Not that Roosevelt was anxious about how his preservation of the Grand Canyon would be evaluated in history books. Certitude was his greatest political strength. In fact, on the same afternoon that he declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, he began threatening to do the same with large parts of the Appalachian and White Mountains, an action certain to cause tremendous resistance by congressmen from Maine to Georgia. One notable exception was Governor Robert Glenn of North Carolina, who committed himself politically to Roosevelt’s conservationist crusade, hoping that the Great Smoky Mountains would emerge as a national monument.21 For his part, Roosevelt intended to take the Antiquities Act to its limit not just in the West, but everywhere in America. He envisioned the act as a federal hand with numberless fingers. It was obvious that his last fifteen months in office were going to be filled with conservationist action.
And as of January 11, 1908 (“Grand Canyon Day”), it was also clear that no parcel of wilderness—private, public, or other—was immune from potential seizure by the federal government. Roosevelt’s preservationist initiatives would be as simple as they were decisive. Orthodoxy was being shattered, and many more projects were in the works. With no worries about reelection in 1908, Roosevelt was ready to take on “the American goliath” (which he later defined as a vicious plutocracy, with morals of “glorified pawnbrokers,” that owned both political parties along with “ninety-nine percent at the very least of the corporate wealth of the country, and therefore the great majority of the newspapers”).22
II
Roosevelt, in fact, wasted little time in pressing the Antiquities Act into service yet again in California in early 1908. Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan, had previously written to Roosevelt about the Pinnacles, a fantastic landscape of jutting rocks and volcanic formations near Soledad, California. The spires and crags of the Pinnacles were awe-inspiring. Jordan was a leading eugenicist and ichthyologist, whose Guide to the Study of Fishes sat prominently on one of Roosevelt’s bookshelves at Sagamore Hill. The inspiration for this book had been Robert B. Roosevelt. No fewer than 1,000 genera and 2,500 species of American fish were named after Jordan. A founding member of the Sierra Club, he was a devotee of Darwin and Huxley’s biology, and he developed his own laws of biogeography. Fascinated by the adaptability of species, in 1907 Jordan had cowritten Evolution and Animal Life, which President Roosevelt found illuminating.23 If Jordan—an expert on organic Evolution—believed that the Pinnacles were worth saving, then Roosevelt needed no other authority. He could now wave his wand—the Antiquities Act—and immediately guarantee federal protection to whatever Jordan wanted.
On January 16, 1908, Roosevelt turned these 2,500 acres of grandeur into Pinnacles National Monument, on Jordan’s recommendation. (By 2009 the site had been expanded to more than 26,000 acres.) Only superlatives can describe the Pinnacles ecosystem. Oddly, the Pinnacles had more types of bees—400 species—than anywhere else known to entomologists. There were also 149 species of birds, forty-nine of mammals, twenty-two of reptiles, eight of amphibians, sixty-nine of butterflies, and forty of dragonflies and damselflies. And there were also precipitous bluffs, talus caves, crags of volcanic rock, and little canyon hideaways where the lizards seemed almost as ancient as the brontosaurus. The clincher, to Roosevelt, was that The Condor (a periodical) reported California condors using the Pinnacles as a primary roosting site. And the red rock formations, courtesy of an extinct volcano, were more than 23 million years old. If that didn’t constitute antiquities, what did? As Jordan boasted, the Coast Range chaparral (the finest examples in the national park system) and the riparian, xeric, and foothill woodlands were ideal for getting away from the cityscapes of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. One of the prettiest sites in the natural world was in the Pinnacles: the acmon blue butterflies, in spring, congregating on coyote brush flowers. And saving all this was as easy as signing a declaration!
Holed up in the White House because of snowstorms and freezing weather, Roosevelt began methodically marking on a map of the United States sites he wanted preserved by the federal government before he left office on March 3, 1909. His desks at the White House and at Sagamore Hill were crossroads for plans to rehabilitate species. From a political standpoint, the Antiquities Act was a revelation, freeing the Department of the Interior from having to squabble with Congress. Much like federal bird reservations for the USDA, national monuments soon became an idée fixe at Interior. Even more significantly, bureaucrats and politicians alike were beginning to see national monuments as a way station to national park status. And even Pinchot, chief of the Forest Service, wanted his reserves studied for Indian artifacts. “The importance of taking steps to preserve such objects has become very apparent,” Pinchot wrote to his on-site employees, “and as soon as possible I wish you to report specifically upon each ruin or natural object of curiosity in your reserve, recommending for permanent reservation all that will continue to contribute to popular, historic, or scientific interest.”24
Roosevelt was temperamentally well suited to conflict and acrimony, and his presidency had already had more than its share of both. By February 1908, he had made an impressive number of political and corporate enemies, including Standard Oil Company, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the E. H. Harriman conglomerate, and J. P. Morgan, among many others. But as the biographer Ron Chernow wrote in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Roosevelt had “no more potent ally than the press,” in his corner.25 And the clashes of Roosevelt versus the titans made good copy. The corporations of the gilded age spent millions of dollars on advertising, trying to smear Roosevelt’s reputation, cripple him politically, and exhaust him personally. They had failed on every count. Each swipe had the reverse effect—bolstering Roosevelt’s obstinacy. He licked them at their own game. Although he had never been solicitous of the opinions of his political antagonists, by February 1908 Roosevelt had lost all patience for anti-forestry. He now saw his enemies as Dickensian villains, full of “bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth.”26
America’s corporate leaders (and their army of bosom chums) were not the only unfortunates on the receiving end of Roosevelt’s wrath. When he had established Wind Cave National Park in 1902, a clamor had arisen for him to do the same with Jewel Cave, 143 miles of unmapped underground passageways in the Black Hills just west of Custer. Even though it was the second largest cave in the world, this labyrinth hadn’t been discovered until 1900, when a couple of small-time prospectors, the brothers Frank and Albert Michaud, had felt a blast of chilly air emanating from a rock crevice in Hell Canyon one warm summer afternoon. It was a good place to protect the carcasses of slaughtered cattle from rotting in the heat. But just maybe there was gold beneath where they stood!
Excited by their find, the Michauds purchased dynamite in Rapid City, South Dakota, blasted a big opening, and then crawled into a cavernous room aglow with calcite crystal. Much to their chagrin, there was no gold to be found. But there were numerous caverns filled with stunning, gemlike calcite crystals, which caught the light from their lanterns and returned it in varied patterns and colors. The brothers rushed to procure a mining claim for Jewel Tunnel Lode, as they named the site, and began advertising it as a tourist attraction. They even used the caves to hold a number of dances for local couples—the crystalline walls were a natural forerunner of the disco ball. A few geologists who studied the site determined that the passageways were part of an extinct geyser channel.* 27
The Roosevelt administration soon got involved, using the almost unlimited power of the executive branch to establish national monuments for the permanent preservation of places deemed to have historic and scientific interest. Certainly Jewel Cave met this criterion. In 1907, he authorized Harry Neel and C. W. Fitzgerald to survey Jewel Cave. Roosevelt imagined the underground site to be part of a larger preservation initiative in the Deadwood and Rapid City area, which would include the Badlands, Devils Tower, Wind Cave, and the Black Hills Nati
onal Forest. Neel and Fitzgerald’s report recommended that Jewel Cave be declared a national monument—despite the mining claim of the Michaud brothers.28 Like Wind Cave, this new find was situated in the Pahasapa limestone rock layer of the Black Hills, and the federal government wanted to study its geological history.29
When Roosevelt established Jewel Cave National Monument on February 7, 1908—his thirteenth designation thus far under the Antiquities Act—he knew there could potentially be decades of legal problems.30 But Roosevelt was apparently untroubled by the possible consequences. There was no restraining him. As far as he was concerned, the 1,280-acre Jewel Cave Monument was a national treasure. If only the Michauds weren’t such self-interested money-grubbers, they would have understood that such a unique natural wonder belonged to all Americans. Furthermore, the Michauds had to stop making additional openings to Jewel Cave, because they were desecrating the site. This was tough medicine for a couple of presumably lucky prospectors, who thought they had stumbled on a fortune. But as Roosevelt saw it, if soldiers gave their lives for the democracy, surely land could be deeded to the federal government for the sake of science. With federal lawyers breathing down their necks, the Michaud brothers sold their claim to the U.S. government for $500.31
To Roosevelt’s way of thinking, the notion that a little knot of men in the Black Hills saw Jewel Cave as a source of profit was depressing to contemplate. The labyrinth of chambers and tunnels belonged to the U.S. government: end of story. Conservation was, above all else, a moral issue to Roosevelt—a cause he believed he shared most intimately with men like John Muir and Seth Bullock, who were uninfected by the greed of New York and Chicago. By contrast, the South Dakota miners seemed to Roosevelt rather like lowly English sparrows—deemed a pestilential invasive species by the Biological Survey and thus deserving neither understanding nor accommodation.32 Well, if sparrows they were, then the president would deal with the Michauds, and all those like them, in his typically expedient fashion. “Is there any kind of air gun which you would recommend which I could use for killing English sparrows around my Long Island place?” Roosevelt wrote to Dr. C. Hart Merriam. “I would like to do as little damage as possible to our [other] birds, and so I suppose the less noise I make the better.” 33
Ridding Sagamore Hill of English sparrows wasn’t the only hunting Roosevelt had in mind that spring. While last-minute legal maneuvering was taking place in the Department of the Interior to establish Natural Bridges in Utah and Wheeler in Colorado as national monuments, Roosevelt began planning a post-presidential safari to British East Africa. His romantic notion was that he would leave civilization in favor of the roar of the lion and the pleasant odor of buffalo. Roosevelt was going to invite two celebrated trophy hunters whom he highly admired—R. J. Cunninghame and Frederick Courtney Selous (both of whom collected big game specimens for the British Museum)—to join him. Selous would later dedicate his African Nature: Notes and Reminiscences (1908) to Roosevelt. Roosevelt also struck up a lively correspondence with the British hunter-explorer Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, about possibly seeing the great African fauna and flora, rhinoceros, gnu, water buffalo, and giant eland. Roosevelt actually looked forward, he wrote, to being served up as “food for ticks, horseflies, and jiggers.”34
A veteran of the Boer War, the well-bred Patterson had written an adventure saga, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, in 1907. (Decades later, it was made into two Hollywood movies.) With narrative verve and vividness, Patterson’s book told of his quest to track down and kill two male lions that had eaten approximately 140 railroad workers over the course of nine months in the Tsavo province of Kenya. During the 1890s, rinderpest (a bovine disease) had killed millions of buffalo, zebras, and gazelles, the primary food source for lions. Their food supply thus limited, the starving maneless lions turned to humans as prey. Inspired by Patterson’s action-filled prose, particularly his references to weapons like the Martin-Enfield double-barreled rifle and the .303 Lee Enfield, Roosevelt now wanted a lion head for his library wall at Oyster Bay. (Roosevelt, in fact, worked behind the scenes to eventually help the Field Museum of Chicago acquire the stuffed Tsavo lions and put them on permanent display.35) “A year hence I shall leave the Presidency, and, while I cannot now decide what I shall do, it is possible that I might be able to make a trip to Africa,” Roosevelt wrote to Patterson on March 20. “Would you be willing to give me some advice about it? I shall be fifty years old, and for ten years I have led a busy, sedentary life, and so it is unnecessary to say that I shall be in no trim for the hardest kind of explorer’s work. But I am fairly healthy, and willing to work in order to get into a game country where I could do some shooting. I should suppose I could be absent a year on the trip.”36
While Roosevelt hastened to assure Patterson that he wasn’t a “butcher,” he nevertheless hoped to acquire a multitude of specimens for American museums, entering Africa in the Mozambican port of Mombasa and boating down the Nile with shotgun in hand. Roosevelt arrived in Mombasa in April 1909, and departed for home from Khartoum in March 1910. This was no bear hunt in Mississippi and no holiday in Louisiana’s canebrakes. He would be away from the United States for over a year. That letter of March 20, in fact, started an epistolary exchange between the two men that would continue throughout 1908. The president interrogated Patterson repeatedly about the prospects of bagging specimens of zebras, giraffes, and cheetahs. As the tenor of his letters made clear, he could hardly wait to be armed to the teeth and free from the shackles of the White House. The Smithsonian Institution had been eager to officially sponsor Roosevelt and his party in obtaining all types of specimens, from the diminutive Kenia dormouse to the colossal white rhinoceros, for its collection. With a retinue of hundreds, Roosevelt would fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting Kenya and Uganda in the heart of British East African safari land.*
There was nothing odd about Roosevelt’s desire to hunt big game in Africa. Only the Boone and Crockett club’s taxidermist, Carl Akeley, who had constructed the world’s first habitat diorama in 1890 at the Milwaukee Public Museum, had begun to biologically inventory the wildlife along the Nile River with seriousness of purpose. Working out of the Field Museum in Chicago, Akeley had developed a new technique for taxidermy, which did a better and truer job of preserving texture and musculature. Roosevelt truly admired the way Akeley displayed wild-life in a group setting. The gorilla and the elephant were his specialties. Roosevelt thought Akeley could make a very distinctive contribution to the annals of scientific exploration by collecting with him in Africa. Roosevelt and Akeley would risk their lives for the right gorilla. Poets called nature a mother, but Roosevelt knew it was also a grave. Regardless of his worries about exertion by a middle-aged man in the heat, and about sleeping sickness (the primary concern), with proper funding Roosevelt believed he could revolutionize the African exhibits at all of America’s top museums.
It was strange, though, that he was planning to disappear from the American political scene for virtually a full year. In considering Roosevelt’s maverick conservationist agenda of 1908–1909, it is important to remember that the president didn’t foresee a future political career. Having already won a Nobel Peace Prize for diplomacy, Roosevelt increasingly envisioned his postpresidential role in part as being a global spokesperson for big game animals, wildlife protection, and natural resources conservation. Didn’t South Africa need antelope preserves? Shouldn’t India find ways to protect its tigers? Couldn’t China develop its own fish hatcheries? This had always been Roosevelt’s hope for the Boone and Crockett Club—that it would go global with its preservationist and conservationist message and ideas. Akeley, a new club member, actively promoted this global approach. And Roosevelt was about to write his first non-American centric book, even though the content was about an American naturalist expedition traveling in the so-called dark continent. “I speak of Africa and golden joys,” Roosevelt later wrote in African Game Trails. “The joy of wandering through lonely lands; the joy of hunt
ing the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary, and the grim.”37
III
The success of Mesa Verde National Park in 1906 had gotten Roosevelt extremely interested in the Four Corners states and territories: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Guided by Congressman Lacey, Roosevelt had read about Montezuma Castle, El Morro, and other prehistoric ruins of the Southwest. And at some point Roosevelt also read an article in National Geographic magazine titled “The Colossal Natural Bridges of Utah,” which had piqued his curiosity.38 Pinchot’s U.S. Forest Service—at the time, a branch of the USDA—was in charge of Utah’s two national forests, Sevier and Manti. And Utah also had many more spectacular wonders. Word had reached the White House that southeastern Utah had the largest number of natural bridges in the world. The novelist Edward Abbey later wrote rapturously about the three bridges, which retained their original Hopi names. The first, Kachina, meant “spirits that had lightning snake symbols on their bodies” the second, Uwachomo, signified “flat rock mound” the third, Sipapu, meant “place of emergencies.” The bridges, the largest of which was 222 feet high, had been formed by streambed erosion (unlike many other arch formations in Utah, which were created by wind, rain, and ice). Surrounded by piñon forest, Anasazi ruins, and a gorgeous slickrock canyon, Natural Bridges met every criterion for national monument status.39
Priding himself on knowing everything about the West, Roosevelt started reading every book he could find on Hopi and Navajo culture, and later contributed an essay about the southwestern tribes of the Four Corners region in his A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916).40 Ultimately Roosevelt was taking a tricky line: preserving Hopi-Navajo culture in the southwest while also encouraging soldiers, agents, missionaries, and traders to Americanize these peoples. Roosevelt never hesitated to promote the education of Native Americans, and he seemed unaware of the humiliation being inflicted on tribes by the imposition of the Bible and reservation life. “The Indian should be encouraged to build a better house,” Roosevelt wrote of this policy, “but the house must not be too different from his present dwelling, or he will, as a rule, neither build it nor live in it.” 41
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