The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (39 page)

Meanwhile, having heard so many stories from Theodore about Medora, Edith was now pleased to put a face on things. The Badlands stillness seemed unbreakable, eternal, and primeval. Nature, she understood anew, was tonic for her husband; serene solitude of the sagebrush calmed this act down. He simply was more relaxed without gaslights. And she undoubtedly discerned from reading the preface to volume one of
The Winning of the West
that her husband, in an imaginative leap of romantic fancy, equated his Dakota ranching days with those of the late-eighteenth-century pioneers clearing brush through the Allegheny upcountry and Great Smokies valleys. “The men who have shared in the fast-vanishing frontier life of the present,” he had written, “feel a peculiar sympathy with the already long-vanished frontier of the past.”
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On September 9, the Roosevelt party started making its way to Yellowstone National Park. For the next week, everybody’s eyes were fixed on wildlife around Inspiration Point and on the condensed force of Yellowstone’s Lower Falls as it roared downward 308 feet. Everything about Yellowstone was exhilarating to Roosevelt—although he was disappointed that game wasn’t found around the hundreds of geyser basins where the tourists congregated. One afternoon he and Ferguson fished in the Yellowstone River within close view of Tower Falls, bringing strings of brook trout back to camp for supper. According to Corinne’s diary, throughout their stay in Yellowstone National Park, Theodore kept copious notes about the wildlife they spotted. She marveled at her brother’s ability to distinguish birds at a glance or from merely hearing their thin cries. During just the first four days in Yellowstone they encountered the peregrine falcon, red-tailed hawk, Canada jay, raven, mallard duck, teal duck, nuthatch, dwarf-thrush, robin, water ouzel, sunbird, long-spur, grass finch, bittern, yellow-crowned warbler, Rocky Mountain white-throated sparrow, song sparrow, wren, and pigeon hawk. As a bird-watcher, Roosevelt was most stirred by the golden eagle, which put on an aerial show: these dark-brown raptors glided at fifty miles an hour and then swooped downward for direct strikes on chipmunks and ground squirrels. “Each one of the above I saw with the eyes of Theodore
Roosevelt,” Corrine recalled, “and can still hear the tones of his voice as he described to me their habits of life and the differences between them and others of their kind.”
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Although Theodore occasionally sulked about not being able to “rough it”—the cost of having his family in tow—being in the fresh air brought ample reward. “He loved wild places and wild companions, hard tramps and thrilling adventure,” Corinne wrote, “and to be a part of the type of trip which women who were not accustomed to actual hunting could take, was really an act of unselfishness on his part.” On most days the Yellowstone sky was cloudless; the nights were cold, with frost chilling the eyeballs and causing sinuses to ache. Instead of eating elk venison, as T.R. would have liked, the party’s diet usually consisted of cutthroat trout plus canned ham and tomatoes. At night a theatrical Theodore tried to scare everybody, pretending to be a bear on the prowl outside their tents, swollen with laughter until thoroughly spent. As Corinne put it, they were all enjoying the “pretense of roughing it.”
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As Edith and Corinne soon learned, however, for all his scientific knowledge, Theodore was a reckless escort in the wilderness. For starters, the professional guide he had hired, Ira Dodge, got them terribly lost. Acting as if it were still midsummer, one evening the Roosevelt party camped at an altitude of 7,500 feet, shivering all night under flimsy blankets; even the camp’s drinking water, in a pail, froze.
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Disregarding safety, Theodore thrust people ill equipped for outdoors rigors to push themselves to the point of breakdown or exhaustion. Worse yet, Roosevelt had leased a string of horses unaccustomed to being ridden sidesaddle. On a pack trail ride along stretches of the Continental Divide, which separates waters flowing west from those flowing east, Edith was thrown off her horse, which had reared suddenly, spooked by an erupting geyser. The pain in her back was excruciating, but no doctor was brought in. Her recovery was slow. Soon thereafter, Theodore himself was injured when hunting with Ferguson outside the park. He had “rather strained” his groin and was uncomfortable on horseback for a few days. After visiting the Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of Yellowstone, where the hot water rose through limestone instead of lava, the Roosevelt party was back at the Elkhorn Ranch on September 23, bruised but all smiles.
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The whole Medora-Yellowstone trip was hailed by T.R. as an unsurpassed bonding experience for his family. Only going to a great European spa like Baden-Baden, he believed, had the same rejuvenating effect on citified people as a week in America’s great park. (It didn’t hurt that he had an office of civil service clerks to mind the store back in Washington,
D.C., during his six-week grand holiday.) “I have rarely seen Edith enjoy anything more than she did the six [weeks] at my ranch, and the trip through the Yellowstone Park,” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “And she looks just as well and young and pretty and happy as she did four years ago when I married her—indeed I sometimes think she looks if possible even sweeter and prettier…. Edith particularly enjoyed the riding at the ranch, where she had an excellent little horse, named Wire Fence, and the strange, wild beautiful scenery, and the loneliness and freedom of the life fascinated and appealed to her as it did to me.”
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After the vacation at Yellowstone, Theodore threw himself into his conservation work for the Boone and Crockett Club harder than ever. Arming himself with scientific data, he was determined that his children could someday bring their children to experience Wyoming’s Garden of Wonders. Using the newest wildlife science available, Roosevelt wanted the old-time wildlife abundance back. Yellowstone needed to be expanded as a zoological reservation (George Catlin had once called for this), where big game like elk and buffalo could thunder around unmolested by the intrusions of civilization. After all, Roosevelt argued, the West couldn’t have been won without buffalo and elk to provide the pathfinders with meat. The time had come to create reserves so that the populations of both species could increase again and be safe. If Robert B. Roosevelt and his amiable helper Seth Green could repopulate Hudson River spawning shad through artificial propagation, then surely a similar repopulation project could be undertaken on behalf of buffalo. Essentially, the visionary Roosevelt was calling for what in the 1980s became the American Prairie Foundation, a nonprofit organization that wanted to create a 3.5-million-acre reserve in central Montana for studying, North American game, bird-watching, hunting, and hiking.
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By 1890 the conservationist movement was no longer embryonic. A new leader had appeared on the West Coast, a man who spoke on behalf of pristine nature with the grace of a literary angel. The California naturalist John Muir’s two articles in
Century
magazine (both illustrated by Thomas Moran), “The Treasures of the Yosemite” and “Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park,”
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had created a literary sensation. Worried that overgrazing by sheep was denuding the Sierra high country and threatening the groves of old-growth sequoias, Muir wanted to preserve the complete watersheds of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers inside a new national park. Immediately, Roosevelt recognized that California had found its John Burroughs. It was helpful that Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of
Century
, was himself a strong proponent of national parks in Cali
fornia. Congress created three of them that fall: Sequoia, Yosemite, and General Grant, which is now part of Kings Canyon National Park.

Bolstered by Muir, Roosevelt now argued that wildlife preserves like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant were among the best ideas of the Gilded Age. Using the Boone and Crockett Club as his pulpit, he argued for tougher antidevelopment and antipoaching laws at Yellowstone. “Through his effort with Grinnell, Roosevelt began to envision the park as a sanctuary and breeding ground for wildlife,” the historian Jeremy Johnston explained in
Yellowstone Science
. “Roosevelt hoped that if the park’s wildlife were protected, their populations would dramatically increase and spread to the surrounding regions. This would ensure the continuation of hunting, his favorite pastime, outside the park’s boundaries. It would also alleviate his fear that as settlement increased, the West would become a series of private game reserves creating a situation where only the rich could hunt.”
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As Roosevelt touted Boone and Crockett’s conservation agenda throughout official Washington, there was talk about conflict of interest. But a sharp (and convenient) distinction had been drawn in Roosevelt’s own mind: his club was a watchdog agency guarding against incursions in Yellowstone National Park (federal property). Still, the noisiest of Montana Mineral Railroad’s lawyers and Wyoming’s developers weren’t afraid to publicly smear T.R. as a hypocrite attacking the spoils system from the Civil Service Commission while exploiting his government connections to lobby for conservation. Still, Roosevelt had
rightness
on his side. There was a palpable urgency to what the Boone and Crockett Club was trying to accomplish in terms of saving big game. A new public consciousness was needed to save the untamed beasts of the west. Roosevelt thought that promoting species survival via educational outreach in zoos and museums was an important way to wake up America’s youngsters to the plight of animals. He also championed the sculptures of Edward Kerneys (considered America’s first animalier) whom made anatomically correct bronzes. He collected them like mad.
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The indifference of big business toward habitat saving annoyed Roosevelt mightily. Instead of thinking of forests as a finite resource and offering to replant as they logged, the railroads preferred the slash-and-burn approach. And the problem of deforestation wasn’t only in the West. The soil runoff from speed-logging in the Adirondacks was being blamed by scientists for ruining navigation (by creating sandbars) on the Hudson River. Following John Muir’s preservationist tactics as delineated in
Century
with regard to California’s
world-class forests, Roosevelt started floating the idea of creating an Adirondack National Park in New York.

Roosevelt remained determined, and in January 1891 he ran a very important board meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club in Washington. Roosevelt and Grinnell appealed to the room of dark-suited worthies—most notably Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble—about the importance of protecting wildlife and creating forest reserves.
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The latter issue was taking on particular urgency, since deforestation was an ever-increasing problem. Western wildfires were epidemic. Railroads had an insatiable appetite for timber, needing wood for railway carriages, stations, platforms, fences, and, of course, the ties for their expanding network of tracks. (In 1887,
Scientific Monthly
estimated that the railroads needed 73 million new ties each year.
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) Loggers thought of forests as an infinite resource, so no replanting was done. The denuded land was vulnerable to erosion and so, for instance, the soils of Roosevelt’s beloved Adirondacks were already clogging the navigable water of the nearby Hudson River. “Roosevelt…asked me to say something of the way in which game had disappeared in my time,” Grinnell joked to a fellow member of Boone and Crockett, Archibald Rogers, “and I told them a few ‘lies’ about buffalo, elk, and other large game in the old days.”
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The board meeting led to White House action to protect the nation’s forests. A few days later two members of the Boone and Crockett Club—William Hallett Phillips (a lawyer and diehard angler who accidentally drowned in the Potomac River in 1897, moving Rudyard Kipling to dedicate a poem in
Scribner’s
to his memory) and Arnold Hague (a geologist-conservationist with the U.S. Geological Survey who had written an influential report on Yellowstone)—briefed Secretary Noble on how the new science of forestry could prevent deforestation. The Harrison administration quickly pushed legislation through Congress to protect forests on public lands. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which the president signed that March, put an end to the virtual giveaway of public land to the railroads and enshrined the government’s role in protecting the wild-life in American forests. Most important, its final provision, Section 24, gave the president the right to convert public land into forest reserves. It stated: “That the President of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and reserve, in any state or territory having public land, bearing forests, in any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations, and the President shall, by public proclamation,
declare the establishment of such reservations and the limits thereof.”
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The language of Section 24 would prove crucial to Roosevelt’s future conservationist efforts as president.

As soon as the first forest reserve—Yellowstone National Park Timberland Reserve—was established, it was clear that YIC and other would-be developers had suffered a huge, irreversible defeat. The Boone and Crockett Club issued a resolution praising Noble, and Grinnell published a glowing tribute to his efforts in
Forest and Stream
.
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President Harrison quickly bestowed protection on 13 million acres of American woods, creating eleven forest reserves,
*
where absolutely no tree cutting was allowed; and six timberland areas, where limited logging was permitted under close supervision. As the conservationist Gifford Pinchot later noted in his memoir
Breaking New Ground
, this was “the most important legislation in the history of Forestry in America,” and it “slipped through Congress without question, without debate.”
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