The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  XI

  While Roosevelt was hunting wild turkey in Virginia, the 1906 congressional elections were held. Generally speaking, it was a good day for Republicans (progressive) in the North and Democrats (progressive) in the South. But in what was interpreted by political pundits, in part, as displeasure with Roosevelt’s intense conservationism, twenty-eight Republican seats were lost in the U.S. House of Representatives. This meant that the Republican majority was lessened by fifty-six seats (it was now 222 to 164). One casualty of the election was John F. Lacey of Iowa’s Sixth District. Apparently the voters didn’t care that Lacey was America’s authority on petrified logs in the Arizona desert; they wanted solutions to the economic downturn of 1906 (which would turn into the Panic of 1907). Iowans living in towns like Oskaloosa, Pella, and Eddyville had real problems and spared little thought for Anasazi cliff dwellings, Zuni cave drawings, and the mating habits of little green herons. Congressmen were supposed to bring back pork to the home district not establish federal parks, forests, and bird reservations in other states and territories.

  Nothing seized Roosevelt’s attention quite like an electoral debacle. Losing Lacey in Congress, for instance, was a blow, because Lacey had so ably aided the conservationist movement in the congressional Committee on the Public Lands. But Roosevelt realized, stoically, that every politician had his day and Lacey’s had lasted for thirty-seven years. With his congressional career now terminated, Roosevelt inquired whether Lacey wanted a cabinet appointment or an ambassadorship. Lacey’s answer was no. He preferred to practice law in Oskaloosa. What an unsung American hero this Iowan was! Without Lacey, there might have been no model bird laws in Florida, no reintroduction of bison in Oklahoma, and no preservation of cliff dwellings in the Southwest. Mesa Verde might have been destroyed without his intervention. William Hornaday correctly said of Lacey that “he was never elsewhere than on the firing line.” A movement was under way in November 1906 to create a “monument as lofty as his own purposes and as imperishable as his fame.”77 The accomplishments of Lacey’s governmental career were never forgotten by Roosevelt, who, on returning from Panama, planned to designate as national monuments three southwestern prehistoric sites favored by Lacey.

  From Pine Knot the president headed to Norfolk, setting sail for Panama on November 9, 1906, to see “how the ditch is getting along.” There had been no cases of yellow fever in Panama City since November 11, 1905; the amazing Dr. William Gorgas had eradicated this scourge from the isthmus. So Roosevelt, with a group of military personnel at his side, was ready for an inspection tour. The first days passed peacefully at sea. Much of his correspondence while he was aboard the USS Louisiana dealt with Cuba and America’s naval power. Yet he also kept colorful naturalist notes. “All the forenoon we had Cuba on our right and most of the forenoon and part of the afternoon Haiti on our left,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit, “and in each case green, jungly shores and bold mountains—two great, beautiful, venomous tropic islands.” Among meditations on voodoo, cannibalism, Dutch sea dogs, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and the Chagres River flood, Roosevelt wrote about the tropics, proud to think that he had saved wild parts of Puerto Rico, Florida, and Louisiana from destruction. “The deluge of rain meant that many of the villages were knee-deep in water, while the flooded rivers tore through the tropic forests,” he wrote of Panama. “It is a real tropic forest, palms and bananas, breadfruit trees, bamboos, lofty ceibas, and gorgeous butterflies and brilliant colored birds fluttering among the orchids. There are beautiful flowers, too. All my old enthusiasm for natural history seemed to revive, and I would have given a good deal to have stayed and tried to collect specimens.”78

  Halfheartedly reporting on the engineering feats associated with the Panama Canal, Roosevelt was proud of his achievement but seemed to prefer being a naturalist. He saw himself as an advance scout for the American Museum of Natural History, which didn’t acquire specimens from Panama until 1914.79 When the Louisiana anchored in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt rushed out to inspect the Luquillo National Forest area he had created in 1902. After reading Biological Survey reports about the rain forest and parrots, he now examined them on his own. Returning to his childhood habit of drawing animals, Roosevelt once again doodled parrots and turtles. “The scenery was beautiful,” he wrote to Kermit. “It was as thoroly [sic] tropical as Panama but much more livable. There were palms, tree-ferns, bananas, mangoes, bamboos, and many other trees and multitudes of brilliant flowers. There was one vine called the dream vine with flowers as big as great white water lilies, which close up tight in the daytime and bloom at night. There were vines with masses of brilliant purple and pink flowers, and others with masses of little white flowers, which at night smell deliciously.”80

  Kermit, now sixteen years old, was full of gratitude that his father sent him such marvelous notes from Panama, from Puerto Rico, and at sea. But he seems to have thought somewhat differently in early December. News came that his father—President Theodore Roosevelt—had won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a settlement in the Russo-Japanese War. Not surprisingly, as the first American ever to win this honor, Roosevelt was pleased. But he was also concerned about the $40,000 check that accompanied the prize. After all, he had spent much of his public career huffing and puffing against bribery and corruption. He had made peace between Japan and Russia because it was his job as president. Ethically, the $40,000 didn’t belong to him.

  To Kermit, his father was just being unduly foolish. The money could properly be used to build a new wing on Sagamore Hill, to travel around the world, or to earn interest in an inheritance fund for him and his brothers and sisters. Shouldn’t the Roosevelt family enjoy this gift? His father, that December, deplored such self-indulgent notions. “Now,” the president wrote to Kermit, “I hate to do anything foolish or quixotic and above all I hate to do anything that means the refusal of money which would ultimately come to you children. But mother and I talked it over and came to the conclusion that while I was President at any rate, and perhaps anyhow, I could not accept money given to me for making peace between two nations, especially when I was able to make peace simply because I was President. To receive money for making peace would in any event be a little too much like being given money for rescuing a man from drowning, or for performing a daring feat in war.”81 A prisoner of old ethics, Roosevelt received the check that December. He used it to create a committee in Washington, D.C., for industrial peace.

  On December 8, Roosevelt had signed quietistic declarations establishing Montezuma Castle (Arizona), El Morro (New Mexico), and the Petrified Forest (Arizona) as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The three monuments were a tribute to Lacey’s trademark persistence on their behalf. If Lacey hadn’t been a teetotaler, he might have uncorked a bottle of Dom Perignon when told of this order. In Arizona, Wetherill excitedly anticipated more tourists than he could shepherd to see the ancient sites. Roosevelt had created all three monuments as a federal measure to deter artifact thieves and promote scientific study. He understood that these southwestern ruins and petroglyphs were windows to understanding the prehistoric cliff dwellings, pueblo ruins, and early missions discovered by army officers, ethnologists, cowboys, and explorers on the vast public lands in the territories. The story of ancient peoples could be analyzed better in these three monuments than anywhere else in North America; the ruins were that intact. Thanks to the Antiquities Act, nobody was allowed to excavate or appropriate anything from Montezuma Castle, El Morro, or the Petrified Forest without permission from the relevant department (War, Agriculture, or Interior). As Charles F. Lummis wrote in St. Nicholas, an illustrated magazine for young adults, these monuments were in a part of the United States which “Americans know [as] little as they do Central Africa.”82 The historian Josh Protas has noted, in A Past Preserved in Stone, that the “diversity” of Southwestern monuments “set a precedent for the types of monuments that would later be established.”83

  Take, for example, El Morr
o, on the Colorado Plateau. More than 2,000 inscriptions and petroglyphs were carved into the soft sandstone by explorers, pioneers, and native tribes. Much of western history may have been lost when pioneers headed down the Santa Fe Trail, but at El Morro some clues were left behind. Located five miles from Trinidad, New Mexico, this ancestral Pueblo ruin is at an elevation of 7,219 feet. Probably fewer than 1,000 easterners had seen it by 1906. Apparently, the ancients had used El Morro as a reliable water hole and campsite. At the time T.R. declared El Morro a national monument, the walls carved with signatures looked like a gigantic hotel register. Once again, thanks to Roosevelt, El Morro was now a treasured place, saved for future generations to study and enjoy.

  Montezuma Castle National Monument of Arizona featured amazing cliff dwellings that had been molded and lived in by the pre-Columbian Sinagua around AD 1400. The Sinagua had once prospered, developing a sophisticated culture, but then inexplicably vanished. To many people, the Arizona cliff dwellings they left behind were among the wonders of the world. Nobody really knew what to make of them. The Verde Valley area overlooking Beaver Creek had been named by Europeans for the Aztec emperor of Mexico—Montezuma II—in the mistaken belief that he had once lived there, and the misnomer stuck. An early advocate of protecting Montezuma Castle was T.R.’s old Rough Rider friend William “Buckey” O’Neill, who besides being a mayor of Prescott, Arizona, was the editor of Hoof and Horn. To O’Neill, the Montezuma Castle cliff dwellings, much like Mesa Verde, raised more questions than they answered. Why did the Sinagua leave? Archaeologists offered conflicting answers to such questions, though warfare and drought seemed the most logical reasons. Now, professional anthropologists and archaeologists could study Montezuma Castle’s axes, tools, shells, paints, bone implements, and other artifacts with federal protection.

  Because the Roosevelt administration didn’t have cash to spare, the Arizona Antiquities Association started repairing Montezuma Castle and put up a protective metal roof. Tourists at Phoenix and Prescott now became enthusiastic about day outings to Montezuma Castle. As a promotional gimmick, it was said that Kit Carson had favored the ruins; he had once camped in the area. There were murmurs in the Tucson newspaper that Montezuma Castle should become a national park. All of Arizona was proud of Montezuma Castle. “We were (and perhaps still are) attracted to the ruins, no matter what their size or age,” John B. Jackson wrote in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. “Their shabbiness served to bring something like a time scale to a landscape, which for all its solemn beauty failed to register the passage of time.”84

  But it was Petrified Forest National Monument that created a flash of satori in preservationist circles. If a swath of Arizona’s Painted Desert strewn with petrified coniferous trees could be saved, so could Florida’s swamps, Louisiana’s brackish marshes, and Alaska’s tundra. Lacey, who had crisscrossed the country in his effort to save the Petrified Forest—which he considered one of America’s five most striking wonders, along with Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Yosemite, and Wind Cave—celebrated at his home in Oskaloosa. Nobody in public life could speak about the Petrified Forest quite like Lacey, even though he came from Iowa. He believed that many of the petrified logs had grown exactly where they now lay. Every log impregnated with silica, stained by iron oxide and other minerals, was a rainbow of colors. “Ages ago, so long that it makes one dizzy to think of it, these trees were alive and growing in the Southwest,” Lacey said. “They were coniferous, as shown by microscopic examination of their texture. The species is extinct, and the nearest resembling species now found exists in Asia Minor. The geological history of this forest is easy to read. The trees fell and floated around in some old arm of the sea until the roots and limbs were worn and rounded just as we see like examples on the sandbars of the Mississippi. The trees became heavy and waterlogged and settled to the sea bottom.”85

  Thanks to the guardian spirit of Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Lacey, this ancient sea bottom filled with petrified logs in eastern Arizona was an American treasure for future generations to study and enjoy. And Wetherill was ready to enforce federal protection even in treeless vales where the grass blades had perished due to the pounding sun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE PREHISTORIC SITES OF 1907

  I

  Even with the administration’s designation of Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro as national monuments in December 1906, President Roosevelt wasn’t content. Because John F. Lacey was no longer in Congress, Roosevelt had less clout with the House Committee on Public Land. Furthermore, the relationship between Interior and the USDA’s Forest Service was not congenial. By January 1907, Roosevelt had grown increasingly suspicious that his secretary of the interior, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, was too soft on the extraction industries in the West. Hitchcock was like a well-trained bullfighter who made his best passes when there was no bull present (or, as Roosevelt saw it, receded into the shadows when a real goring was possible). Easing Hitchcock, a McKinley man at heart, out of the post, became a priority for Roosevelt in early 1907. Finesse was needed because Roosevelt didn’t want to cut the life-line while Hitchcock was still making policy. Another consideration was allowing Hitchcock to reenter the private sector with honor, and this too became a priority for the administration over the holiday season. The situation was especially sensitive because Hitchcock, who was then sixty-one, was feeble (he died in 1909).

  As of January 15—the day of the Senate’s official confirmation—Roosevelt’s new secretary of the interior was James R. Garfield of Ohio. Everybody in Washington knew Garfield as one of Roosevelt’s staunchest foot soldiers. As the saying went, he was an old head on young shoulders. Yet he was always something of a messenger boy. And it didn’t hurt that Garfield’s wife, the former Helen Newell of Cleveland, Ohio, was a prominent Washington hostess (part of the first lady’s elegant clique). “Garfield is earnest,” the Saturday Evening Post wrote. “The President likes earnest persons. Garfield is ambitious. The President likes ambitious persons. Garfield is conscientious, and the President lays much stock by that. In short, Garfield is a clean young man, with a mind that grapples with great problems, no matter what the windup of the encounter may be.”1

  Roosevelt wanted somebody to go after the perpetrators of land fraud in the West, a fellow Republican progressive unafraid of controversy. Garfield was his beau ideal. The handsome forty-two-year-old Garfield had served in the Ohio state senate from 1896 to 1899. He was rara avis because of his old-fashioned sense of bedrock loyalty, always a character trait in short supply. As a silver-star bonus, Garfield was the son of James A. Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, and had been weaned on national politics. For all their differences, Roosevelt knew that the elder Garfield had been a man of biting intelligence. Young James was a student at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, when his father was assassinated and he had witnessed the ghastly shooting, which happened at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C., during his summer break. Somehow he had absorbed the assassination faster than much of the country did, and he refused to let the tragedy derail his ambition. In 1881 he enrolled at Williams College, where he earned straight A grades. Following college Garfield earned a J.D. degree from Columbia University, developing a formidable, Rooseveltian prosecutorial bent. Garfield wasn’t afraid to rouse lions from their lairs in the name of good government.

  “Teddy in Timberland” was a popular cartoon that ran in syndication.

  “Presidential Timberland.” (Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Association)

  From 1902 to 1903 Garfield was Roosevelt’s eyes and ears at the U.S. Civil Service Commission. His professional attitude was characterized by following orders and saying “Yes sir.” Bosses, including Roosevelt, naturally admired that sort of man; and in addition, Garfield was competent. He was promoted to commissioner of corporations at the Department of Commerce and Labor. With the zeal of Lincoln Steffens he lashed out against the corrupt industr
ies of the era: oil, steel, railroads, and meatpacking. Perhaps Garfield was only following orders, but he seemed to relish what we might now describe as being Roosevelt’s pit bull. At the very least Garfield understood that the fight for national forestry would be prolonged and intense. Now, in early 1907, Roosevelt wanted to sic Garfield on the timber thieves and land hustlers. As Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Garfield saw it, forestry was a science based on truth—not a political game in which you tried to score points in order to be reelected. “He has a man’s job before him now,” the Washington Post wrote of Garfield that spring. “The Department of the Interior controls the public domain, the forests, the Indians, the patents, the pensions, the Bureau of Education, the Geological Survey, and the Reclamation Service. All the land grafters, all the Indian grafters, all the sharks who are trying to get the timber and the oil and the coal for nothing must come to him and pass under his eye.”2

  The unflappable Garfield immediately was in full stride, walking directly into the line of fire. When the Republican Party lost House seats, pro-business newspapers started attacking Roosevelt for his antagonistic attitude toward Wall Street, big timber, and Standard Oil. For example, Edward Payson Ripley, president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, said that Roosevelt didn’t have the public interest at heart in creating forest reserves and national monuments. To Ripley, Roosevelt was simply obsessed with the wilderness. The railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman—who had sponsored the Alaska expedition that included Dr. C. Hart Merriam and John Burroughs, had a similar opinion—deeming Roosevelt a self-promoter and a traitor to his class. Roosevelt, for his part, started instructing Garfield to defend Native Americans from corporate land grabs in Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Montana. George Bird Grinnell was starting to write ethnographic books on Indians—he was doing research for a study that would be published as By Cheyenne Campfires. His work was starting to rub off on Roosevelt.3 In a court order, Roosevelt defined Garfield’s job as protecting the “rapidly disappearing timber” for future generations to enjoy. America’s forests, Roosevelt believed, belonged to the homeland, but the homeland was under siege by underregulated industrialization (in other words, big business run amok). “Oil and gas,” Roosevelt wrote to Garfield on February 1, 1907—“I most emphatically believe that we should not permit the lands containing oil and gas to be alienated under conditions which would in effect mean the building up of a great monopoly in oil.” 4