The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (129 page)

Many of the “crowded hour reserves” were in places Roosevelt knew personally, particularly the Bighorn Forest in Montana, the Bitterroot in Montana-Idaho, and the Teton in Wyoming. In the 1890s, Roosevelt had written a series of essays about all three for his celebrated Dakota trilogy. New Ranger stations were ordered built in 1908, sometimes three or four per forest. Some of the Crowded Hour Reserves forests had begun as suggestions by his friends. For example, the ornithologist William Finley of Oregon successfully sponsored Malheur, Umatilla, Suislaw, Cascade, Umpqua, Siskiyou, Crater, and Wallowa national forests in his state. In the exhilarating rush of creation on July 1, two prime national forest sites in Oregon had been left off the list: Deschutes and Fremont. Pinchot worked quickly to correct the situation, and added them to the list of forest reserves on July 14. Judged purely on the basis of their size and scope, Roosevelt’s Crowded Hour Reserves were among the most important designations in the annals of American forest and wilderness preservation.

The jam of Crowded Hour Reserves animated the U.S. Forest Service as never before. Waves of new applications for positions as rangers and superintendents came pouring onto Pinchot’s desk. Working for Roosevelt to protect national forests was suddenly considered a great honor. Take, for example, Clinton G. Smith of North Cornwall, Connecticut, a first-generation student of Yale Forestry School. On August 1, 1908, he was made supervisor of Pocatello National Forest in Utah (which had been established in March 1907 but was expanded on July 1, 1908, to include Port Neuf National Forest and part of Bear River National Forest). Smith’s prescribed duties were to protect vast acres of the Crowded Hour Reserves, he also started teaching people in Idaho and Utah about silviculture. Over time, Smith became a member of the District Investigative Committee of the Forest Service, prosecuting abusers of the public domain in towns like Malad City, Montpelier, and Soda Springs.
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What should historians make of the Crowded Hour Reserves of July 1, 1908? In March 1903, Roosevelt had lectured before the Society of American Foresters (of which he was an associate member) about his intentions regarding resource management. He had forcefully advanced the argument that forestry was vital to all Americans, particularly those who lived in the arid West. To Roosevelt, the dryness of the West was the worst impediment to the region’s long-term prospects. But by a wise combination of forest reserves and man-made reservoirs, westerners could transform their arid homesteads into lush, Edenic communities. Because Roosevelt was creating national parks, national monuments, and federal bird reservations, all of which were preservationist measures, he didn’t want his Crowded Hour Reserves to be misrepresented as just another sop to wilderness activists. These dozens of new and enlarged national forests would, in the long run, economically sustain a thriving American West. “The object is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself, nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself,” Roosevelt explained. “[B]ut the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy in the United States, is the making of a prosperous home.”
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VI

His correspondence during the summer of 1908 shows that Roosevelt grew excited by the prospect of once again being a naturalist, after the end of his presidency. From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt made arrangements with Charles Doolittle Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, to sponsor his field collecting in Africa just a few weeks after he
stepped down as president. Roosevelt planned to write articles for
Outlook
and a book for Scribner’s about his experiences in British East Africa, the Congo, and Egypt. He wanted Walcott to suggest professional taxidermists and naturalists to accompany him on his safari. All specimens collected by the Roosevelt expedition would be donated to the Smithsonian Institution and other important American museums. Roosevelt’s mission was simple: for America to have the best natural history collections in the world. Because 1908 was an election year, Roosevelt was looking forward to handing the reins of his party to the presumptive Republican nominee, William Howard Taft. “I would a great deal rather have this a scientific trip, which would give it a purpose of character, than simply a prolonged holiday of mine!” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge over the summer. “I am no longer fit to do arduous exploring work, and this will probably be about the last time that I shall be fit even for the moderate kind of trip I have planned. But it seems to me that there is something worth doing to be done along the lines I have laid out—something that is still the work of a man of action; and I should like to remain a man of action as long as possible.”
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Roosevelt felt confident that the American people would elect Taft over William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee. Perhaps with this in mind, the president spent almost as much time, it seemed, hiring his African expedition team as he did stumping for Taft. He gave no outward signs of guilt, hesitation, or concern over misplaced priorities. After reading the zoologist Edgar Alexander Mearns’s
Mammals of the Mexican Boundary of the United States
(1907), Roosevelt appointed Mearns as chief naturalist and physician for the African expedition. Mearns had acquired his impressive reputation while on duty as a major in the Philippines. Wielding a machete with the same prowess as Bill Sewall using an ax, he was the ideal lead scout for jungle exploration. Roosevelt also extended an invitation to two younger American Darwinian naturalists: J. Alden Loring (an authority on small mammals), and Edmund Heller (the Chicago Field Museum’s specialist on big game). Heller in particular interested Roosevelt, as he had been trained on an extended expedition to the Galápagos.
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Mearns, Loring, and Heller were all fine taxidermists, and taxidermy was a skill crucial to the expedition’s serious work. As this was taking place, Roosevelt wrote more than thirty letters about the African trip to Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History, oftentimes asking him for such hard-to-find items as books on Ugandan gorillas and snakes of the Nile River.
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And Roosevelt gladly accepted an invitation, offered annually to naturalists of high esteem,
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to deliver the prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford University for 1910. The world-renowned biologist Thomas Huxley had previously delivered the lectures, so Roosevelt was immensely pleased.

When he returned to the White House from Sagamore Hill in September 1908, Roosevelt met with Congressman John Lacey to discuss possible southwestern Indian ruins in need of rescue by the federal government. Lacey also promoted the admirable idea of preserving the crumbling Spanish colonial missions of Arizona in Tumacacori, along the border with Mexico: Santos Angeles de Guevavi and San Cayetano de Calabazas. To save these adobe-style architectural gems, the federal government would need to seize them. Until this time, no historic Spanish buildings or structures had been declared national monuments, but the Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde had been designated part of a national park, and Roosevelt was now smitten with the idea of Tumacacori. The memory of Spanish rule in Arizona shouldn’t be effaced by misplaced national pride or triumphalism. Americans needed to better understand the decades when imperial Spain colonized parts of their Southwest. On September 15, Roosevelt signed the Tumacacori National Monument into law. One signature designated three landmarks.

The first weeks of September were exceptionally busy for Roosevelt.
Collier
’s was publishing an essay by Jack London, “The Other Animals,” in which London attempted to cut Roosevelt down to size for attacking the realism of his fictional dogs—a point of great pride for him—and for calling him a “nature faker.” London skewered Roosevelt for supposedly stating that animals did not reason, were below mankind in the biological pecking order, and could perform only mechanical and reflexive actions. London believed that accident counted for much in nature and that Roosevelt’s certainty was arrogant.

London insisted that his two novels about dogs—
Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
—were consistent with evolution. He had been in Hawaii when he heard that Roosevelt considered him a nature-faker. Embarrassed, London said he had “climbed into my tree and stayed there.” But by the time he sailed to Tahiti on the
Snark
, London was ready to exchange blows with both Roosevelt and Burroughs. For starters, he insinuated that they had old-school European tendencies: “They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that ever does reason,” he wrote. “This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is not modern at all. It is distinctly mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a view, are homocentric…. Had not the world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President Roosevelt
and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well in their theories of the Cosmos. They could not have believed otherwise.”
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“When London says this,” a furious Roosevelt wrote to the editor of
Collier’s
, Mark Sullivan, “he deliberately invents statements which I have never made and in which I do not believe.”
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Roosevelt considered
White Fang
a decent work as fiction. But zoologically, its behavioral descriptions of wolves and lynx irked him enough that he publicly called it “mischievous nonsense.” Its purported facts were all wrong. In his letter to
Collier’s
, Roosevelt inventoried all of London’s offenses against biological accuracy. Sounding less like a president than like a fact-checker, he offered exact page references in
White Fang
where London’s veracity failed to pass muster.

Had Roosevelt really enough free time to engage in such a hypothetical, picayune debate with a writer of fiction? Nobody came out ahead in these “nature-faker” controversies, but London did get in a few truly memorable lines at Roosevelt’s expense:

Words are slippery, but London was a master of them. Nothing, short of insulting his family, cut into Roosevelt’s sense of self more than a claim that he didn’t understand Darwinism. But it was 1908, a presidential election year, so Roosevelt let the matter go. When pressed, Roosevelt could often behave like a cuttlefish which, when unable to extricate itself from a dangerous situation, blackens the surrounding waters, eventually becoming invisible in the murk. That’s how he dealt with London in the
end, writing him off as a black-hearted fraud.
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Now, a century later, the “nature-faker” debate smacks of childish egoism, particularly on the part of a sitting American president. But to dismiss Roosevelt’s obsession with proper descriptions of wildlife as mere conceit is to misread a central facet of his complex personality—his all-encompassing belief that he understood evolution. Roosevelt was a faunal naturalist, steeped in Darwinian biology, and he knew more about wolves than perhaps anyone else in the country. If London was going to count himself as a literary realist, then lynxes twice the size of the Biological Survey’s heaviest specimen had no business in his art. In this instance, as often before, Roosevelt was more than happy to risk being exposed as an intellectual bully if doing so meant that he could set a record straight.

That September, Roosevelt was also championing farmers: he was deeply involved in getting his new Country Life Commission up and running. Although the reference work
Roosevelt Cyclopedia
doesn’t mention it, the Country Life Commission was a direct outgrowth of his reading of John Burroughs’s and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works. Roosevelt’s motto came from Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
: “Whoever can make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
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Over the summer, Roosevelt had persuaded Liberty Hyde Bailey, director of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, to serve as chairman of the commission tasked with analyzing the status of rural life in America. At first, Bailey turned Roosevelt down—he was too busy—but Roosevelt wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Your letter is not only a great disappointment but a great surprise to me,” Roosevelt wrote to Bailey on August 4, from Sagamore Hill. “I would not have gone into this thing at this time if I had not been assured as a matter of course from our conversation that you would accept. I believe you are entirely right when you say in your letter that this is the greatest opportunity that has yet presented itself for the influencing of country life conditions and the setting in motion of movements that shall organize and vivify the affairs of the open country. Yet my dear Mr. Bailey, by your action you are doing all you can to hurt this great opportunity. You have no right to do it, my dear sir. It is imperative from the standpoint of the work that you and I
have so much at heart that you should accept the chairmanship of this Commission, no matter how little work you do with it.”
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