The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (41 page)

While Limerick rightfully threw cold water on Roosevelt and Turner’s thesis, a caveat must be added. Three new national parks
were
created in late 1890 out of huge parcels of pristine California wilderness. Approximately 13 million acres of the West
had
been set aside in 1891 by the Forest Reserve Act. (That acreage is more than twice the size of Massachusetts.) Limerick was correct in saying that millions of settlers kept coming west, but they weren’t allowed into the sequestered government-owned prime forestlands. The Interior Department was, by 1890, closing off large swaths of the West to future development. By 1898, 40 million acres had been saved as reserves. Therefore, perhaps the appropriate resolution to the dispute between Roosevelt-Turner and Limerick-White can be found by considering the role of forestry science during the gilded age. Roosevelt, as the
New York Times
would note, was a leader in a new post–Civil War generation trying to redefine Americanism in the 1890s. Roosevelt may have named his pony Grant, admired John Hay’s ring made of hair from Lincoln’s beard, and applauded Sherman and Sheridan for protecting Yellowstone, but he had never personally experienced war—and neither had his wealthy father. As for the western American “frontier,” Roosevelt wasn’t part of its settlement. Hopping off the Northern Pacific Railroad with thousands of dollars to lavish on wilderness guides and equipment in Medora was hardly Jim Bridger stuff. But the obverse of that reality was also true: Roosevelt never killed a Confederate, an Indian, a Mexican, or any other human on American soil.

What Roosevelt did in the Dakotas (and Grinnell did in Nebraska, Baird in Arizona, and Merriam in California) was collect samples of western wildlife, as ambulating Ivy League scientists were apt to do. For all their Wild West notions, these men—and a dozen like them who graduated from Harvard and Yale between 1870 and 1890—were the children of Charles Darwin. After the surrender at Appomattox in 1865, an entire generation of Ivy League graduates, for the first time, had all studied Darwin. Science was the rage. And to those who—like Roosevelt, Baird, Merriam, and Grinnell—were predisposed to biology, the father of evolutionary theory continued to be a secular saint as they entered their thirties. Once
On the Origin of Species
had been published in 1859, it was virtually impossible for educated Americans like Roosevelt to look at flora or fauna in the same way. In other words, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 came about not because the frontier closed but because during the 1870s Harvard and Yale had started taking biology, naturalist studies, and forestry seriously in the aftermath of Darwin (and George Perkins Marsh). For the purposes of inventory and study, America’s outdoor laboratories (wildlife included) needed to be preserved. That was a scientific imperative. Just as Copernicus realized that the earth wasn’t the center of the solar system and Newton discovered laws for the movement of the stars, Darwin made it clear that man must be considered as merely a part of the natural world.

What made Roosevelt different from Grinnell, Baird, or Merriam was that while he fully embraced Darwinism and Marshism, he wouldn’t throw away Mayne Reid’s potboilers or the notion of the Alamo as a heroic line in the Texas sand. Roosevelt stubbornly refused (or was intellectually unable) to become part of the “dry as dust” world of science. “I know these scientists pretty well, and their limitations are extraordinary, especially when they get to talking of science with a capital S,” Roosevelt wrote to Grinnell. “They do good work; but, after all, it is only the very best of them who are more than bricklayers, who laboriously get together bricks out of which other men must build houses. When they think they are architects they are simply a nuisance.”
⁹⁹

Although when it came to studying bears, elks, deer, and antelope Roosevelt too was something of a bricklayer, he had appointed himself as the architect of the burgeoning scientific conservation movement. It was Roosevelt, for example, who dramatically testified before the Public Lands Committee of the House of Representatives against railroad expansion and the YIC’s development schemes. During a question-and-answer session Roosevelt acted like a conservationist hit man, ready to take out
any un-American corporations or individuals undermining the new wild-life protection ethos and forestry. Unlike Baird, for example, Roosevelt never demanded data. For both better and worse, Roosevelt believed in the cumulative power of firsthand observations over empirical laboratory results. All the biological conservation theory and forestry science in the world, he insisted, wouldn’t add up to much if the American people didn’t
believe
the findings.

Although Roosevelt worried that Merriam, at the U.S. Biological Survey, was overdoing classification, he insisted that big game, songbirds, and even reptiles should be saved like rare, precious gems. To protect animals as endangered species, moreover, Roosevelt believed you had to make people
care
about their survival. Roosevelt, susceptible to the ideas of naturalist-inclined poets like Whitman and Burroughs, was the kind of polymath not usually admired by serious scientists. To make nature dull like the “little half-baked scientists,” Roosevelt believed, was fraught with peril. Darwinism needed to be communicated directly to people in simple ways that they could understand and that wouldn’t dethrone God as the creator. Like Darwin himself, Roosevelt was a “nature theologist,” holding that nature was proof positive of the genius of God, who had masterminded everything from sparrows’ eyes to Pike’s Peak.
¹⁰⁰

Thus, by 1891, serving as civil service commissioner and as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt was already the heart and soul of the burgeoning conservation movement. One reason for this was that he was the only Darwinian-trained biologist who wore a shapeless broad-rimmed rancher’s hat, carried guns, and knew how to attract a large audience both inside and outside official Washington. When Roosevelt offered homilies about grizzly bears and elk herds, the general public listened. As a Washington-based politician, he had clout: for example, he dined regularly with Secretary of the Interior Noble at the Metropolitan Club. He could also glad-hand with backwoods types in the West on his hunting trips. It’s one thing to set aside timber tracts with Section 24 as President Harrison did; it’s quite another to change an American mind-set about wildlife and timber management—a mind-set committed to plowed land and sawmills—as Roosevelt was attempting to do, seemingly overnight.

In the early 1890s people needed familiar points of reference to make the leap from Creationism (God put mammals, fish, minerals, and trees on earth to be used) to Darwinism-Marshism (varied species need lots of protective habitat and enforceable laws to survive). Roosevelt was there as America’s conservationist trail guide. Because most subscrib
ers to
Forest and Stream
imagined “Dakota Teedie” as a wilderness hunter in buckskins, he had the credibility to explain to them why game laws and forest reserves were necessary. No other easterner was perceived by so many Americans as embodying the western spirit. Only by living in the log cabin at Elkhorn and writing about it in
Hunting Trips
and
Ranch Life
did Roosevelt earn the right to explain why California’s old-growth timber needed saving and why for every tree felled in Wyoming another should be planted.

By mixing Darwinian-Marshian analysis with cowboy campfire yarns, and by applying his inbred prosecutorial disposition, inherited from Uncle Rob, Roosevelt was able to help sell the U.S. Congress, the departments of Agriculture and Interior, and eventually western Americans on the notion that saving natural wonders, wildlife species, timberlands, and diverse habitats was a patriotic endeavor. From his boyhood (when he drew Egyptian storks to demonstrate evolution) until his death in 1919 at age sixty (after an arduous river trek to the Amazon of Brazil), Roosevelt served as the American spokesperson for mainstreaming evolutionary theories. This was something neither Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, nor John Hay had an inclination to do—nor, for that matter, did John Burroughs, Elliott Coues, or John Muir. “He who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology,” Roosevelt would write later in life, “and especially of that science of evolution that is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin.”
¹⁰¹

VI

Especially after the Forest Reserve Act and the three new national parks in California, it was natural for Roosevelt to support President Harrison for reelection in 1892. Despite their personal differences, the two men were philosophically similar. Roosevelt cheered his fellow Republican’s achievements, such as the bold appointment of Frederick Douglass as ambassador to Haiti. When Harrison resolutely confronted Britain and Canada about their overharvesting of fur seals in the Bering Sea, Roosevelt was honored to be part of his administration. When Harrison’s wife, Caroline, died of tuberculosis a few weeks before the 1892 presidential election, Roosevelt sympathized with his boss’s deep grief and distracted mind. So when Grover Cleveland routed Harrison in the election, Roosevelt, too, had a sense of loss.

As president of the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt hoped that President Cleveland would build on the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. Although the overweight Cleveland—who was a cartoonist’s delight be
cause of his girth and his walrus mustache—couldn’t be accused of being a typical outdoorsman, he was known to care deeply about the fate of big game. Therefore, Roosevelt planned to engage Cleveland, a fellow New Yorker, in saving Great Plains buffalo from extinction. Recognizing that preserving the territorial integrity of Yellowstone was the initial step if the national park movement was to succeed, Roosevelt refused to reduce the political heat just because Harrison had been rejected by the electorate. He believed that the unflinching Grover Cleveland, who had gone after Tammany Hall’s notorious Roscoe Conkling,
¹⁰²
could be won over by the Boone and Crockett Club through a combination of diplomacy and arm-twisting. After all, most of Roosevelt’s fellow club members were extremely rich and were, like Cleveland, from New York state.

On December 5, 1892, as Harrison’s term was winding down, Roosevelt wrote a letter to the editor, attacking the villains—mining interests and real estate grabbers—of Cooke City, Montana, located northeast of Yellowstone National Park. To Roosevelt, this mining-camp town seemed to be frying in greed. Through unethical quid pro quos and bribes, local developers in Cooke City had, Roosevelt feared, chipped away at the territorial integrity of President Grant’s idea for a park (dating from 1872); President Harrison’s wise amendments regarding forestry and timberlands (1891) were simply being ignored. Grinnell had published a series of articles in
Forest and Stream
criticizing the contraband mentality of Cooke City and even disseminated a pamphlet all over Montana aimed at stopping the pilferers by threatening to have the U.S. Army arrest them. The Boone and Crockett Club’s hard-line approach was “If you poach in Yellowstone, you will go to jail for two years.”

Roosevelt’s letter, written on U.S. Civil Service commissioner stationery (and thus implying that the federal government was on his side), didn’t mince words. “It is of the utmost importance that the Park shall be kept in its present form as a great forestry preserve and a National pleasure ground, the like of which is not to be found on any other continent than ours; and all public-spirited Americans should join with
Forest and Stream
in the effort to prevent the greed of a little group of speculators, careless of everything save their own selfish interests, from doing the damage they threaten to the whole people of the United States, by wrecking the Yellowstone National Park,” he wrote. “So far from having this Park cut down it should be extended, and legislation adopted which would enable the military authorities who now have charge of it to administer it solely in the interests of the whole public, and to punish in the
most rigorous way people who trespass upon it. The Yellowstone Park is a park for the people and the representatives of the people should see that it is molested in no way.”
¹⁰³

In
The Winning of the West
, Roosevelt had promoted manifest destiny and the westward march of U.S. capitalism with the zeal of Horace Greeley, so his new position baffled the developers in Montana. Roosevelt, in fact, had once speculated that Duluth would soon rival Chicago as the citadel of the West and that the Red River valley of the Dakotas would harvest grain for the world. As if he were a bond salesman for Jay Cooke, he had written that Montana would supply the most beef and that the Cascade Mountains of Washington Territory had enough potential timber to construct endless homes for America’s growing population.
¹⁰⁴
Now, suddenly, Roosevelt was smashing the utilitarian paradigm on behalf of preserving lodgepole pines, petrified logs, and elk herds. To the Cooke City folks, Roosevelt’s new demands were nothing more than atheistic excuses for a federal land grab.

Such were the deeply anti-Roosevelt protestations of Montanans (and the organized syndicate YIC) in the early 1890s. How were they to know that Roosevelt had developed his preservationist insights by reading sportsman literature and studying Darwinian biology at Harvard? Who knew he had memorized every detail of Audubon’s
Birds of America
as if it were a sacred text? How could railroad titans have understood that he took pride in his association with John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell, who had lured him into the preservationist camp? How were western cattlemen to fathom Roosevelt’s preference for open-range grazing because his humane, Berghian side didn’t like seeing wild game get tangled up in barbed wire? Could anybody really imagine that his Uncle Rob used to have monkeys leaping around in a New York brownstone and a German shepherd sitting at the dinner table? To T.R.’s thinking, his letter in
Forest and Stream
was just straight talk. Like Muir, he thought the idea of national parks should be adopted, honored, and celebrated by mainstream Americans. Some areas of the American landscape and some types of wild-life, he believed, were simply too magnificent for mankind to destroy for the quick financial profits of scoundrels like the Cooke City crowd.