The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (76 page)

Crary had seen one of the most amazing boxwork formations in the world. More than 300 million years old, Wind Cave is a subterranean wonderland of fractured limestone, crystal fins, and calcium deposits. Words cannot do justice to the diverse geological formations and underground lakes. A whole new geological vocabulary, in fact, was created to describe various types of boxwork: for example, starburst, nail quartz, gypsum flowers, and helictite bushes. With a constant temperature of fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit, the cave network was a perfect retreat from the Black Hills’ cold winters and hot summers. Some of the passageways are wet and slippery. An astounding 95 percent of the world’s mineral boxwork was found in the cave. Yet much of it was fragile, snapping off when a spelunker’s head bumped it or a hand grasped it.

Between 1881 and 1890 South Dakotans hoped that gold could be grubsaked in Wind Cave, as it had been in the Black Hills. Miners tried, but with no luck. Instead, the cave complex started attracting explorers and curiosity seekers. Periodically the local
Custer Chronicle
called Wind Cave a “wonder,” and the
Hot Spring Star
added the mystical note that “no bottom” had been found. It was frustrating for locals to sit on a great mineralogical assemblage and not be able to turn a profit. Alvin McDonald of the South Dakota Mining Company considered finding the cave’s bottom a challenge akin to Robert E. Peary’s going to the North Pole. During 1890–1893 McDonald worked underground, keeping a detailed diary about various caverns and rock formations. He also did some drilling. Cave passages were enlarged for tourists and wooden staircases were erected. McDonald emerged with plenty of artifacts and reams of descriptive prose about stalactites worthy of Verne—he named rooms and mapped trails like an explorer in a work of science fiction—but he was forced to give up the “idea of finding the end of Wind Cave.”
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When Roosevelt became president, the effort to learn more about Wind Cave was put on a fast track. Homesteading was banned anywhere surrounding the cave’s entrance. On April 4, 1902, the GLO commissioned a surveyor in Rapid City to map as many rooms and passageways as he could. Many locals, however, considered this a fool’s errand. The U.S. government was also keenly interested in determining the precise amount
of minerals available for possible mining. Lawsuits over who owned Wind Cave were put aside as the U.S. government tried to inventory and map the labyrinthine caverns.

As the GLO went about its work, Senator Robert J. Gamble of South Dakota—a Republican—introduced a congressional bill declaring Wind Cave America’s “second wonder” (after Yellowstone National Park).
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Worried that vandals and thieves were stealing crystals and rocks, Gamble claimed that the U.S. Geological Survey and Theodore Roosevelt were on his side in creating the new national park. The
New York Times
aided the cause by publishing remarks by an unidentified U.S. government employee who said that Wind Cave was a “wonderful evolution of nature” exuding “grandeur, grotesqueness and beauty.” The
Times
itself said that giving Crater Lake the status of a national park was a wise move and recommended the same for Wind Cave. “There are something like 3,000 chambers and 100 miles of passages,” the
Times
enthused, “containing many curious features and formations.”
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Once again Congressman Lacey came into the act, like a bird going after split grain or thistle seed, backing Senator Gamble’s action. Lacey’s friends worried that he was fatigued by the legislative struggle; he would arrive at his congressional office at six AM and not leave until nine PM. When he sponsored the bill in Congress in June 1902, fresh from his success with Crater Lake, Lacey argued that Wind Cave
had
to be a national park in order to stop vandals from destroying it. Reportedly, he said, boxwork thieves were out of control. The same grim fate was befalling the Petrified Forest of Arizona and the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. And there was another component to Gamble and Lacey’s argument. For meteorological reasons alone, they said, Wind Cave needed to be saved and maybe someday bottled up to furnish electrical power. (More than 1 million cubic feet of air was emitted or taken in every hour at the blowhole entrance.)

When both the House and the Senate approved bills to establish America’s seventh national park, Roosevelt was gleeful. On January 9, 1903, without ceremony, he reserved 10,522 acres in western South Dakota to become Wind Cave National Park (eventually it would be enlarged to 28,295 acres). Although it is doubtful that Roosevelt realized this at the time, in addition to the boxwork formations he saved a fine example of mixed-grass prairie, one to which, in coming years, the Bronx Zoo bison would be reintroduced. Wind Cave National Park also became a prime bird-watching location, especially for enthusiasts seeking for the uninhibited song of western tanagers and lazuli buntings. Hunting and fishing
were prohibited in the park, and no ponderosa pines could be chopped down for firewood. Rule Number 1 of the General Regulations for Wind Cave was that removal of formations was forbidden and nobody could ever again enter the cave without the approval of the U.S. government. The posted notices read: “All Persons Are Liable to Prosecution.”

Wind Cave has proved to be the “wonder” Senator Gamble called it. The mapping and exploring of its passageways continued unabated. When Wind Cave National Park celebrated its centennial in 2003 only an estimated 5 percent of the cave had been explored. Visitors were routinely dumbstruck by its size and complexity. Like the ocean floor it once was, the cave complex remained an unfathomable mystery for future generations to take up. The Carnegie Institution was founded in 1902, and there was some hope that grants could be given to scientists to solve the cave’s mysteries. With Roosevelt’s new national parks—Wind Cave and Crater Lake—a fait accompli, under the safekeeping of the Interior Department and U.S. Army, two important links in the chain of American “wonders” had been strengthened. And President Roosevelt, as far as western sites were concerned, was just getting started.

III

Contributing to Roosevelt’s promotion of the American West was the publication of his friend Owen Wister’s novel
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
in 1902. Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt,
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it told the story of a cowboy, a natural aristocrat, who was involved in Wyoming’s Johnson County War in the 1890s. Wister’s sophisticated use of cowboy imagery and the cowboy culture had echoes of Roosevelt’s own days in North Dakota. Wister, a Harvard graduate (summa cum laude) whose short stories in
Harper’s
were extremely popular, had hit the mother lode with this action-packed novel, where right (even vigilante justice) prevailed over wrong.
The Virginian
became an overnight sensation; more than 200,000 copies were sold in 1902–1903 alone. While it lacked the humor of Mark Twain and the sophistication of Henry James,
The Virginian
was nevertheless a novel of considerable distinction. (Unfortunately, it is usually remembered only for the Zane Grey pulp western phenomenon it inspired.)

President Roosevelt had proofread part of
The Virginian
before publication, wanting Wister to tone down the sadistic violence and gratuitous blood and gore. Roosevelt insisted that the protagonist—the heroic cowboy, who is never given a name—should become
the
arbiter of western culture and morals, a citadel of manly virtue. Amazingly, Wister agreed to make the changes. Like Roosevelt, Wister had traveled all over the West—in Arizona, California, and Washington, always going back to Wyoming—to study cowboys closely. Often depressed, failing to find a producer for his opera about Montezuma, Wister clung to his notebooks, which were filled with reportorial details of his ranch days north of Laramie. In
The Virginian
, Wister, with Roosevelt cheering him on, apotheosized the cowboy as the American hero, a Natty Bumppo writ large, redefining western mythology. Wister was in Wyoming during 1885, which the historian Walter Prescott Webb deemed
the
halcyon year of the “cattle kingdom”—and he masterfully captured the raw essence of that era with a realist’s eye for accuracy.

If President Roosevelt could have written one novel in his lifetime, it would have been
The Virginian
. Not only did Wister insist that the West was the mainspring of moral and political regeneration, but his narrative was full of observations about wildlife and “vanishing” big game. “For a while now as we rode,” Wister wrote (in the style of the Boone and Crockett Club), “we kept up a cheerful conversation about elk.” His writing about the geography of Wyoming also echoed Roosevelt’s
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
. For example, Wister wrote, “We had come into a veritable gulf of mountain peaks, sharp at their bare summits like teeth, holding fields of snow lower down, and glittering still in full day up there, while down among our pines and parks the afternoon was growing sombre.”
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Besides naturalist ideas, Wister hammered home the theme of national unity. The Virginian, for example, came from the south but his love interest, Molly Stark Wood, was from an old Yankee family. Their marriage suggested healing after the Civil War, which had claimed more than 600,000 American lives. What replaced the sectional conflict, for Wister, was the West, which had redemptive power. The chief factor was nature. Unlike James Fenimore Cooper, who saw the forest as a place of danger, Wister promoted national parks, such as Yellowstone, for tourism.
The Virginian
ends with the Virginian and Molly getting married in a beautiful federal forest in Wyoming. No longer were Native Americans a problem in the West—they had been defeated. The new “noble savage” in
The Virginian
was the Virginian himself, who as a cowboy was liberating him
self from industrial disease, urban chaos, and boogie-street immorality. Consequentially, for a man like the Virginian (or Roosevelt) to exist, there had to be a wilderness. Owing to Roosevelt’s embrace of
The Virginian
, the new American male archetype was off and running, and the concept included the promotion of forestry and humane treatment of horses. “The Virginian is also, despite his skill in violence, a kind man,” the the literary historian John G. Cawelti noted in a Barnes & Noble edition of the book: “Two of the most striking episodes in the novel—one involving a denuded hen named Emily and the other an abused horse—illustrate his general kindness to animals.”
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Wister’s character was a reserved man who obeyed the law, respected nature, never cursed, was courteous to women, and even befriended Indians. Considerateness and gentlemanliness were part of his charm. And he was a walking, talking exemplification of the Boone and Crockett Club’s sportsmen’s code, and also a one-man rodeo. Just as the U.S. Forest Service later used Smokey the Bear to teach people about the dangers of forest fires,
The Virginian
could be read as constructive propaganda, i.e.
real men
didn’t disobey federal laws by poaching in places like Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Black Hills; that
real cowboys
respected the boundaries of national parks and never desecrated these sites. It’s indisputable that
The Virginian
was worth more, in terms of public relations for President Roosevelt and his conservationist-preservationist agenda, than any five Madison Avenue firms of later years could have been.

Reveling in
The Virginian
as literature, Roosevelt even approved of the vigilante justice in the novel. Cattle rustlers, plumers, poachers, abusers of wildlife—in Wister’s West they deserved to be hanged. Of course, as president Roosevelt couldn’t sanction Wister’s tracking down and hanging of rustlers, but his sympathies were in that direction. The railroad and barbed wire had ended the open-range era of the West. Gone were the old days of first-generation cowboy lore. President Roosevelt and Wister both scorned the new big business: conglomerates of oil, transportation, and manufacturing which were destroying the wilderness they found so intoxicating. It was up to the new generation of cowboys, Roosevelt believed, to stand against these usurpers. Yesterday’s free-range cattlemen had to become the front line in his conservation movement. To Roosevelt the three great values of America—individualism, nationalism, and democracy—needed wilderness to flourish.

As Wister implies in his dedication, he had let Roosevelt line-edit
The Virginian
. Why? If Wister’s hero had been prone to wrongheaded violence—eradication of animals, genocide of Indians, brothel morals—
as many first-generation western white men actually were, then wouldn’t his book, in effect, be granting mythological status to rogues? To President Roosevelt’s thinking there was already too much melodramatic romanticization going on in the American West. There were too many men like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and John Wesley Hardin. The black hats were dominating the nickel-novel market. The white-hatted scientists who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey naturally seemed boring and tame compared with the Kid. Wasn’t it far better to give the lawmakers and biologists a boost in the popular imagination? Wasn’t it better to promote Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, John Muir, and other men of their type as the heroic face of the American West?
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Furthermore, western folklore already had its exploiter gods: Paul Bunyan obliterated forests with his mighty ax and Pecos Bill dug out the Grand Canyon with a huge shovel. All that the Virginian—like a later character, the Lone Ranger—did was try to distinguish right from wrong. Wister’s Virginian ushered in a new, better representative western male. Put a pair of field glasses into the Virginian’s hands, and he would have been the kind of Auduboner the USDA was promoting in its
Yearbook
.

To Roosevelt, the westerner who most epitomized the Virginian (besides Seth Bullock) was the lawman Pat Garrett, who had shot Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on July 14, 1881. Roosevelt had learned from his Rough Riders—half of whom came from New Mexico—that Sheriff Garrett was revered from Las Cruces to the Four Corners. A worshipful Roosevelt loved to meet the renowned sheriffs of the West—they were heroes. Garrett, fairly honest, upright, with a bit of a drinking problem, didn’t disappoint him. No sooner had McKinley been assassinated then Roosevelt, in December 1901, hired Garrett to be collector of Customs based in El Paso (or one of Roosevelt’s “White House gunfighters,” as the newspapers began calling such appointments). When Roosevelt and Garrett finally met, around Christmas 1901 in Washington, they got on like long-lost brothers.
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