelers fumed in a letter home about being stuck with “strong willed women and weak-minded men”), their clothing was traditionally less suitable for rugged travel than garments worn by men (the most scandalous and politically radical aspect of Archibald’s journey was her dressing in pantlike “bloomers”), and they had to constantly guard against sexual assault and harassment. No accounts suggest that Archibald was subjected to either, but she modestly alluded to her appeal among the Native Americans. “One Indian wanted to trade [me for] two squaws,” she wrote, while others “approaching the wagon made signs for me to jump behind them on their ponies.” Archibald declined with a polite shake of the head. (I’ve only seen one picture of her, and in my opinion she looks like the movie star Julia Roberts.)

Memorials nationwide pay homage to Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, and Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s indispensable Shoshone guide, all of whom charted new trails at enormous risk. But Julia Archibald remains largely forgotten, along with dozens of other intrepid women. Amanda Berry Smith, a former slave, crisscrossed four continents in the late nineteenth century as a missionary and educator, and her autobiography contains some of the earliest writings by any American on customs and daily life in remote African villages. Inspired by her globe-trotting father, Hawaiian-born Annie Montague Alexander traveled almost nonstop gathering fossils and hunting live animals for scientific study. She donated her massive collection along with considerable funding to create the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, both in Berkeley, California. While Alexander was digging up bones and shooting wild animals (the Alaskan bear
Ursus alexandrae
is named after her), botanist Ynes Mexia was logging
thousands of miles in Mexico and South America collecting 150,000 plant specimens. And in the spirit of Julia Archibald, a fifty-eight-year-old mountaineer named Annie Smith Peck was the first person of either gender to summit Peru’s 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán. A year later, in 1909, she planted a
VOTES FOR WOMEN
banner atop Peru’s Mount Coropuna.

In her August 5 letter from Pikes Peak’s summit, Archibald lamented her inability to adequately convey the “beauty and grandeur” around her. Thirty-four years later, a Wellesley College professor followed in Archibald’s footsteps on July 22, 1893, and articulated the sentiments that had so eluded her predecessor. “It was then and there [on Pikes Peak],” Katharine Lee Bates recalled, “as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Bates immediately began jotting down verses. Unsatisfied, though, with her first draft, she tinkered with it for two years before publishing the poem. “O beautiful for halcyon skies,” it began,

Bates revised it several times before finalizing the version of “America the Beautiful” we sing today. A giant, three-paneled memorial at the summit pays tribute to Bates, but there’s no mention of Archibald anywhere.

When our train left this morning the temperature was in the high seventies. Here it’s in the low fifties. My T-shirt provides little protection against the stinging wind, and in no time I’m shivering so hard that I can barely hold my camera steady. There’s at least another five
minutes to go before we’re supposed to be back on the train (“If you’re late, you’ll be left behind,” Erin cheerfully warned us), and I doubt I’ll be able to return here anytime soon. So this is really my only chance to photograph this historic view and fully take in the moment.

My teeth start chattering uncontrollably. I think of Julia Archibald spending two whole freezing nights up here and try to convince myself to tough it out for the remaining few minutes.

Another blast of cold air whips across the observation deck. Instinctively my shoulders hunch, and I cross my arms tightly against my chest. That does it for me. With head and pride hung low, I bolt for the train.

NO MAJOR TRIBUTES
were ever carved on “the tablets of memory” for Madison Grant commensurate with his lifelong dedication to saving America’s wilderness. No bronze plaques mark the
homes in which Grant lived, and there are no mountains, valleys, glaciers, parks, hospitals, trails, or highways named in his honor. (There is a Madison Grant elk refuge somewhere in California’s Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, paid for by his brother after Grant died in 1937, but when I called the park, no one on staff had heard of it.) Nor is the Madison-Grant High School in Fairmount, Indiana, related to the man; Madison and Grant, a school administrator informed me, are simply the town’s two neighboring counties. Whatever public memorials to Grant do exist are so obscure as to be essentially invisible.

Grant’s name first came to my attention while I was researching the pantheon of nature lovers who led America’s nascent conservation and preservation movements. (Although the words are often used interchangeably now, they weren’t originally synonymous:
conservation
meant the responsible management of wild habitats to ensure their long-term sustainability for the benefit of humans, especially hunters and fishermen, while
preservation
was about safeguarding these places for their own sake. The modern environmental movement is more closely associated with the latter.) And I was struck by how many of them were city boys, and, specifically, native New Yorkers. Along with Grant, the prestigious group included President Teddy Roosevelt; Wilderness Society founder Bob Marshall, who has a million-acre Montana preserve named for him; artist William Henry Jackson, whose 1871 photographs of Yellowstone galvanized congressional support for the national parks and who has Jackson Point in the Grant Tetons and Mount Jackson in Yellowstone named in his honor; and anthropologist and naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who has a mountain and a glacier in Montana dedicated to him. Grinnell founded the Audubon Society in 1886 and was an early advocate of saving the American bison.

Pulling the bison back from the precipice of extinction is, in particular, one of the most extraordinary reversals in preservation history. An iconic photograph from the 1880s shows a gigantic mound, about forty feet tall and several hundred feet around, of what appear to be bright white rocks. Its size can be roughly estimated by the two unidentified gentlemen in dark suits posing next to and on top of it. What the men
are posing with, in fact, is a small mountain made entirely of the skulls of slaughtered bisons.

Tens of millions of these animals once populated North America, but by the early 1900s, a mere one thousand of them remained. Ranchers and railroad companies wiped them out in droves to prevent the massive beasts from trampling their property, and hunters shot and sold them for their meat, hides (to make robes), tongues (considered a delicacy), bones (to be ground up into fertilizer), and horns (for umbrella handles).

At the forefront of the bison-rescue effort was Madison Grant. Working with Grinnell, Teddy Roosevelt, and the New York Zoological Society director William Hornaday, Grant was instrumental in establishing the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Montana’s National Bison Range, South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Game Preserve, and Nebraska’s Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge as safe havens for the animals. There are now approximately half a million bison in America.

Despite his role in raising critical funds, helping to organize the American Bison Society, and educating Congress and the public about the animal’s urgent plight, Grant has been largely ignored. Partly this was his own fault. According to his acquaintances, Grant was a modest soul who gave few newspaper interviews and was quite content to let Grinnell, Roosevelt, and Hornaday garner the lion’s share of attention.

A later battle for imperiled redwood trees, however, drew Grant front and center. “The impending destruction of these forests is the most serious question confronting California in the effort for the preservation of some portion of her vast inheritance,” Grant warned in the June 1920 issue of
National Geographic
. He then expounded on the history of the redwoods and their irreplaceable environmental and aesthetic worth. “The cutting of a Sequoia for grape stakes or railroad ties,” Grant argued,

At the end of the seventeen-page spread, Grant emphasized the “sentimental considerations” for ensuring the redwoods’ survival. “No one who has seen these groves,” he stated confidently, “can fail to love them.”

Sentimentality itself must have momentarily gotten the better of Grant because he knew this wasn’t true. Plenty of logging executives had visited these same woods and seen only a cash crop. Gold lured the first wave of prospectors to California in the 1850s, but the “Redwoods Rush” that followed was equally (if not more) profitable. Within three decades, hundreds of sawmills had popped up in the region to cut and grind giant redwoods into lumber that was prized for both its beauty and its durability. From cradle to casket, the booming American population was dependent on redwood-based products, furniture, buildings, and homes. In the early 1900s, 95 percent of the original forests were leveled, and the timber barons themselves were predicting that, to meet demand, the rest would be gone within sixty years.

Aghast at such a notion, Grant co-founded the Save the Redwoods League in 1918 with the paleontologists John C. Merriam and Henry Fairfield Osborn and proposed that the federal government use eminent domain to protect the trees, which all grew on private property. Grant, however, experienced staunch resistance to this suggestion, even among the League’s own board of directors.

Then he had a brainstorm: Grant would appeal to his wealthy friends and colleagues to purchase from the landowners parcels of forests, or “memorial groves” as Grant called them, that would be maintained by the Save the Redwoods League in perpetuity. John C. Phillips, a Grant acquaintance who also served on the League’s board, agreed to buy a
thirty-five-acre grove as a tribute to his brother-in-law Colonel Raynal C. Bolling, the first high-ranking officer killed in World War I. “Colonel Bolling and his comrades dedicated their lives to their country,” Grant remarked in a moving speech at the August 6, 1921, ceremony. “Let us dedicate ourselves to the task of keeping and preserving in its natural beauty a country which is worth fighting for.” There are now almost one thousand of these memorial groves representing more than one million acres of redwood forests.

The corner of Seventy-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan hardly looks like an epicenter for America’s early environmental movement, but it was from his home at 960 Fifth Avenue, as well as his office at the New York Zoological Society (which he cofounded and which is now the Bronx Zoo), that Madison Grant worked day and night to save endangered lands and species.

Had he wished, he could have lived a life of pampered self-indulgence. Born about a half mile from here into enormous wealth and privilege, Grant was educated by private tutors and traveled the world before attending Yale University, from where he was graduated with honors, and Columbia Law School.

“What’s going on, my friend?” a burly doorman asks me after I’ve paced back and forth in front of the stately Upper East Side residence a few times to verify the address and find the best angle from which to photograph the building. I realize my wandering to and fro probably makes it seem like I’m casing the joint.

“I’m traveling the country looking for unmarked historical sites,” I explain, “and this is one of them.”

“Just don’t shoot any of the people coming in or out,” he says.

I assure him I will not.

Grant died here on May 30, 1937. Despite suffering from acute arthritis, up until the end of his life he was planning a trip to attend a conservation seminar in Berlin and exerting considerable energy helping newly created international organizations rescue species around the world at risk of dying out. His participation was critical in protecting,
among many other animals, Sudanese white rhinos, koalas, African elephants, South African mountain zebras, and tortoises from the Galápagos Islands.

Unmarried, Grant had no children to promote his legacy, and while alive he was more comfortable advancing the issues he held dear, rather than himself. Though mostly forgotten now, he did not die in complete obscurity. “
MADISON GRANT, 71, ZOOLOGIST IS DEAD—SAVED REDWOOD TREES
,” a long, glowing
New York Times
obituary announced. “Mr. Grant was born at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-third Street on Nov. 19, 1865,” the obituary continued. “Finding it unnecessary to earn a living, Mr. Grant turned a childhood interest in wild life into practical use. He first took up field zoology and then explored the scientific field of the higher forms of wild life [… and] is credited with the discovery of a number of North American mammals.”