A case in point occurred on April 14, when Roosevelt delivered a major policy address on Arbor Day, promoting trees. His message was direct: posterity would weave no garland for farmers who overharvested trees and didn’t plant new ones. Roosevelt was sure of that. Arbor Day, to Roosevelt, was a holiday to equal the Fourth of July. It had started in 1872, when Nebraska had very few trees: the state board of agriculture had sensibly distributed elms, oaks, and pine seeds for citizens to plant. Arbor Day evolved into a competition in which cash prizes were awarded to whoever planted the most trees. According to the Omaha World-Herald, more than 1 million trees were planted on the first Arbor Day. What began as a state holiday in Nebraska soon became a national effort.21 Many states held annual spring Arbor Day events. Now Roosevelt—with western senators and Rockefeller’s supporters clamoring for his head—transformed Arbor Day 1907 into a rallying cry for his visionary conservationist policies. To an audience made up of children from the Washington, D.C. area, Roosevelt preached the wonders of national forests. “It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation’s need of trees will become serious,” he said. “We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship: but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed, and because of this want you will reproach us not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.”22
The eastern press loved this lecture. The Washington Post covered it on the front page under the headline “President for Trees.” 23 But Senator Fulton considered it a sickening spectacle of Roosevelt manipulating the press. “A people without children would face a hopeless future: a country without trees is almost as hopeless,” Roosevelt had said. “Forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves would soon vanish, and with them all their benefits. A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood, and at the same time a reservoir of water. When you help to preserve our forests or to plant new ones, you are acting the part of good citizens. The value of forestry deserves, therefore, is to be taught in the schools.” 24
Roosevelt kept saying that the “shortsightedness” of deforestation would be solved only by planting trees and reducing lumbering. However, with regard to forest reserves—unlike national monuments—after March 1907 Roosevelt was still forced to work with an irritated Congress on bills aimed at purchasing for the federal government great forest reserves in the White Mountains and Southern Appalachians. Many congressmen felt bruised by Roosevelt’s obvious contempt for them. They were hardly in the mood to squander political capital for the sake of his eccentricities. “The only agreement of the bills,” Roosevelt lamented to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, “is that of their great expense.” Roosevelt had calculated which states were doing a good job of preserving forests (New York and Pennsylvania) and which states weren’t (Michigan and Wisconsin). What brought him great pride was that the western states were far more fortunate than “their eastern sisters” because his administration had shoved “requisite foresight” down their throats.25 Not on his watch would America become a lumber exporter to the world.
III
That same spring Roosevelt had received the report by the Bureau of Corporations on the unlawful activities of Standard Oil of New Jersey. It infuriated Roosevelt no end: Standard Oil had engaged in price-cutting practices, collusive deals, public misinformation, and so on. How to deal with such abuses? First, Roosevelt increased his calls for much stronger regulation of corporations. This infuriated conservative Republicans, but Roosevelt knew that it was good politics. The banking system and the stock market were going through a severe downturn. Why not make the petroleum industry the scapegoat? The Roosevelt administration issued seven lawsuits against Standard Oil and its subsidiaries (these lawsuits were coupled with numerous antitrust cases that state attorneys general issued). Part of Roosevelt’s motivation was trust-busting as nation-building. Criticism was hurled at Roosevelt by Wall Street financiers who claimed that he was stifling the stock market with his gloomy pronouncements. By dismembering Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad, Roosevelt was trying to show that the United States was run by the federal government, not by self-interested capitalists with huge bank accounts and no scruples. To Roosevelt, men like Rockefeller and Harriman were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”26
Roosevelt loved Arbor Day because it gave American citizens a chance to do something productive. Every April new trees would be planted across America.
T.R. at Arbor Day tree planting. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Even though gasoline automobiles had infiltrated Washington, D.C., in 1907, Roosevelt insisted on either speed-walking or horseback riding around town. Cars didn’t appeal to him—the idea of placing gasoline on top of a hot engine seemed perverse and worrisome, and the rumble of engines scared away the birds. This was the last year before the Model T transformed the American landscape forever—an event which simply bored Roosevelt. Still, he cheered Michigan and Indiana for building better automobiles than anywhere else in the world. As an unapologetic nationalist he liked America to have the automotive edge—or any edge.
Unable to stay idle, Roosevelt began drafting an ornithological report for AOU on how sparrows were different in Long Island and Virginia owing to climate variations. And he was perplexed by some avian mysteries. Why did wood thrushes flourish at Sagamore Hill whereas they were scarce at Pine Knot? He kept detailed bird lists for Virginia about species he encountered: Baltimore and orchard orioles, flickers, redheaded woodpeckers, purple grackles, bluebirds, all nesting “within a stone’s throw of the rambling attractive house, with its numerous outbuildings, old garden, orchard, and venerable locusts and catalpas.”27
For an Audubonist, this was a real feast. But Roosevelt had an eerie experience that May, which he would talk about for years to come. Keenly observant, he saw a flock of passenger pigeons near Charlottesville. Because Darwin, whose name Roosevelt still uttered with reverence, had begun On the Origin of Species with a report about experiments conducted on backyard pigeons from around the world, Roosevelt was interested in their evolutionary characteristics. Darwin had successfully bred pigeons, concluding that they were all descendants of Columba livia (the rock dove). He had speculated that if the varied pigeon species mated in the wild, the offspring would eventually lose their unique traits and resemble the rock dove: this was due to a process that Darwin called reversion.28
What Roosevelt also knew that May 18 about the passenger pigeons (a species on the edge of extinction) was that no flock had been sighted in the wild by an ornithologist for more than twenty-five years. In the era before DNA records containing gene analysis and ancestral chromosome fusions, knowledge about birds’s genetic makeup came from detailed field reports in many towns. Roosevelt was thus fulfilling his public duty by reporting on what he saw near Pine Knot. “There were about a dozen, unmistakable with their pointed tails and brown-red breasts, flying in characteristically tight formation to and fro before alighting on a tall, dead pine,” the historian Edmund Morris writes in Theodore Rex. “He compared them to some mourning doves in the field beyond; and there was no question of the difference between the two species.”29
Because pigeons were delicious, many species were being driven into extinction by market hunters. For example, in 1904 the Choiseul crested pigeon (Microgoura meeki) had vanished; the last one was sighted in the Solomon Islands near New Guinea. In early 1907 two American birds had gone extinct in Hawaii: the Molokai’O’o (Moho bishopi) and black mano (Oreganis funera). This led Roosevelt to create, in 1909, a huge federal bird reservation in the westernmost Hawaiian islands. But the Molokai’O’o and black mano were rare birds, easily shot by hunters. By contrast, the destruction of the passenger pigeon affected all of North America, where it was k
nown to be the most abundant bird of all time. Before the Europeans arrived in the New World, nearly half of all the birds there were passenger pigeons. To pioneers, they were an unlimited food supply.
Robert B. Roosevelt had tried to stop this slaughter of passenger pigeons in the 1880s, introducing skeet shooting to sportsmen as an alternative, but to little avail. The last recorded passenger pigeon was shot around 1900—nobody had gotten within sight of a flock since then. William T. Hornaday had already shown passenger pigeons in a tombstone cartoon as being extinct (though he added a hopeful question mark). But now Roosevelt had seen a flock at Pine Knot in 1907. Excitedly, Roosevelt hurried back to the cabin and wrote Oom John an effusive letter, insisting that they were “no doubt” passenger pigeons. Burroughs quickly wrote back an encouraging note, saying that the previous year a flock was said to have been seen around Boston, Massachusetts, although the report was unconfirmed. A few weeks later Burroughs said that a flock was seen in Sullivan County, New York.30 There was no need for Roosevelt to feel diffident: he wasn’t the only observer. Perhaps the passenger pigeon could be saved, like the buffalo.
Realizing that passenger pigeons were on Hornaday’s endangered species list, and being exceedingly sportsmanlike about this matter, Roosevelt refused to shoot one. But he knew visually that this was the passenger pigeon, as described in Audubon’s Birds of America (page 25 of Volume 5). All of Albemarle County was abuzz over Roosevelt’s sighting which, if true, was the last official report before extinction. That same year W. B. Mershon had published, as a farewell, The Passenger Pigeon—a book of memories of the great flocks that constituted an impressive ornithological eulogy.31 There was also public concern about the impending extinction. As it happened, the last passenger pigeon on earth—named Martha—died in captivity on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Thereafter, coffee shops and bars would freakishly boast about having a stuffed passenger pigeon on display.
Roosevelt took pride in the fact that Burroughs’s eminence had habituated since their first meeting at the Fellowcraft Club. Likewise he was proud that his illustrator of Ranch Life, Frederic Remington, had become famous. Somewhat surprisingly, Remington was perhaps the one western artist willing to denounce the staged rescues in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and Owen Wister’s hero in The Virginian. Remington called Indians the “aboriginal” Americans, and he was praised by a Crow chief for having white skin but the heart of an Absaroke.32 In articles, short stories, and two novels Remington had treated Native American warriors as outdoorsmen superior to the “great white hunters” of modernity with their scoped rifles and waterproof sleeping bags. As the Independent noted, Remington had been a pioneer in moving away from “mere sentimentality” about Indians to serious ethnography. This intellectual advance in Indian scholarship impressed Roosevelt greatly.33
Over the summer of 1907 Roosevelt composed a series of open letters on the White House stationary, honoring Remington’s artistic achievements. Roosevlt saluted Remington’s painting for the inherent westernness of his broken peaks and purple mountains. Roosevelt was a habitual doodler, but he couldn’t draw his beloved West the way Remington could. However, he had the political power to save natural sites in the rutted wag-ontrail territories. Every Remington rough trapper and graceful Indian radiated a humanity worthy of Rembrandt. “I regard Frederic Remington as one of the Americans who has done real work for this country, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Roosevelt declared on July 17. “He has been granted the very unusual gift of excelling in two entirely distinct types of artistic work; for his bronzes are as noteworthy as his pictures. He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had, and he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet vanishing type of American life. The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”34
To Roosevelt, the very talented Remington had made a “permanent record of certain of the most interesting features of our national life.” He ranked Remington as high as George Catlin for accurately combining Indian ethnography and western landscapes. By 1904 Remington’s bronzes such as The Bronco Buster, The Buffalo Signal, and Coming Through the Rough were themselves virtually national monuments, cycleproof, as recognizable as Leutze’s painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware or Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Remington’s bronzes—twenty-one in all, cast at the Henry-Bonnard Company (using the sand-cast method) and the Roman Bronze Work Company (using the latest wax casting method)—were like the Liberty Bell or the Golden Spike of the Transcontinental Railroad: in a word, heirlooms. Lacey had been the legislative genius of the Antiquities Act. Edgar Lee Hewett and other grassroots activists had stirred up preservationist action in the Four Corners region. But it was the spirit of Remington that brought places like Petrified Forest and El Morro out of the bureaucracy at the GLO or the Department of the Interior and animated it with a whiff of the Wild West for people worldwide. And he did so without succumbing to romanticism—though his work had been treasured as such.
Others were starting to see Roosevelt’s saving of wonders as his gift to America. Praising the Antiquities Act of 1906, the New York Times, for example, noted that the national monument movement had created America’s “conservationist consciousness.” The United States stood at the center of a revolution in natural resource management, and Roosevelt was responsible for this positive shift. That was a high compliment to Roosevelt. If the Times was correct, then 1907 became the year when Roosevelt’s doctrine of conservationism cohered. The four national monuments Roosevelt had founded in 1906—Devils Tower, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro—could have just been a flash in the pan to please Hewett and Wetherill. But in 1907, inspired by Remington, Roosevelt kicked up a dust storm, declaring antiquities sites with impressive regularity. Following Hewett’s recommendation, Chaco Canyon—which had been a major urban center of the ancestral Pueblo culture—became a national monument through a presidential executive order of March 11. Ruins and hieroglyphics were now folded into the national forestry movement on a permanent basis. As Stanford University’s president David Starr Jordan later wrote in the journal Natural History, Roosevelt’s genius was that “he did not care a straw for precedent.”35
In 2009 the National Park Service published a detailed time line of Chaco Canyon’s history from AD 850 to 1902. In vivid detail it recalled when Hewett first stumbled upon ancient stairways carved into cliffs. But when Roosevelt declared Chaco Canyon a national monument in 1907, very little was known about this prehistoric Four Corners site. Regularly, as Hewett reported, the Hopi and Pueblo of New Mexico made pilgrimages to the ruins as if to a temple. Likewise, Richard Wetherill (the brother of “Hosteen John” Wetherill) had homesteaded in the Chaco Canyon area west of Santa Fe, studying Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Del Arroyo, and Chet’o Ketl. For the Roosevelt administration to actually acquire the complex of ruins at Chaco Canyon, the GLO had to ask Wetherill to relinquish the valuable land; he enthusiastically did. In an act of high-minded philanthropy, the great southwestern trail guide and Indian trader Richard Wetherill simply handed Chaco Canyon over. Roosevelt later repaid John Wetherill with a personal visit in 1913 to the Betatakin ruins of a “big village of cliff-dwellers” in what is now Navajo National Monument.36
Then, on May 6, Roosevelt struck again, in northern California. The Antiquities Act was starting to take effect. Following the San Francisco earthquake, geologists came to California from all over the world to study the San Andreas Fault and the Lassen Peak volcano (the southernmost one in the Cascade range). What fascinated geologists about Lassen Peak was that it was not a typical mountaintop; it had a cluster of craters on its summit. Situated on the edge of the so-called Pacific plate, Lassen Peak was one of more than 300 active volcanoes that constituted a ring of fire in that part of the world. These volcanoes included Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, Alaska’s Katmai, Japan’s Fuji,
and Indonesia’s Krakatoa. To Californian poets, Lassen Peak was just a weird and gorgeous mountain in Shasta County. But to concerned geologists, it was a mighty volcano about to blow. Recognizing that this volcano was both a scientific and a natural wonder, Roosevelt granted it national monument status. And it wasn’t just the peak that was saved: all the surrounding steaming springs, hissing fumaroles, and gurgling mud pots were saved as well. Roosevelt wanted the entire thermal alley preserved as a monument.
Deeming the Lassen Peak volcano area the Yellowstone of California, Roosevelt also created another national monument on the new park’s northeastern border, called Cinder Cone, that same May 6. From above, Cinder Cone looked like a 700-foot-high pottery wheel with a dent on top. According to the U.S. National Park Service, the volcanic cone has been “controversial” since the 1870s “when many people thought it was only a few decades old.”37 They were wrong. Created from volcanic cinders and loose scoria, Cinder Cone was the product of a succession of dramatic eruptions that took place about AD 1700 (or during a 300-year period). “The series of eruptions that produced the volcanic deposits at Cinder Cone were complex,” the U.S. Geological Survey reported in 2004, “and are by no means completely understood.”38
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