The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  With the success of the Antiquities Act in 1906, Roosevelt had become even more dangerous to western developers, railroad companies, and oil companies. He usually donned a Stetson hat and often wore a bandanna around his neck, and his public rhetoric was full of western toponyms, cowboyisms, and Indian words not often heard in the East. From the White House, he was playing a Rocky Mountain man to help sell his radical conservationism. The oilmen, land developers, and trust titans wanted to see Roosevelt relegated to the sidelines of public life, like John F. Lacey. Instead, they had to confront not only Roosevelt but also Garfield. The timber industry believed that T.R.’s excessive conservationist initiatives were symptoms of his having gone berserk. But such hostility only encouraged Roosevelt to thrust himself forward as the true guardian of America’s natural resources. Figuratively, conservationism was simply the wise, righteous preservation of the American way, the prerequisite to Roosevelt’s building a republic like none other. “The grazing states, especially Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, protested vigorously against the new policies,” the historian Roy M. Robbins noted in Our Landed Heritage. “The stockmen of these states were compelled to use the meadows in the reserves inasmuch as the lower plains gave out during hot weather. The sheepmen were especially anxious, for fear that government regulation would curtail their operations in favor of cattle interests. Both those groups looked with suspicion upon policy which seemed to favor the homesteader.”5

  Working closely with Pinchot, Roosevelt began scheming for innovative ways to create dozens of new national forests before Congress reconvened on March 3. These forests would humanize the soul—if not, the Dark Ages would come to America (or so Roosevelt supposed). On February 23, 1907, in fact, a disgusted senator—Charles Fulton of Oregon, a fellow Republican—introduced the following amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill: “hereafter no forest reserve shall be created, nor shall any addition be made to one heretofore created, within the limits of the State of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, or Wyoming except by act of Congress.”6

  Fulton believed the whole Antiquities Act was nonsense and had to be curtailed. He was sick and tired of arrogant executive orders that gave petrified logs and spotted owls priority over business profits. Also, Fulton said, the lowly settler and the poor farmer were being denied the same rich timberlands by the Roosevelt administration. This was a grim consequence of the government’s irresponsible hoarding of resources.

  Roosevelt’s answer to Fulton was dramatic. On March 2, 1907—four days before the amendment was slated for a vote—Roosevelt released a document to Congress as a presidential fait accompli. Thirty-two new forest reserves had been created, seemingly overnight. Behind each forest listed were snatches of complicated conversations his representatives had conducted with state legislators and land managers about soil erosion, runoff, and deforestation. Numerous papers, passes, exemptions, validations, dues, expansions, and limitations had been issued. Roosevelt’s refusal to let Congress inhibit him caused a firestorm against him on Capitol Hill. By contrast, in sleepy Oskaloosa, where he had resumed his law practice on Main Street, Lacey deemed it a great day in the annals of forestry. Roosevelt had delivered a punishing blow to the advocates of states’ rights. He had caught Congress flat-footed. And the lumberman’s axes had been stilled in certain heavily forested regions, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

  The conservationist pronouncement of March 2 was a fine example of Roosevelt’s unappeasable conservationism. Roosevelt issued a long “Memorandum” listing forest reserves either created or enlarged:

  Toiyabe Forest Reserve, Nevada

  Wenaha Forest Reserve, Oregon and Washington

  Las Animas Forest Reserve, Colorado and New Mexico

  Colville Forest Reserve, Washington

  Siskiyou Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Bear Lodge Forest Reserve, Wyoming

  Holy Cross Forest Reserve, Colorado

  Uncompahgre Forest Reserve, Colorado

  Park Range Forest Reserve, Colorado

  Imnaha Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Big Belt Forest Reserve, Montana

  Big Hole Forest Reserve, Idaho and Montana

  Otter Forest Reserve, Montana

  Lewis and Clark Forest Reserve, Montana

  Montezuma Forest Reserve, Colorado

  Olympic Forest Reserve, Washington

  Little Rockies Forest Reserve, Montana

  San Juan Forest Reserve, Colorado

  Medicine Bow Forest Reserve, Wyoming, Colorado

  Yellowstone Forest Reserve, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming

  Port Neuf Forest Reserve, Idaho

  Palouse Forest Reserve, Idaho

  Weiser Forest Reserve, Idaho

  Priest River Forest Reserve, Idaho and Washington

  Cabinet Forest Reserve, Montana and Idaho

  Rainier Forest Reserve, Washington

  Washington Forest Reserve, Washington

  Ashland Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Coquille Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Cascade Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Umpqua Forest Reserve, Oregon

  Blue Mountain Forest Reserve, Oregon 7

  When Fulton heard that huge tracts of Oregon forestlands had been pickpocketed by the federal government before the agriculture bill could be voted on, he was furious. No serious American, he believed, could have designated so many western forest reserves in such a cavalier fashion. It was a gray, grim day, Fulton lamented, for Willamette valley’s businessmen. According to Fulton’s tirade, Roosevelt and Pinchot’s team had sneakily withdrawn 16 million acres, ostensibly to prevent overlogging. And eight of the forest reserves were in Oregon: Wenaha, Siskiyou, Imnaha, Ashland, Coquille, Cascade, Umpqua, and Blue Mountain.8 The whole damn state, Fulton fumed, was becoming a park. The lumber warehouses and industrial storage sheds in his state would be empty if this type of land grab was tolerated. A torrent of accusations followed: Why didn’t Roosevelt burn the Constitution while he was at it? Why didn’t he just declare Oregon a colony and get it over with? Why didn’t he ban sawmills from operating in the West?

  Not for a second did Fulton believe that the autocratic Roosevelt was preserving millions of acres for homesteaders or for posterity. The new forest reserves were, to his mind, something the aristocrats of the Boone and Crockett Club and the Audubon Society wanted to have as trophies, at the expense of hardworking, taxpaying citizens. And in general, western interests claimed that this was foul play. Roosevelt, they believed, had acted dishonorably by setting aside the 16 million acres of forest reserves without proper congressional consultation.9

  As a result of the land withdrawal of March 2, the executive branch was sued. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said Roosevelt was acting like a tribal chieftain unaccountable to constitutional law. The defense attorneys said the lawsuits were small-minded. At issue was whether the Roosevelt administration had abused executive powers. Eventually, in 1910, the dispute was brought before the courts, first in U.S. v. Grimaud (220 U.S. 506) and then in Light v. U.S. (200 U.S. 523). In both cases the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in T.R.’s favor. Big timber had been stymied. The threat of these court cases served only to impel Roosevelt forward with his far-reaching conservationist agenda.10

  Convinced that the future of America was imperiled, Fulton kept up his dogged pursuit of Roosevelt. That spring Roosevelt had told Everybody’s Magazine that westerners who didn’t understand subspecies of deer and elks weren’t good stewards. The president’s attitude was plain as day: timber companies were bandits, and westerners incapable of biologically identifying moles were nature fakers. What rubbish! To Fulton, the president was as crazy as a loon—and dangerous. But Roosevelt later patted himself on the back for being a political fox. “When the friends of the special interests in the Senate got their amendment through and woke up, they discovered that sixteen million acres of timberland had been saved for the people by putting them in the National Forests before the land grabbers could get at them,” Roo
sevelt bragged in An Autobiography. “The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath; and dire were their threats against the Executive; but the threats could not be carried out, and were really only a tribute to the efficiency of our action.”11

  The combination of the Antiquities Act, the new natural forests, and the debate over nature fakers put Roosevelt in a mood for sparring. He was now forty-nine, and there was about him the cockiness of a gambler who has been winning and is itching for more action. Unleashing Garfield on the corporations was his latest sport. Another favored sport was lambasting faux naturalists untutored in Darwinian biology. “You will be pleased to know that I finally proved unable to contain myself, and gave an interview or statement, to a very good fellow, in which I sailed into Long and Jack London and one or two others of the more preposterous writers of ‘unnatural’ history,” Roosevelt wrote to Burroughs. “I know that as President I ought not to do this; but I was having an awful time toward the end of the session and I felt I simply had to permit myself some diversion.”12

  The seemingly arbitrary forest reserve designations of March 1907 stung the Western politicians the most. As the Congressional Record noted, even as late as World War I the mention of what Roosevelt had done “still brought forth the wrath from certain quarters.”13 In 1907 the Walla Walla Weekly accused Roosevelt of putting the small logging operations out of business in Washington state with his mania for national forests. As this argument went, rich corporations like the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company already owned millions of acres. They weren’t adversely affected by T.R.’s conservationism; the little guys were. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer sarcastically wondered why T.R. didn’t just declare the entire state a national forest. Some people in Seattle and Tacoma argued that Roosevelt’s obsession with land fraud made him believe, mistakenly, that national forests were a “panacea.” Governor Albert Mead of Washington declared that “Gifford Pinchot, the United States forester, has done more to retard the growth and development of the Northwest than any other man.”

  Roosevelt scoffed at such criticism as juvenile. There was more to the Pacific Northwest and northern California than fresh-cut boards. The Pacific slope was more wonderful than any place in Europe. The mere thought of Mount Shasta and Mount Olympus made Roosevelt ache, and intensified his love of the United States. America’s three West Coast states taken together were larger than any European country. California alone was bigger than Great Britain or Italy. American mammal life also far exceeded that in spent-out Europe. In Oregon, for example, the bears ate both clams and berries and slept in primeval forests and on rock-strewn beaches. Roosevelt called the soil of the San Joaquin Valley the prerequisite for its becoming a God-ordained garden. And the forestlands of these three states, he was convinced, were the finest in the world. “There is nothing quite like the Coast, either in America or anywhere else,” Roosevelt would write. “Nature is different from what it is elsewhere. The giant sequoias and redwoods, the wonderfully beautiful isolated mountain peaks and great mountain ranges, the giant chasms like the Yosemite, the forests, the flower meadows, the soft, sunny, luxurious beauty of Southern California, the colder but equable wet climate of the Northwest coast proper, the marvels of Puget Sound, the Valley of the Columbia and of the rivers running into it—all these things, taken separately, may be matched elsewhere, but not when taken together.”14

  One of Roosevelt’s strongest conservationist statements was a long letter he wrote on June 7, 1907, to Secretary of the Agriculture James Wilson. Obviously composed with posterity in mind, Roosevelt abandoned his usual cheerleading on behalf of “America the beautiful” in favor of a sober-minded analysis of the importance of protected forests for national security. “If the people of the states of the Great Plains, of the mountains, and of the Pacific slope wish for their states a great permanent growth in posterity they will stand for the policy of the administration,” Roosevelt wrote, disgusted that a Public Lands Convention was being organized in Colorado to overturn his policies. “If they stand for the policy of the makers of this program, they should clearly realize that it is a policy of skinning the land, chiefly in the temporary interest of a few huge corporations of great wealth, and to the utter impairment of its resources so far as the future is concerned. It is absolutely necessary to ascertain in practiced fashion the best methods of reforestation, and only the National Government can do this successfully.”15

  II

  Criticism of Roosevelt’s national forests of March 2 wasn’t confined to California, Washington, and Oregon. Newspapers in the grazing states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana also slammed into Roosevelt. Many editors considered the large-scale withdrawal of timber and coal lands completely unacceptable. Inequity was involved because the federal government had grabbed western forestlands while leaving eastern forests in private hands. Demands were made for nullification. An editor of Denver Field and Farm fumed that one-fourth of Colorado was now a national forest: soon, decent Coloradans wouldn’t even have land left to bury the dead. The Centennial (Wyoming) Post of March 30 suggested that after March 2, an old cowboy song needed a new verse:

  Bury me not on the range

  Where the taxed cattle are roaming

  And the mangy coyotes yelp and bark

  And the wind in the pines is moaning

  On the reserve please bury me not

  For I never would then be free;

  A forest ranger would dig me up

  In order to collect his fee!16

  Roosevelt’s forest conservationism brought him a lot of hate mail during the spring of 1907. Everybody west of the 100th meridian—which drops from the Manitoba–North Dakota border through Greater Bismarck and straight down to the streets of Laredo—seemed to have a quarrel with him. The White House mailroom grew leery of any letter postmarked Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, or California. The hugeness of what Roosevelt was doing seemed to be the principal concern. Roosevelt claimed that he was only stopping shifty businessmen, trust titans, and oil hogs from despoiling the national landscape, and that he was surprised when Wall Street called him a “wild-eyed revolutionist.” This was disingenuous on his part. Various captains of industry had pleaded with him to ease up on his apparent rancor toward railroads and oil. But Roosevelt refused to capitulate. With muckrakers cheering him on, Roosevelt enjoyed being a wilderness warrior. In his letters, he expressed a somewhat overstated preference for hiking Rock Creek Park to study fauna rather than dealing with unscrupulous robber barons. “The grounds are now putting on their dress of spring,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit about the White House lawns. “The blossom trees are in bloom; perhaps the most beautiful spot at the moment is round the north fountain with the White Magnolia, the pink of the flowering peach, and the yellow of the forsythia.”17

  In the West, cowboys played a game called “chapping,” slapping one another with leather chaps to see who would cry uncle first. During the spring of 1907 Roosevelt was engaged in chapping with big timber, in particular. Circumventing Congress, he began appealing directly to the general public in his addresses about conservation. In a sadistic way that no historian, no journalist, and no political commentator can overstate, Roosevelt enjoyed making the timber companies suffer. What infuriated his opponents was how he appealed directly to the public, with prosecutorial zeal. It unnerved them. The press always allowed Roosevelt to cloak his conservationism in patriotism and morality—and the newspapers’ readers in the nonwestern and southern states fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

  No president ever manipulated the press with the consummate skill of Roosevelt. Part of his cunning was treating even minor journalists as if they mattered. Reporters, as a rule full of self-importance, used the fact that Roosevelt was a man of letters, a member of their tribe, to justify their puffery. A voracious bibliophile, inspired by the Saint Augustine admonition to (“Take up, read!”), Roosevelt never missed a major article in any contemporary periodical, even an obscure academic journ
al. As Roosevelt liked to joke, he was at heart a “literary feller.” The novelist Ellen Glasow tried to explain why, against her better instincts, she regularly surrendered to Roosevelt’s bravado. She believed that Roosevelt had “dubious literary insight,” but she confessed that he also had a strange “human magnetism.”18

  Another factor also aided Roosevelt’s career. As the historian Ron Chernow has pointed out indirectly in Titan, Roosevelt was a direct beneficiary of “a newly assertive press.” Thanks to two technological developments—linotype and photoengraving—the number of glossy magazines proliferated during the Roosevelt era. Too often, Chernow believes, historians have focused on the “strident tabloids” and “yellow journalism” of the period.19 The circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, for example, were an impetus for sensational copy.20 But this was also a serious era, when investigative reporting was significant. Periodicals like McClure’s, Outlook, and Scribner’s Magazine loved Roosevelt for two primary reasons: he wrote for them and he applauded their exposés of corporate corruption. Add into the mix the sheer electricity that Roosevelt produced in his public appearances, the way he sucked the air out of any room, and the trust titans didn’t have a chance. Roosevelt didn’t lull reporters’ sense of right and wrong; he challenged them to write the right thing by flattery and by making good copy.