Unfortunately, Garland’s dialogue seems artificial; and what really prevents Cavanaugh from being first-rate literature is the hokey, cartoonish way he described American women, as damsels in need of male protectors. Nonetheless, from a modern-day perspective on environmental history, Cavanaugh—a Rooseveltian conservationist foot soldier—is a welcome new type of western hero, determined to save treasured landscapes for future generations. Like a hardwood birch, Cavanaugh was straight-grained, with few knots. Take, for example, the following dramatic exchange between Cavanaugh, anxious to explain his federal oath to protect the western reserves from clear-cutting, and his love interest, the beautiful Lee Virginia:
She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her mind she said: “You don’t belong here? You’re not a Western man?”
“Not in the sense of having been born here,” he replied. “I am, in fact, a native of England, though I’ve lived nearly twenty years of my life in the States.”
She glanced at his badge. “How did you come to be a ranger—what does it mean? It’s all new to me.”
“It is new to the West,” he answered, smilingly, glad of a chance to turn her thought from her own personal griefs. “It has all come about since you went East. Uncle Sam has at last become provident, and is now ‘conserving his resources.’ I am one of his representatives with stewardship over some ninety thousand acres of territory—mostly forest.”
She looked at him with eyes of changing light. “You don’t talk like an Englishman, and yet you are not like the men out here.”
“I shouldn’t care to be like some of them,” he answered. “My being here is quite logical. I went into the cattle business like many another, and I went broke. I served under Colonel Roosevelt in the Cuban War, and after my term was out, naturally drifted back. I love the wilderness and have some natural taste for forestry, and I can ride and pack a horse as well as most cowboys, hence my uniform. I’m not the best forest ranger in the service, I’ll admit, but I fancy I’m a fair average.”
“And that is your badge—the pine-tree?”
“Yes, and I am proud of it. Some of the fellows are not, but so far as I am concerned I am glad to be known as a defender of the forest. A tree means much to me. I never mark one for felling without a sense of responsibility to the future.”80
Adorned with an introduction from Gifford Pinchot, Cavanaugh succeeded in showcasing Forest Service rangers as defenders of nature, honest protectors ready to arrest poachers and market hunters who disobeyed federal laws in the West. Garland, by writing the novel, had rendered America a genuine creative public service. He was trying to inform people that the forest rangers—who “represented the future”—were noble guardians of the gorgeous western landscape, protecting it from plunder by black-hatted rogues.81 Pinchot applauded Cavanaugh for explaining the historic transformation of the old West (buffalo hunting) to the new West (forest conservation). “The establishment of the new order in some places was not child’s play,” Pinchot wrote to Garland in March 1910. “But there is a strain of fairness among the western people which you can always count on in such a fight as the Forest Service has made and won.”82
What infuriated Roosevelt about Taft’s people—including the chief forester, Graves—was the notion of running all of Alaska’s natural resources under a so-called Alaskan Commission (big business before conservation). Led by Alaska’s congressional delegate James Wickersham, western corporations denounced Roosevelt and Pinchot’s “broad arrow” policies (i.e., locking up natural resources that rightfully belonged to miners, fishermen, and farmers). War against the Tongass and Chugach was under way.
By 1910, Roosevelt, Garland, and Pinchot were concerned that the United States had very little wilderness left. With western expansion petering out, at least from an explorer’s perspective, Alaska became the last frontier. They were determined to see that its natural resources would never be exhausted. Jack London described Alaska in his adventure novels as a “vast silent” wilderness region that demanded heroism. Susan Kollin, in Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier, describes London’s and Roosevelt’s obsession with the far north as a means of “reinvigorating U.S. men” to “test their strength and endurance against the challenges of wilderness.” Kollin, a modern environmentalist influenced by the 1960s ecology movement, approved of Rooseveltian conservation, which allowed wild places like the Tongass and Chugach to be saved. But Kollin insisted that the motivation for men like Roosevelt and London was to save a “new frontier where Anglo Saxon males could reenact conquest and reclaim their manliness.”83
Although London has been considered the “Kipling of the Arctic” for his stories of American expansionist fortune-seeking in Alaska and the Yukon, the novelist James Oliver Curwood brought an environmentalist perspective to his brutal tales of the far north. Curwood, a die-hard Rooseveltian conservationist, was the lead lobbyist promoting legislation to create Superior National Forest in Michigan. During the early twentieth century, more than 4 million hardcover copies of his books were sold in the United States. His novels, such as The Alaskan and Son of the Forests, were translated into twelve languages. Curwood wrote about reindeer farms, Eskimo culture, and grizzly bears.84 In The Alaskan his heroine, Mary Standish, bursts out with patriotic rhetoric about the wonders of Mount McKinley, the Pribilofs, and the Tongass: “I am an American. I love America! I think I love it more than anything else in the world—more than my religion even. . . . I love to think that I first came ashore in the Mayflower. That is why my name is Standish. And I just want to remind you that Alaska is America.”85
Curwood did a fine job of injecting conservation into his novels. Worried that Alaskan waters were overfished, Curwood lamented that the “destruction of the salmon shows what will happen to us if the bars are let down all at once to the financial bandit.” More of a weekend recreationist than a wilderness cultist like Muir, Curwood championed proper game and land management ethics in Alaska. The Alaskan Native Brotherhood was founded in 1912 and promoted the same conservationist principles. “Roosevelt’s far-sightedness had kept the body-snatchers at bay, and because he had foreseen what money-power and greed would do, Alaska was not entirely stripped today, but lay ready to serve with all her mighty resources the mother who had neglected her for a generation,” Curwood wrote. “But it was going to be a struggle, this opening up a great land. It must be done resourcefully and with intelligence.”86
Although Rooseveltian conservationists of the progressive era such as Garland and Curwood were often perceived as a united front, always promoting forestry and wildlife science, there was at least one fault line among them. This was as menacing as the San Andreas Fault, and it had to do with whether to dam the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park. Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when widespread fire had caused catastrophic damage downtown, the city applied to the Department of the Interior for a water rights lease to Hetch Hetchy, a breathtakingly beautiful valley in Yosemite National Park. A vicious fight ensued between those who wanted the O’Shaughnessy Dam built and those who wanted the glacial valley protected. Ironically, Pinchot, who was working against big mining interests in Alaska, sided with San Franciscans in the controversy over Hetch Hetchy because the dam, in his mind, represented “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”87 Pinchot objected to the views of his naturalist friends—Muir, in particular—in California, who were always ready to cut a rancher’s fence or torch a sheepherder’s wagon to protect the Sierras from development. “When I became Forester and denied the right to exclude sheep and cows from the Sierras, Mr. Muir thought I made a great mistake, because I allowed the use by an acquired right of a large number of people to interfere with what would have been the utmost beauty of the forest,” Pinchot testified before the U.S. Congress Committee on Public Lands. “In this case I think he has unduly given way to beauty as against use.”88
From 1910 to 1913 the fight over Hetch Hetchy, which ma
ny scholars believe was the birth of the modern environmental movement, reached epic proportions.89 The newspapers built the drama into a feud between two types of conservationists: Gifford Pinchot, a utilitarian conservationist, who was in favor of damming Hetch Hetchy; and John Muir, the wilderness prophet of the Sierra Club, who resembled Saint Francis of Assisi and was vehemently opposed to the dam. The fracas made for good theater. Uncharacteristically, Roosevelt—who on December 8, 1908, had declared Yosemite a “great national playground” where “all wild things should be protected and the scenery kept totally unmarred”—sat on the sidelines of the controversy.90 Defending his Alaskan forest reserves was an easy decision for Roosevelt. They were largely remote and isolated from large population settlements. But San Franciscans, still recovering from the earthquake of 1906 and needing a water reservoir, were a different matter to him. It was Muir, working on Travels in Alaska, who held the moral high ground; his righteous fury on behalf of Yosemite echoed all the way from the snowcapped Sierra Nevada peaks to Alaska’s Brooks Range up to the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea.
“Dam Hetch Hetchy!” a furious Muir declared. “As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”91
Chapter Four - Bull Moose Crusade
I
When Roosevelt returned from Africa in June 1910, one of the first public events he spoke at was a luncheon of the Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA) held on the roof of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City. The New York Times treated the stag luncheon as a glitzy convention of the conservation movement, minus Gifford Pinchot. In getting from Oyster Bay to Manhattan, the always competitive Roosevelt decided to race the Long Island train in his Ford car; he beat it by five minutes. Blind in one eye and with blurred vision in the other, Roosevelt was reckless at the steering wheel and heavy-footed on the accelerator—in short, a menace on the road. After talking with reporters in his Outlook office, Roosevelt headed to the Waldorf-Astoria roof, which had been decorated like a rustic camp. There were a lot of pinecones and picnic tables. Large heraldic shields honored the heroes of the CFCA and the conservation movement: Boone, Crockett, Carson, Pike, Frémont, Audubon, Lewis and Clark. Roosevelt arrived with his son Kermit and his publisher, Arthur H. Scribner. Everybody wanted to hear Roosevelt’s African tales. He delivered stories about lions, zebras, and gazelles. And he took “nature fakers” like Jack London to task. According to the New York Times, when he was done with his hourlong talk, the CFCA members “fired their revolvers to punctuate their enthusiasm.”1
The CFCA was the inspiration of the zoologist William Temple Hornaday. Disgruntled with the Boone and Crockett Club’s ethos of trophy hunting, refusing to count dead elk or moose antler points, Hornaday broke ranks with the hunters.* In 1897 he created the CFCA, with an emphasis on sportsmen committed to the preservation of wildlife habitats, the primitive arts of the outdoors life, and the wise use of natural resources. Based in Chappaqua, New York, the CFCA included Ernest Thompson Seton among its early founding members. One of its primary objectives was to keep the Adirondacks forever wild. The CFCA, in fact, had challenged New York state to immediately set aside more than 1 million new acres of forestlands. Entire Adirondack watersheds needed immediate protecting. The club also wanted New York railroads not to use coal and timber companies to stop the destructive practice of clear-cutting.2
Studying the map of the United States—particularly in the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Alaska—the CFCA members wanted to create more huge federal reserves like the Yukon Delta (known as the Roosevelt Bird Reserve) in Alaska. Later that year, in December, Hornaday held a dinner for about 350 people honoring Colonel C. J. “Buffalo” Jones for helping save bison in Arizona.3 Hornaday, who was largely responsible for the effort at the Bronx Zoo to bring about buffalo repopulation in Oklahoma and Montana, urged the CFCA to fight to protect wildlife habitats in the far west and Alaska. “Roosevelt’s idea of science as a tool for conservation seems a truism to us now,” Aldo Leopold wrote in Game Management (1933), his manifesto on wildlife protection, “but it was new in 1910.”4
A guiding principle of the CFCA was privacy; no reporters have ever attended an annual meeting. The event of June 22, 1910, at the Waldorf with Roosevelt was no different; there are no transcripts of his remarks. Evidently, however, a beautiful American rose was held over Roosevelt’s head, representing “campers’ freedom” to speak their minds candidly and off the record. Hornaday, who had the great honor of introducing Roosevelt, called him the premier outdoorsman of the era. The club’s gold medal was then handed to Roosevelt, and he received a standing ovation. On its reverse side of the medal was engraved: “For his work in the protection of wildlife and forests and for his contributions to zoology.”5
That July, Hornaday also teamed up with Pinchot to further the Adirondack Park “forever wild” program. Pinchot saw Taft’s departments of the Interior and Agriculture as a joke. Back from visiting Roosevelt in Italy, he started investigating corporate abuses in the Adirondacks. He spent time around Mount Marcy with Overton Price, editor of Conservation. The CFCA had achieved a victory in New York with a bill forbidding the sale of wild game. Now, with Pinchot as point man, they were urging a bill to forbid the sale of timber in the Adirondack Park. Two attorneys—A. S. Houghton and Marshall McLean—were drafting a lawsuit. Hornaday wanted the CFCA to sue “big timber” for wasteful clear-cutting of forests that belonged to the people of New York.6
Just a few days after the CFCA dinner, Hornaday attacked the Taft administration harder than Pinchot had ever dared. Hornaday, as the New York Times reported, accused the head of Taft’s Fur Seal Board—Walter I. Lembkey—of personally profiting from the killing of Alaskan seals and otters. The CFCA—seemingly with Roosevelt’s support—declared Lembkey “manifestly unfit” for his position. According to Hornaday, the Fur Seal Board should be purged of such members. President Taft and his secretary of commerce and labor were complicit in the slaughter of Pribilof Island seals, whose number had shrunk dramatically.7 It sickened Hornaday to contemplate that his government was complicit in the harvesting of Pribilof seals—even pups—for their pelts of thickly packed hairs (300,000 per square inch). As far as Hornaday was concerned, the Fur Seal Board was nothing more than a band of pirates. If Taft wanted war over protecting Alaskan seals, then Hornaday was glad to confront him.
Throughout the summer of 1910 Hornaday tore into Taft for running a Fur Seal Board that, instead of “watch-dogging” the Pribilofs, was allowing cash-and-carry profiteers and businessmen cronies to profit while the northern fur seals’ numbers diminished. Out of all the pinnipeds—that is, mammals with flippers—the northern fur seals intrigued Hornaday the most. For one thing, their migratory journey from the Bering Sea to the central California coast was exceeded in length only by the migrations of harp seals of Newfoundland and some whales. From a biological perspective, the northern fur seal had the most pronounced sexual dimorphism of any mammal species. And these seals were tough defenders of territory. “It is not safe to enter a rookery in breeding season, but bulls normally will not pursue intruders beyond the edge of their own territory and much of their angry display is bluff—though not to other bulls,” Briton Cooper Busch wrote in The War Against the Seals. “The northern fur seal is fully capable of driving off an interloping Steller Sea Lion three times its size.”8
By the time Roosevelt arrived in Denver that August to deliver an important speech on conservation, speculation was rampant that he would run for president in 1912. He was driven by malice against Taft and against the “lawless man of great wealth” who was skinning public lands in New York, Alaska, and elsewhere.9 Every syllable Roosevelt uttered from the podium was infused with vehemence and urgency. He called for inheritance taxes on large estates as a fair mechanism to fund more and better big government. Demanding obedience to the sportsman’s code, he pushed his conservation agenda forwar
d, “dee-lighted” to demonize investment bankers as “debauchers” of the American landscape. Positioning himself as the arbiter of economic justice and a countervailing force to Wall Street, Roosevelt thundered that the lamentable antinational tide had to be reversed. Alaska’s coastal waters, for example, needed to be protected by a powerful Bureau of Fisheries, or else the salmon runs would end. Regulation of huge cannery operations, Roosevelt said, would occur only in the form of vigorous federal regulation of Alaska’s waterways. And the Pribilofs—those rugged breeding grounds for seals, walrus, and otters—needed to remain fully in the portfolio of the U.S. Biological Survey, not in the Commerce and Labor Department. The five-year ban against sealing, in Roosevelt’s eyes, needed to become permanent.
Arriving in Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910, Roosevelt artfully preached his “new nationalism,” which included vigorous conservation. With a discernible intensity, Roosevelt expressed his conviction that the U.S. government was a far better steward of the land than the self-interested House of Morgan and similar types who populated Wall Street. He was anxious to bring corporate power to heel. Conservation, he said, was the great moral issue of the day. Roosevelt claimed that President Taft had unnecessarily created the Bureau of Mines with U.S. Forest Service funds. Why not more fully fund the Bureau of Fisheries, which he had created in 1903? Government regulatory powers, Roosevelt insisted, had to be increased dramatically to impede human degradation of wild America. Spontaneous enthusiasm and reverberating cheers greeted every line of conservationist populism that Roosevelt shouted out.
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