Rightful Heritage: The Renewal of America

by Douglas Brinkley

  V

  On November 25, 1938, Roosevelt took the existing seven-square-mile Arches National Monument in Utah and enlarged it to approximately forty-five square miles via Presidential Proclamation.93 The sheer size of the Arches enlargement caused the administration to authorize the establishment of a CCC camp near Moab. The two hundred men assigned by the National Park Service to work at Arches lived near the swift-flooding Colorado River.94 Enduring sunstroke and heat exhaustion, they built monument headquarters, maintenance sheds, a handsome road with switchbacks, and the Moab Canyon Wash Culvert. Unlike Zion or Bryce Canyon, Arches wasn’t concerned about attracting the tourism industry. As a result, Arches National Monument became an exemplary model of the CCC enhancing the wilderness experience without exploiting nature.95

  Around Christmas 1938, Roosevelt, with the help of Ansel Adams and David Brower of the Sierra Club, accelerated the Kings Canyon National Park legislation in Congress.96 Undampened and determined in spite of entrenched opposition by the Forest service, the effort by FDR and the Sierra Club gained momentum on Capitol Hill. Henry Wallace remained the most significant holdout in the administration. However, Ickes did some sleuthing and managed to discover that Wallace’s father—Henry Cantwell Wallace—had wanted to enlarge Sequoia National Park, just south of Kings Canyon, to include the disputed lands along Kings River while he was serving as Warren Harding’s secretary of agriculture.

  Ickes gave this information to FDR, who then used it to encourage Wallace to support Kings Canyon National Park. “Reverting to the subject of Kings Canyon,” Roosevelt wrote to Wallace early in 1939, “I think you will find that three former Chief Foresters agreed that this area ought to have a national park status. I think you will find that a grand Secretary of Agriculture, by the name of Henry C. Wallace, wrote on January 17, 1924, in reference to H.R. 4095, to add certain lands to Sequoia National Park the following: ‘The proposed enlargement of the park and the specific boundaries relating thereto are endorsed by this department.’ I think you will find that the area then proposed for addition to the Sequoia Park was even bigger than the area now proposed for the Kings Canyon Park.”97

  Using Wallace’s father in this way was perhaps unfair. But FDR’s insistence on finalizing Kings Canyon National Park wasn’t about favoring NPS, or about his sometimes difficult relationship with his secretary of agriculture. He was dead set on saving the largest remaining natural grove of sequoias in the world. Wallace knew he had been outmaneuvered and, with no visible ill-feeling, joined the Kings Canyon crusade. The crusade was helped by Ansel Adams’s books; besides that, the Sierra Club’s David Brower, while on high-profile hikes in 1939, had made a long silent film with a sixteen-millimeter Bell and Howell camera. The film, Sky-Land Trials of the Kings, lovingly highlighted the gorgeous natural features of Kings Canyon and is widely considered, as Brower’s biographer Tom Turner put it, “the first conservation propaganda film ever made.”98

  On January 30, 1939, special celebrations were staged in CCC camps throughout America to honor FDR on his fifty-seventh birthday. Beyond politics, the vast majority of Americans still loved the president, with his broad optimism. They honored him by making his birthday a holiday, dedicated to winter fun and raising money for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (a charity FDR had started to combat polio). In the course of raising millions of dollars each year, there were balls and parties, massive multilayered birthday cakes, and fishing rodeos to pay homage to the president—whom Company 1950 in Upland, California, called the “Champ.”99 To Roosevelt’s delight, a number of former CCCers soon became famous in the sports world, including the light heavyweight boxing champion, Archie Moore, and the baseball legend Red Schoendienst of the St. Louis Cardinals. Unfortunately, Congress didn’t give FDR the gift he wanted: making the CCC permanent.

  Sensing that Congress might try to gut the CCC, Roosevelt took every opportunity to praise the work the “boys” did in helping communities recover from hurricanes and flooding. Nevertheless, in early 1939 Congress stripped the CCC of its independent status and transferred operational control to the Federal Security Agency (as it did with the National Youth Administration, the U.S. Employment Service, the Office of Education, and the Works Progress Administration).

  Throughout 1939, President Roosevelt, backed by the Sierra Club, built an alliance of California politicians to help with the effort for Kings Canyon. Key politicians who took the time to visit the area were taken down old logging roads and bridle trails to see the gorgeous vistas. Congressman Bertrand Gearhart, whose district included the proposed park, introduced a bill formally excluding the two reservoir sites that the Sierra Club had wanted inside Kings Canyon: Tehipite Valley on the middle fork of Kings River and Cedar Grove on the south fork. When the mayor of San Francisco, Angelo J. Rossi turned pro-park, Roosevelt thanked him in writing: “I appreciate your telegram of March 13 expressing your support of the proposed John Muir-Kings Canyon National Park. It is my belief that this area merits national park status and I am happy to know that the project has your endorsement.”100

  The opposition—what Ickes had called “local selfish interests”—kept trying to delay a vote in Congress. The Federal Power Commission had refused to give up control of Kings River since 1920. But Roosevelt, with the 1938 midterms behind him, appealed directly to Clyde L. Seavey, the commission’s acting chairman. “The creation of the John Muir-Kings Canyon National Park would protect a unique area in the High Sierra which is magnificently scenic,” Roosevelt argued. “It has been shown that this area has no large economic value and that the potential water powers are of doubtful feasibility. Undoubtedly the many beautiful little lakes do afford opportunities for power production, but the inaccessibility of the lakes and the cost of constructing tunnels and power plants in so wild a region would make this area less attractive for power development than many others in California. For these and other reasons, the creation of the Kings Canyon Park is favored by those best informed about this area.”101

  Having secured USDA’s compliance, Ickes now found himself fighting against the Federal Power Commission—in spite of FDR’s pleas—for much of 1939.102 The commission agreed to support the bill for Kings Canyon National Park only if it included a rider that “retained power rights for the federal government and state of California.”103 Ickes and Roosevelt were engaged in “one of the fiercest congressional battles on record.”104 “John Muir” was dropped from the name of the park, but the Roosevelt administration remained adamant that Kings Canyon National Park be kept pristine and free of rank commercialism.

  The roadless-wilderness provision meant that FDR, wheelchair-bound, would never be able to truly enjoy Kings Canyon National Park. The Sierra Club’s William Colby, one of the great advocates for wilderness in American history, had been fighting to preserve Kings Canyon country since John Muir had died in 1914. His admiration for the work Roosevelt, Ickes, Adams, Brant, and Marshall had done on behalf of the Sierra knew no bounds. Now, with the White House on board, he went into overdrive, working with Congress to create the park. “I feel now that I can die in peace,” Colby wrote to Ickes after Congress finally passed the bill, on February 20, 1940. “At least you have added the greatest possible joy to my remaining years.”105

  On March 4, 1940, after years of squabbling, Kings Canyon National Park was finally established; it constituted some 454,000 acres. Two gorgeous canyons—the Tehipite and Kings—were initially left out of the park’s boundaries. (But William O. Douglas, with help from the Sierra Club, would persuade President Lyndon Johnson to add these exquisite areas to the park in 1965.)106 Having helped establish both Olympic and Kings Canyon national parks, Brant, an unsung environmental hero of the late 1930s and early 1940s, resigned as White House speechwriter to begin a six-volume biography of James Madison.107

  Ansel Adams, in a self-portrait in an antique, convex mirror in 1936. Raised in the San Francisco area, Adams developed an extraordinary proficiency with the technical aspe
cts of black-and-white photography, which he applied to portraits of the natural world, especially in the West.

  A pleasant windfall resulted from the creation of Kings Canyon National Park: the Department of the Interior—using “mural project” funds—hired Ansel Adams to photograph America’s national parks and monuments. Ickes believed Adams’s sublime images would be valuable weapons in the battle to protect pockets of the pristine American West. The elegiac National Park photos that Adams took for Ickes—the Grand Canyon as if a continuous landmass; the jagged Kearsarge Pinnacles of Kings Canyon; the Snake River winding its way through the Grand Tetons; thunderstorms raging in the Rockies; the Big Room of Carlsbad Caverns; and a sweeping panoramic of Glacier from Going-to-the-Sun Road—were astonishing. Ickes was so taken by Adams’s close-up shots of leaves found in Glacier National Park that he ordered a mural-sized folding triptych made and placed it just to the left of his office desk at the Department of the Interior.

  Adams’s only regret about his role in Kings Canyon National Park and his productive stint as a photographer for Interior was that he never got to discuss the natural world with the president. “I never met Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Adams wrote in his autobiography. “I photographed him at a distance in Yosemite and was nearly nailed by a Secret Service agent who mistook my Contax telephoto lens for something else. Once in New York City I was given a front row seat when he spoke at the Museum of Natural History. I witnessed how difficult and painful it was for him to move across the stage on the arm of his son and how vigorous he appeared to be at the podium and delivered a strong plea for conservation in his inimitable voice. He was a wily and brilliant politician who made great cabinet appointments.”108

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “TO BENEFIT WILDLIFE”

  I

  Franklin Roosevelt deserved credit for saving treasured desert landscapes in the West with his four national monuments of the late 1930s—Joshua Tree (California), Capitol Reef (Utah), Organ Pipe Cactus (Arizona), and Tuzigoot (Arizona). What he took from all the archaeological discoveries in these Southwest sites was that civilizations often succumbed to lack of water or contaminated water, or a combination of the two. FDR had the National Park Service and Indian CCC collaborate to stabilize pre-Columbian ruins in the Southwest such as Chaco Canyon, Navajo, Tonto, Wupatki, and Montezuma Castle.1 He had learned that identifying—and showcasing—an archaeological site, a “charismatic” animal, or a native plant with a Southwest landscape made it easier to galvanize public support for preservation.

  After successfully protecting the desert bighorn sheep in Nevada’s Desert Range, Roosevelt sought further success in the rock-and-thorn terrain of the Cabeza Prietas and Kofa Mountains in Arizona. The harsh granite mountain range crested with dark lava. The Spaniards had called it Cabeza Prieta (“black-headed”) and it was the desert bighorn sheep’s last true home in Arizona. A sparse herd had also congregated in the Kofa Mountains—a name coined during early mining days by shortening the well-known claim “King of Arizona”—about ninety-five miles from the Cabeza Prietas on the Mexican border.

  Dr. Ira Gabrielson of the Biological Survey had long touted these Arizona desertscapes as the “most promising” sanctuary outside Nevada for the protection of desert bighorns.2 Driven from their northern latitudes by hunters, the bighorns had taken refuge in sunbaked Arizona’s remotest pockets, adapting to the punishing heat, almost nonexistent rainfall, sparse food, and dizzying elevations. However, the bighorns were still threatened by overhunting, diseases spread from domesticated sheep, and dwindling food sources. Whenever the bighorns foraged along the Gila and Colorado rivers to nibble grass, they were easy for sportsmen to kill. At some depots and truck stops in the Southwest, ram horns were stacked behind buildings like cordwood.

  Frederick Russell Burnham, an American-born adventurer, celebrated his eightieth birthday with a scout troop at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Burnham was instrumental in starting the Boy Scouts with Robert Baden-Powell, whom he first met while seeking his fortune in Rhodesia. A big-game hunter who tried unsuccessfully to import African large animals to the United States to be shot by paying hunters, Burnham embodied self-sufficiency in the outdoors, which was intrinsic to the Boy Scouts.

  In protecting desert bighorn, Roosevelt received a boost from Major Frederick Russell Burnham, a legendary figure in the age of exploration. Born to a missionary family on a Sioux reservation in Minnesota, Burnham became an Indian scout in the 1880s, when the U.S. Army was trying to pacify the Apache in the Arizona Territory. Across sparsely settled western land he had also famously guarded bullion on Wells Fargo stagecoaches traveling in the dusty Southwest and worked as a bounty hunter. During the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), he was Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s chief scout. In 1933, the magazine Boys Life published a series of Burnham’s actual adventures, concluding he was in the same survivalist class as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bridger.3 Few hunters of animals (or of people, for that matter) had the cunning of Burnham, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America.4

  Settling again in the American Southwest after his stint as a soldier of fortune in war-torn Africa, Burnham became an expert on the vibrant cultures of the Opata and Yaqui Indians; was a leader in the California Club (where Los Angeles’s power brokers met); joined the board of the Southwest Museum; and advocated for “fair chase” hunting. Burnham took to heart President Theodore Roosevelt’s stirring oratory at Grand Canyon in 1903—TR had implored the public to leave this natural wonder alone, declaring, “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”5 Burnham became a leading conservationist of the Southwest, aligning himself with the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection for the purpose of saving the desert bighorn sheep (as Ralph and Florence Welles were doing in Nevada). Burnham’s commitment to teaching frontier survival skills to young Arizonans led him to get involved with the Theodore Roosevelt Boy Scout Council in Phoenix.

  Knowing how TR had saved the buffalo from extinction, Burnham was determined to do the same for the bighorns in Arizona’s mountains. When Europeans brought domestic sheep to the Arizona Territory, bighorns caught scabies. These mites caused fatal infections that drastically reduced desert bighorn populations. Only sheep in isolated parts of the territory were able to survive the scourge. “Major Burnham put it this way,” George F. Miller, who knew Burnham through their work with the Arizona Boy Scouts, recalled. “I want you to help save this majestic animal, not only because it is in danger of extinction, but of more importance, some day it might provide domestic sheep with a strain to save them from disaster at the hands of a yet unknown virus.”6

  Burnham and his Boy Scouts appealed directly to FDR to help protect the wild sheep along the Arizona-Mexico border. Less than 1 percent of Arizonans had ever seen a desert bighorn sheep, but Burnham had made it the state mascot.7 Because Major Burnham was a living legend, Arizona politicians didn’t dare step on his toes. And many other conservation-minded Arizonans heeded the major’s call to action. In 1936 Herman Hendrix, the state superintendent of schools, held a “Save the Bighorns” poster design contest with Burnham’s help. Winning drawings were made into colorful posters that were displayed in storefronts in Flagstaff, Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma. Burnham chose a child’s sketch of a bighorn sheep head as the official Boy Scouts of Arizona emblem. To help publicize the conservation crusade, Burnham had his troop wear desert bighorn bandanas around their necks. The National Wildlife Federation, the Izaak Walton League, and the National Audubon Society all joined the Boy Scouts in pestering President Roosevelt to designate the Kofa Game Range and Cabeza Prieta Game Range as sanctuaries for the desert bighorns.

  FDR received counterpressure from many Arizonans who were opposed to the federal refuges. Likewise, Major Burnham and George Miller received hate mail accusing them of being socialists, Yankees, and claim-jumpers. It was one thing, these detractors argued, to teach Boy Scouts how to hunt bighorns
; it was quite another to ask Uncle Sam to grab half a million acres of Arizona—a state that had experienced the second-greatest decline of income in America (only South Dakota was more affected) during the first three years of the Great Depression.8 Governor Rawghlie Stanford, a Democrat, dismissed the bighorn sheep as “George Miller’s billygoats.” Quite sensibly, he didn’t dare mock Major Burnham. On general principles, the powerful Cattle Growers’ Association was opposed to all wildlife reserves in Arizona. Since cattle didn’t graze in the bighorns’ desert—which was five thousand feet high, and rocky—the cattleman’s complaints rang hollow to Roosevelt. Predictably, the Arizona Small Mine Operators’ Association also opposed the notion of a bighorn sheep preserve.

  Ignoring objections from the Tucson Chamber of Commerce—which had taken to referring to Roosevelt as the “Great Seizer” (a pun on Great Caesar)—Ickes asked lawyers with the Department of the Interior to cobble together a compromise deal that would protect Arizona’s desert bighorns. Exemptions were made for cowboys who were already tending cattle in the region, and furthermore, the administration would guarantee that when the Kofa and Cabeza Prieta ranges became wildlife sanctuaries, a few longtime miners would be allowed to work their small claims for life. That was, however, the only concession the extraction lobby received from Washington, D.C.

  What Roosevelt admired, during the fight in Arizona, was the advocacy of the Boy Scouts of America. He had long credited the BSA with helping to inspire the CCC. His New Deal work-relief programs, he believed, were based on the same public service “fundamentals” as scouting.9 Speaking once at Ten Mile River Scout Camp in New York, Roosevelt suggested that all American men should adopt the ethics of scouting as their own.10 So when Arizonan Boy Scouts wrote to him movingly about the need to rescue bighorn sheep in the Kofas and Cabeza Prietas, he responded eagerly. What made Roosevelt such an impressive conservationist leader was that he liked it when ecology-minded young people engaged in local causes urged him to do more. “The ideals of Scouting are not simply ideals for boys,” Roosevelt said. “They are good ideals for man.”11