The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (77 page)

The western code that Wister promoted and Garrett lived, President Roosevelt believed, should become a moral code. As an addendum, as Roosevelt said in
The Deer Family
, a backyard naturalist code should be adopted. Wyomingites had to save the Yellowstone forests just as Oregonians had to fight for the environmental integrity of Crater Lake. Concerned about industrialization and urbanization, President Roosevelt
proudly idealized the West as America’s last best hope. That was why he pushed for the Newlands Act and for so many irrigation laws. Roosevelt had long understood that Congress could declare places like Wind Cave and Sequoia as parks, but if the locals didn’t accept them as such, if county sheriffs continually let poachers go free and laughed as hooligans carved their initials in rocks and stole native American pottery, then the federal reserves would be destroyed. Only if the fighting men of the American West believed in protecting parklands and forest reserves could the West really be the Garden of Eden of his dreams. Although the “Virginian” wasn’t what we would now call an eco-warrior, he later became the prototype for Edward Abbey’s character Hayduke in
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, which led to the creation of Earth First! in 1980. It’s safe to argue that tolerating President Roosevelt’s warrior-like romanticization of Wister’s cowboy virtue and his mystical belief (like Muir’s) in the power of primeval nature is a small price to pay for saving over 230 million acres of the American West.

Roosevelt believed that Wister, far from selling out, did America a favor by making his masculine archetype a man of virtue, not vice. (Medicine Bow, Wyoming, continues to boast that it was the model for the setting of
The Virginian
, and that Wister’s novel put the “Western-man’s ways” on the “straight-and-narrow.”) Like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
The Jungle
—two other novels with a cause—
The Virginian
helped galvanize Americans to celebrate law enforcement instead of propagating the far more destructive trend of outlaw chic. Big game hunting was going to happen in the West. Therefore, wasn’t it far better for settlers to follow the noble sportsman’s code of
The Virginian
instead of the butchery of Buffalo Bill? Wister, with President Roosevelt as a guiding light, did the West a favor by making the region’s first true literary hero a white hat instead of a black hat. When
The Virginian
wandered the badlands, he was, like Roosevelt himself, a righteous horseman in the “quiet depths of Cattle Land” where every magnificent vista was considered “pure as water and strong as wine.” According to Wister, being “a man” meant holding congress with nature—again, like Roosevelt, who he said was the “greatest benefactor we people have known since Lincoln.”
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The Virginian
continued selling like hotcakes, with a stage production under way. Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on a tear to save western forestlands, catching the pro-development crowd unaware. (It should be noted, though, that Texas had no public lands on which he could declare anything.) If
The Virginian
ended in a shootout, so too would Roosevelt’s conservationist battle with western developers; and he planned on winning
it. Between the creation of Crater Lake National Park (May 22, 1902) and that of Wind Cave National Park (January 9, 1903), just over seven months, Roosevelt built his conservationist tower strong and tall. His administration established thirteen new national forests. (However, he also reduced the 1.1 million acres of the White River in Colorado by 61,000 acres in 1902; today it’s 2.3 million acres.)

Geographically Roosevelt’s forests ranged from the great boundary waters of Minnesota and Canada to the foothills of the lush, waterfall rich Arbuckles in Oklahoma. In New Mexico Roosevelt created Lincoln National Forest in honor of his presidential hero (this 1,103,828-acre reserve straddled four counties and became the birthplace of Smokey the Bear). Heading off the mining industry, Roosevelt declared the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana a national forest, though they were known to contain silver, gold, lead, and zinc. The lush timber forest and grassy meadows of the Little Belts, Roosevelt declared, were far more valuable to America’s long-term heritage than a cabal of speculators amassing personal fortunes from the public domain. The Little Belts had formed 70 million years ago; he wanted to keep them intact.

Perhaps the most extraordinary forest reserves President Roosevelt created in 1902 were the huge “experimental” ones in Nebraska. In April he declared Niobrara and Dismal River national forests. (The reserves became jointly known as Nebraska National Forest in 1907.) Within their perimeters were the longest “hand-planted” forests in the world. Starting in the 1890s Charles Edwin Bessey, a botanist at the University of Nebraska, working in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, began an innovative tree-planting project in the Nebraska Sand Hills. Because the Sand Hills were semiarid, receiving only about twenty inches of rain annually, the 20,000-square-mile area was terribly deforested. Brushfires were the most menacing threat. In 1901, Pinchot, wanting to assist Bessey’s vision of a forested Nebraska sand hills, sent a reconnaissance survey team to assess the possibility of planting trees.
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Roosevelt had great confidence in the Nebraska Sand Hills rehabilitation project. By creating the two forest reserves on deforested land—208,902 acres, to be exact—Roosevelt was hoping to launch a prototype pilot project that could soon be replicated in Kansas and Iowa. He saw both Dismal River and Niobrara as nurseries for Nebraska farmers who wanted trees for windbreaks and to protect their homes. No longer would sharp summer winds scorch their crops or brutal winter snowdrifts bury homes, as had happened at his North Dakota ranch. Trees would protect farmers from the elements and improve soil humus so that modern agri
culture could thrive. Roosevelt also believed that trees in Dismal River and Niobrara would “ameliorate the dryness of the atmosphere,” thereby increasing rain.
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Roosevelt and Pinchot’s Nebraska project was, as the historian John Clark Hunt called it in the journal
American Forests
, “The Forest That Men Made.”
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Building the headquarters in Halsey, Nebraska, President Roosevelt had Forest Service employees plant 70,000 jack pine seedlings (from Minnesota) and 30,000 ponderosa pine seedlings (shipped from the Black Hills Forest Reserve by Seth Bullock). Many trial-and-error experiments commenced. Overcoming prairie fires was extremely difficult. Eventually the workers discovered that native red cedar grew more effectively than pine. From a political perspective the Nebraska project was proof positive that federal forestry efforts were aimed at enhancing western living, not destroying states’ rights.
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Decades later, when America was in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt would adopt the Nebraska pilot project nationwide as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

Still, T.R. received a lot of criticism from Nebraskan farmers and stockmen who thought of his forest reserves as socialism—the U.S. government taking lands away from the public domain. Eventually, Roosevelt was forced to reduce his Sand Hills reserves by 2 percent.
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“Some of the Nebraska Congressmen are uneasy about the growth of the forest reserves in Nebraska,” Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot in 1906. “I call your attention to the enclosed account of an interview with [Sylvester] Rush, who was special district attorney at Omaha, who was so active in securing the prosecution of the cattlemen for illegal farming. The article tends to show that some of the cattlemen who have been most prominent in illegal action are pushing this reserve scheme. Of course this does not alter the fact that these reserves are good things where no harm to the homesteader or agricultural settler results; but it also shows that we should be exceedingly careful about going too far with them. Such a course would tend to promote a revulsion.”
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Besides undertaking the forestry experiment in Nebraska, Roosevelt also preserved millions of acres of Alaskan forestland in 1902. Even though he still hadn’t managed to visit Alaska, he had carefully read Merriam’s “Harriman Alaskan Expedition Report of 1899.” (And he knew that Burroughs and Muir were busying themselves writing memoirs of their Alaskan trip.) Well aware that the Alexander Archipelago—a 300-hundred-mile-long group of pristine islands off the southeastern coast of Alaska, named after a former head of a Russian fur trading company—
was an incubator for thousands of seabirds, seals, walruses, and whales, Roosevelt declared all 1,110 islands a national forest on August 20, 1902. When he was asked how seal and bird rookeries could possibly be a forest reserve, Roosevelt pointed out that the islands were located in a temperate rain forest zone. Roosevelt saw this new Alaska reserve as a preemptive strike against Great Britain, whose sea hunters were constantly killing seals in American waters. “We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”
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Originally conceived by George T. Emmons, a former naval lieutenant who hunted and fished in Alaska regularly, the Alexander Archipelago National Forest Reserve was Rooseveltian conservationism writ large—very large. It was slightly over 4.5 million acres. In 1893 Emmons had overseen the U.S. Navy’s Alaska exhibit at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
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At the time Emmons was considered America’s expert on the coastal Alaskan art of the Tlingit and Haida. In 1900, it’s safe to say, nobody else, intellectually, knew the islands, inlets, and waterways of southern Alaska with the nautical precision of George Emmons. Although his primary home was Princeton, New Jersey, Emmons spent his summers in Alaska as an “anthropologist without portfolio.” All of America’s major museums collected Alaskan art from him.
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An amateur cetacean biologist also, Emmons wrote a fact-filled report, “The Woodlands of Alaska” (promoting the Alexander Archipelago), and sent it to Roosevelt. Emmon’s geological knowledge was based on personal exploration—always a plus with Roosevelt. What impressed Roosevelt so much about Emmons was his scholarly, coolheaded analysis of Alaskan wildlife. His report, for example, admitted that much of Alaska wasn’t suited to be a forest reserve. But the forests of southeastern Alaska—the Alexander Archipelago—were a must, if only to protect wildlife. These largely coniferous woodlands were part of a continuous forest which ran through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Because it rained so often, forest fires were rare. These islands were built for the ages. Whetting Roosevelt’s conservationist appetite, Emmons boasted that the coast hemlock (
Tsuga heterophylla
) and the Sitka spruce (
Pices sitchernsis
) of Alexander Archipelago were world-class. With scientific prudence Emmons suggested that the islands of the Alexander Archipelago should remain “one immense forest of conifers.”
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Sounding a lot like Pinchot, Emmons told Roosevelt that he wasn’t a an idealist with regard to national forests; limited logging would have
to take place on the islands of the Alexander Archipelago. Emmons explained how the Roosevelt administration could work around such inconveniences as fishing camps, sawmills, and canneries. Recognizing that Sitka, for example, was inhabited by territorial citizens (white), Emmons didn’t rock the boat. He did, however, recommend that the very thinly populated islands of Prince of Wales, Kuiu, Kupreanof, and Chichagof (and hundreds of smaller islets) become federal assets. Although Tlingit and Haida lived on these islands, they weren’t considered real citizens in 1902. Unbending about saving the archipelago, Emmons chose forestry over Indian rights as his primary concern.
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Another reason President Roosevelt embraced the plan outlined in Emmons’s “Woodlands of Alaska” was a boundary dispute between the United States and Canada over a strip of southeastern Alaska. The object of controversy was known as a “Panhandle” along the Alaska-Yukon border. Ever since the discovery of gold along Bonanza Creek in 1896 the United States had denied Canada direct access to the Klondike from the Pacific Ocean. By 1902 the dispute between the nations was enflamed. “[The] claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Canadian coast,” Roosevelt angrily pronounced, “is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim the island of Nantucket.”
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Roosevelt had long harbored an expansionist desire to incorporate all of Canada into the United States, though of course he never acted on it. Clearly, in 1902, with Canada a great democratic nation, this wasn’t going to happen. Nevertheless, Roosevelt didn’t want to have Canadians timbering or fishing in Alaskan waters. The United States, Roosevelt insisted, had legal authority over an unbroken littoral going from the Alaskan Territory to the southernmost part of the Panhandle. In 1901 Roosevelt had ceded about 600 square miles of land to Canada—but now, in 1903, he wasn’t going to compromise with regard to the Panhandle. Roosevelt, in fact, belying his reputation as an expansionist, is the only U.S. president ever to shrink the size of American territory. Getting Great Britain to side with the United States in a dispute, an international tribunal voted in favor of the Roosevelt administration in 1902. But the U.S. federal government’s seizure of the Alexander Archipelago as a forest reserve was a proactive measure aimed at protecting Alaskan waters from Canadians.

Deeply impressed by Emmons—after all, they shared a love of U.S. naval history and conservation—Roosevelt sent him on an official mission to Alaska in 1902 to iron out a land dispute with Britain over the Alaskan-Canadian border. The sheer professionalism of Emmons on this
mission impressed the president mightily. Owing to Emmons’s advocacy and diplomacy, on August 20 Roosevelt created the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve by a presidential proclamation. “The areas included in the reserve were exactly as George Emmons had proposed them,” the historian David E. Conrad noted in an important article in
Pacific Historical Review
, “and his dream of a national forest in Alaska was an accomplished feat.”
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