The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Overnight, from the relative obscurity of the vice presidency, Roosevelt was now in a governmental position where his every action could be a thunderbolt. The subtle hazards and perils of being president never dawned on him. He was all forward motion, ready to rule by righteousness and a bit of the belt. A friend once famously quipped that Roosevelt was “the meteor of the age,”2 imbued with unshakable self-confidence in his own ideas. In power of mind and disposition Roosevelt was an old-school military disciplinarian type always shouting “Charge!” and galloping up policy hills with flamboyant bravado. There was nothing fussy about him. Largely disdainful of automobiles and the telephone, Roosevelt remained a twentieth century saddle-horse man who favored written correspondence as his primary mode of communication.3 Untiring at his desk, vigorous and direct in his opinions, he was a virtual writing machine. It’s been estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters in his lifetime. (Harvard University Press published eight thick volumes of them between 1951 and 1954; these are, in effect, an epistolary biography of Roosevelt.) These letters were like chess moves to Roosevelt, helping keep his hyperactive mind fresh and his fighting instinct well honed. “Now talking with Roosevelt often does no good because he does all the talking,” William Allen White noted in December 1901. “But when you write him and he can’t talk back you get a chance to put in more.”4

  After only a few days in office Roosevelt started bombarding western friends with exhortations to gear up for a fight to protect America’s heritage. According to the Forest Management Act of 1897, timber and water were the only natural resources that the U.S. government was officially sanctioned to protect inside forest reserves. Therefore, this stop-gap act had opened forest reserves to mining claims. And it ignored foraging because allowing livestock to graze in the reserves was still being hotly debated in Congress. Within a few weeks Roosevelt made it clear that his administration would keep voracious sheep—those goddamn hoofed locusts—out of the forest reserves. “Intellectually a sheep is about on the lowest level of the brute creation,” Roosevelt had written; “why the early Christians admired it, whether young or old is…always a profound mystery.”5 Roosevelt made it clear that sheepherders, or borregueros in the west, would be arrested if they trespassed on federal property. Instead, Roosevelt wanted to promote big game in its old, pre-Columbian range. Roosevelt insisted that white-tailed deer rather than livestock of any sort should populate places like the northern Arizona plateau. Eventually, after seven and a half years as president, he won that specific debate. There are literally hundreds of instances in which Rooseveltian wildlife protection trumped grazing. For example, when Roosevelt became president the Kaibab Forest of Arizona had only about 2,000 deer. Owing to Rooseveltian game management principles, this number swelled to 100,000 within a decade.6 And not a single sheep’s bleat could be heard in the Kaibab Forest.

  Furthermore, Roosevelt built on postulations promoted by Charles D. Walcott (director of the U.S. Geological Survey), who insisted that there were “sentimental” reasons to save forests; they had recreational as well as commercial value. But before Roosevelt’s “new conservationism” could soar, the obligations of continuity and stability were met as protocol dictated. Roosevelt retained stalwarts from the McKinley administration—notably Secretary of State John Hay and Secretary of War Elihu Root—to reassure the nation regarding foreign affairs. The American government would not abandon Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines on his imperialistic watch. There was only one clear deviation in foreign policy. A more energetic push for an isthmus canal would be prioritized; it was a pet issue for Roosevelt. And, of course, Roosevelt would continue to oversee the building of a first-rate U.S. Navy fleet, as dictated by Mahan’s security ideas.

  On the domestic front, however, immediately deviating from McKinley’s policies, Roosevelt began professionalizing forestry and wildlife protection in both Interior and Agriculture. A battle royal for the future of the West had erupted, and he didn’t plan on letting his pro-conservationist side lose. “This immense idea (of conservation) Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation,” Robert La Follette of Wisconsin recalled of the months following McKinley’s assassination, “until the Nation heeded.” 7

  Influenced by Pinchot, Roosevelt believed that the United States was in the Dark Ages when it came to proper scientific management of the reserves. In late 1901 showdowns between preservationists and developers over forest reserves had become common in the West. For example, a spur track had been laid from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a distance of sixty miles, slashing its way through forest. Besides increased tourism, eastern fortune seekers were pouring into the Grand Canyon region seeking minerals and timber rights. Other companies wanted to construct buildings at scenic sites. Plans were under way by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to erect the luxurious El Tovar Hotel on the canyon brink. Was the Grand Canyon going to be ruined? Roosevelt determined that forest rangers and wildlife protectors should be hired as a police force around the Grand Canyon to deal with the increased tourist, timber, and mining development. Not that Roosevelt was opposed to limited wise development.8

  In actuality, Roosevelt wanted more Americans to spend holidays in the West rather than waste time in Europe. What concerned him was that the U.S. government didn’t have enough army troops protecting, for example, California’s sequoias or Yellowstone’s petrified wood. Roosevelt hoped old-breed mountain men, husbandry experts, and Rough Rider-types could be employed in national parks and forest reserves as rangers. In the Sequoia National Park’s Superintendent’s Annual Report of 1901 the term “park ranger” was used for the first time by the U.S. Army. Roosevelt liked the ring of it. According to the historian Charles R. Farabee Jr., in 1902 Roosevelt’s Interior Department created three classifications of rangers: Class A1 (deeply familiar with forestlands and able to survey and inventory) and Classes 2 and 3 (no complex requirements, “but they must be able-bodied, sober, and industrious men fully capable of comprehending and following instructions”).9 Class A1 was paid ninety dollars per month; Class 2 got seventy-five dollars; Class 3 got sixty dollars.10

  Like a diligent ROTC recruiter, Roosevelt now went after one of the ablest Class A1 westerners he knew—David E. Warford of Arizona, from the Troop B Rough Riders, who had taken two Spanish bullets in his thighs near Santiago—to watch over white-tailed deer and forestlands in the Kaibab Forest north of the Grand Canyon. To Roosevelt, Warford—who had returned to Arizona a war hero—was a “new prototype” of the forest ranger conservationist. Warford would protect the yellow pine groves of central-eastern Arizona in what is today the Apache, Coronado, and Tonto national forests. Because the nearly 4.15 million acres* of noncontiguous reserve lands had irregular boundaries—on a map the land looked like jigsaw pieces—it needed somebody who knew every swath of the entire Great Colorado Plateau like the back of his hand to protect the forests from exploitation. Such a vast territory needed a “ranger”—a term first popularized in America during the French and Indian War but appropriated by the Confederate Army during the Civil War. “You have been appointed a Forest Ranger,” Roosevelt wrote to Warford. “Now, I want to write to you very seriously to impress upon you that you have got to do your duty well, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of the honor of the regiment. I recommended you because under me you showed yourself gallant, efficient and obedient. You must continue to show these qualities in the government service exactly as you did in the regiment. You must let no consideration of any kind interfere with the performance of your duty. You are to protect the government’s property and the forests and to uphold the interests of the department in every way. Now, remember that I expect you to show yourself an official of far above the average type; and you are to stand or fall strictly on your merits.”

  It was signed, “Your old Colonel.”11

  Bureaucratic confusion reigned supreme in late 1901 regarding the protection of national parks a
nd western forest reserves. From 1886 to 1918, for example, Yellowstone, General Grant, Sequoia, and a couple of other national parks remained protected by the U.S. Army. Hence when Roosevelt became president the acting superintendent of Yellowstone was Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, known for his antipoaching zeal and hyperefficiency. Selected in 1902 as superintendent, a job he held for five years, Pitcher made great improvements in Yellowstone, establishing a fish hatchery, buffalo alfalfa fields, and trout bag limits in Yellowstone Lake. But owing to the Federal Reserve Act of 1891, the supervision of forest reserves adjacent to the park became the responsibility of the Department of the Interior (not the army). Within Interior the reserves fell under the jurisdiction first of the General Land Office (GLO) from 1891 to 1901 and then, during Roosevelt’s administration, the Forestry Division. But—and herein lies one of the many confusions—the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also had a Bureau of Forestry. Interior and Agriculture divided the responsibilities of managing reserves. So in 1901 Yellowstone National Park, for example, was run by the U.S. Army, while the abutting Yellowstone Park Timber Land Reserve was overseen by the Secretary of the Interior. The United States desperately needed a streamlining of its natural resource policy. As President Roosevelt saw it, forest management and national greatness were one and the same.

  What President Roosevelt recognized in the fall of 1901 was that, ironically, the key to making forest science work depended on Class A1 district rangers—men like Warford whom locals would respect as federal law enforcement officers. It was nearly worthless, Roosevelt believed, to appoint out-of-state Ivy Leaguers as rangers. Communities needed to respect the local ranger, who ideally would have a “shared heritage” with them. The new federal forestry rules and regulations had to be explained, because citizens in the West were accustomed to taking timber and foraging livestock at will. Limits had to be taught. The threatening “No Trespassing” needed to come from the mouth of a homeboy. One of the things Roosevelt liked about Warford, for example, was that he spoke Spanish, which allowed him to communicate with many locals in New Mexico and Arizona. Once this pillar of police ruggedness was in place, then the food scientists and biologists could come in as backup. Another innovation of Roosevelt’s was having student assistants—that is, Yale- or Biltmore-trained scientific forestry experts—spend time working side by side with the western-born rangers.* Roosevelt wanted to give the local men the “undivided responsibility” to oversee their respective forest reserve site.

  Besides the Arizona reserves, Roosevelt turned to the Black Hills in South Dakota, where his old friend Seth Bullock, sheriff extraordinaire, had been employed as forest supervisor to protect the federal reserve as a result of Roosevelt’s lobbying as vice president. “As soon as I was appointed,” recalled Bullock, “Washington commenced to send a lot of Dudes out here as Forest Rangers. I didn’t want them. I wanted Forest Rangers who could sleep out in the open with or without a blanket and put out a fire and catch a horse thief. I wrote the Colonel [Roosevelt] about it.”12

  Upon receiving Bullock’s letter, President Roosevelt instructed Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock to give Bullock a “free hand” in administering the 1,211,680-acre South Dakota reserve. The sixty-six-year-old Hitchcock wasn’t used to having a president run roughshod over him in such a brazen, unremitting fashion. An old-style southern diplomat from Mobile, Alabama, Hitchcock had been McKinley’s minister to Russia before accepting the secretaryship. He was a lineal descendant of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen.13 A snappy dresser and a calm presence, Hitchcock epitomized Mark Twain’s belief that truly civilized men never rushed. Hitchcock dealt with everybody in formal niceties, allergic to conflict, gracious to the point of caricature. A low-grade conservationist himself, Hitchcock was deeply concerned that some of America’s richest timberlands had been recklessly destroyed and others were on the verge of destruction. Certainly Hitchcock understood that the combination of intensive industrial production, the application of science and technology to manufacturing, and the encouragement of land developers and urban growth was destroying natural habitats forever. Yet the optimistic Hitchcock knew that even burned-out forests could be reborn, eventually producing new yields. Nature could heal itself. For the most part Roosevelt and Hitchcock were in sync. Yet between 1901 and 1907 they feuded like obdurate brothers. Hitchcock resented the bullish way the president was going about things, acting like Cassandra, exaggerating the long-term societal dangers because America was consuming forests three times faster than they were being reproduced. Roosevelt and Hitchcock’s goals and vision concerning conservation had nearly identical implications for policy—where they differed was in the matter of pace. It was zoom versus incrementalism.

  Roosevelt, apparently sensing that Hitchcock was only three-quarters on board, never fully trusted this cabinet officer. Concerned that pro-development senators from Wyoming and South Dakota wouldn’t like the conservationist-cowboy Bullock being given carte blanche in the Black Hills, President Roosevelt disseminated Bullock’s letter to every legislator on Capitol Hill. No consultation was going on; Roosevelt was informing the legislators that the legendary lawman Bullock was in charge of South Dakota’s rimland management. Hitchcock, contemplating resignation, decided instead to buckle up and join Roosevelt’s progressive crusade, even if it meant absorbing all the president’s doomsday histrionics. Balding, with a huge gray mustache, Hitchcock acted around Roosevelt and Pinchot like a wise butler tolerating abhorrent behavior from youngsters because he had no other choice. What Bullock tried to communicate to Hitchcock was that the Black Hills could survive only if timber and water were conserved. “If both are destroyed,” Bullock warned, “the richest 100 miles square will become a desert.”14

  Seth Bullock and Teddy Roosevelt. This photo was taken early in the twentieth century. Roosevelt first met Bullock on a cattle range in 1884, and they became very good friends. Soon after assuming the presidency, Roosevelt appointed Bullock U.S. marshal for South Dakota and Black Hills forest ranger. Bullock had an open invitation to stay overnight at the White House whenever he pleased.

  T.R. with Seth Bullock. (Courtesy of David Dary)

  Having the vital Bullock—a forerunner of Shane—on his side was a great relief to Roosevelt. Everybody needs a few bad-weather friends. “I hope to see you in Washington this winter,” Roosevelt wrote to Bullock on September 24. “I want to have you at dinner at the White House, and we will talk over past events. I have been peculiarly pleased to have a man of your type to execute the forest laws, for I know you will see to it that they are enforced absolutely without regard to anything but the law itself. Above all I hope you will see that any Government official who is guilty of laxity or inefficiency is held to a strict account.”15

  What President Roosevelt was trying to accomplish by circulating his correspondence with Seth Bullock to congressional offices was to demonstrate the kind of top-drawer fellow needed to protect the western reserves. Roosevelt’s vision of law enforcement was hundreds of Bullocks reined up like an Interior Department cavalry on parade, ready to protect the forestlands as a backup for the U.S. Army. Since 1872 Bullock had been perhaps the most vociferous promoter of Yellowstone living in the West. After all, it had been Bullock, as a renegade member of the territorial legislature, who introduced the bill to preserve northwest Wyoming as a “great national park.” Nobody in the West loathed poachers—and arrested them—with the earnest fervor of Bullock. As sheriff in Deadwood, Bullock—who entered the pop culture kingdom in 2004 as the leading character in the HBO television series Deadwood—relished protecting the Black Hills from rogue mining outfits operating without proper claims and from rank outlaws illegally prospecting for gold on federal land. And he expressed a sweeping damnation of all lawbreakers. A veteran of Grisby’s Cowboy Regiment in the Spanish-American War and a fierce ally of the Rooseveltian conservation movement, Bullock wanted the upside-down county around Deadwood—specially Devils Tower toward the west and
Wind Cave to the east—preserved as national parks.

  President Roosevelt modeled his administration’s conservation policy after his own governorship in New York—where he had tried to whittle down the Fish, Game, and Forest Commission to one nonpolitical appointee. Thus a new era in forest conservation and wildlife management policy was under way. As governor of New York from 1899 to 1900 Roosevelt had led an effort to measure every stream and brook in the state. He now wanted to apply that idea nationally.16 With an air of reasonableness, he warned Secretary Hitchcock that at all costs nobody should be employed in Interior solely for political reasons. Instead, Roosevelt wanted “good plainsmen and mountain men, able to walk and ride and lie out at night, as any first-class men must be able to do.” He wanted wilderness warriors who understood forest reserves to lead to overall social betterment in America. His exhibits A and B were Warford and Bullock: outdoorsmen without an ounce of haughtiness or of susceptibility to greed. Remembering how Yellowstone had been hampered by a lack of law enforcement before the protection act of 1894, Roosevelt basically wanted the western territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Indian, and Oklahoma protected by Rough Riders. “In other words,” Roosevelt instructed Secretary Hitchcock, “they are to be rangers in fact and not in name, and no excuse will be tolerated for inability to perform the vigorous bodily work of the position any more than lack of courage and honesty would be excused.”17