Championing individual species in peril, Roosevelt lamented the declining populations of the whooping crane, bald eagle, and California condor (Gymnogyps californianus). Taking a step in the right direction, New York had recently passed the Audubon Plumage Law of 1910, banning the sale of plumes of all native birds for the millinery trade.20 Roosevelt was nevertheless concerned that the Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica) off the coast of Maine, which had distinctive black-and-white plumage and a colorful, almost clownlike beak, had been extirpated. American citizens, he argued, shouldn’t have to travel all the way to Newfoundland or Labrador to see a puffin breeding ground. Roosevelt called for “international agreements” among all the nations of the western hemisphere to “put down the iniquitous feather trade.” This was a direct jab at ex-president Taft for having canceled the World Conservation Congress. As Roosevelt said in Outlook, it was “inconceivable” that “civilized people should permit [this feather trade] to exist.”21 To Roosevelt, the “bird cities” in the 1,200-mile Aleutian chain, where three species of cormorants existed, along with colonies of murres, auklets, kittiwakes, and glaucous-winged gulls (Larus glaucescens), constituted one of God’s great spectacles.22
Roosevelt was struck by a chapter in Our Vanishing Wild Life called “The Guerrillas of Destruction.” In military contexts, a guerrilla fighter is one who refuses to recognize civilized rules of engagement. In Hornaday’s mind (and in Roosevelt’s), hunters and plumers who ignored the sportsman’s ethos were like guerrillas. Oology, the collecting of bird eggs by the thousands, had to be banned. Hornaday did an impressive job of describing the culprits, identifying many by name. He aimed an entire chapter at Italian immigrants who had brought an Old World practice of market slaughter to the New World. Hornaday itemized what types of dead birds a consumer could purchase in a Venetian or Florentine market, and the chapter made for grim reading. According to Hornaday, the American South was also willfully ignoring game laws. Robins were being systematically shot and eaten in Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Texas, and Florida by the hundreds of thousands. In Dallas, Texas, a man named F. L. Crow led torchlight bird hunts along the Trinity River; on one occasion, his group killed 10,517 birds in slightly over two hours—just for the hell of it. Roosevelt’s friend Edward A. McIlhenny, owner of the company that made Tabasco sauce, complained that on Avery Island, Louisiana, 10,000 robins a day were slaughtered to be sold at roadside stands in the nearby town of New Iberia for ten cents apiece. “We must stop all the holes in the barrel,” Hornaday fumed, “or eventually lose all the water. No group of bird-slaughterers is entitled to immunity.”23
Hornaday offered gruesome capsule biographies of the “guerrillas,” whom he identified by name. With Roosevelt’s strong approval, in fact, Hornaday issued an Eleventh Commandment, an “inexorable law” that every generation of American conservationists needed to absorb: No wild species of birds, mammals, reptile, or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes.24 In Alaska this meant that the harvesting of northern fur seals and sea otters had to be curtailed. The Aleutian Islands Reservation was established for that purpose in 1913, to end the “exhaustion” of wildlife resources. Furthermore, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey (which would become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940)—following the model established by TR at Pelican Island, Florida, in 1903—created a reindeer reserve on Alaska’s Unalaska and Umnak islands.25
Another virtue of Our Vanishing Wild Life, from TR’s perspective, was that Hornaday described the pioneering accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration in species protection. (Gifford Pinchot, by contrast, was focused on forestry and had failed to recount these federal bird reservations in his memoir, Breaking New Ground.)* Hornaday explicitly praised Roosevelt for saving Wind Cave, the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, and Mesa Verde (among other American wonders), and detailed how the activist warrior of the Antiquities Act of 1906 had fought to save such treasures as Jewel Cave, Montezuma Castle, Tumacacori, El Morro, Chaco Canyon, the Gila Cliff Dwellings, Muir Woods, Pinnacles, Cinder Cone, and Lassen Peak. Roosevelt had established the national monument designation as a sort of way station to protect areas he hoped would eventually become national parks. Two of Alaska’s most spectacular national parks—Katmai and Glacier Bay—were monuments first. Other impressive national parks, such as Washington’s Olympic, Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and California’s Death Valley, also began as national monuments.
Hornaday also included a chart of the fifty-one federal bird reservations created by Roosevelt from 1903 to 1909, and credited the ex-president with developing the U.S. government’s wildlife protection ethos by way of the Boone and Crockett Club and the National Association of Audubon Societies. In Alaska alone, Roosevelt’s bird sanctuaries—Tuxedni (Chisik and Duck islands in Cook Inlet), Saint Lazaria Island, Bering Sea (Saint Matthew Island Group), Pribilof (Walrus and Otter islands), Bogoslof, and the vast marshlike Yukon Delta—would eventually become parts of two national wildlife refuges: the Alaska Maritime NWR and Yukon Delta NWR. “These reservations,” Hornaday wrote, “are of immense value to bird life, and their creation represents the highest possible wisdom in utilizing otherwise valueless portions of the national domain.”26
The Alaskan wilderness was, unquestionably, still an Eden-like paradise in 1913, what a future U.S. Fish and Wildlife director, Ira N. Gabrielson, would call a “living zoological museum.”27 But that positive assessment didn’t take account of the seal, otter, and walrus rookeries, which were under assault by market hunters. Using statistical graphs, Hornaday made vividly clear in Our Vanishing Wild Life the high percentages of walrus and seal populations in jeopardy. The prognosis for species survival was unfavorable. In Hornaday’s mind (as in the minds of Roosevelt, Sheldon, and other conservationists), there were “fatal defects” in Alaskan game laws circa 1913. For example, as part of a reparations strategy, First Nation tribes enjoyed an exemption from bag limits in Alaska. Tribes were legally allowed to shoot anything that moved. Hornaday recounted the experience of the conservationist and hunter Frank Kleinschmidt at Sand Point on the Kenai Peninsula: he saw eighty-two caribou tongues piled up in a Native Alaskan’s canoe, brought to market to sell for fifty cents apiece. He was aghast at this casual carnage. “The carcasses were left where they fell, to poison the air of Alaska,” Hornaday wrote of the market hunters. In contrast, he praised the outcome of regulated sports hunting: “Thanks to the game law, and five wardens, the number of big game animals killed last year in Alaska by sportsmen was reasonably small—just as it should have been.”28
Both Hornaday and Roosevelt were adamant that Sitka deer (Odocoileus hemonius sitkensis), which lived in southeastern Alaska, be allowed to roam thousands of miles on protected U.S. government land unmolested by market hunters. They were part of what Roosevelt called America’s “deer family.” The U.S. Department of the Interior had an obligation, they believed, to allow only a very limited hunting season for Sitka deer in the Tongass and Chugach national forests. Such a position was not viewed favorably by Alaska’s residents, many of whom believed the federal government had no right telling a citizen of the territory what he could or couldn’t shoot. Game management seemed to them like something conceived by Karl Marx. An ex-governor of Alaska, in fact, explicitly protested that Rooseveltian conservation with regard to Sitka deer and moose was socialistic. In a rugged territory like Alaska, the argument went, a man had a right, under the Second Amendment, to follow a buck and pull the trigger. “The preservation of the game of Alaska should be left to the people of Alaska,” a territorial ex-governor argued. “It is their game; and they will preserve it all right!”
In Our Vanishing Wild Life, Hornaday outlined the flaws he saw in that stance against the federal government:
1. The game of Alaska does not belong to the people who live in Alaska—with the intent to get out tomorrow!
2. The preservation of the Alaskan fauna on the public domain should not be left unreservedly
to the people of Alaska because . . .
3. As sure as shooting, they will not preserve it!29
Hornaday wanted the sale of all game to be prohibited in Alaska: even an Arctic prairie billy (a Euroamerican subsistence settler) or an Eskimo should be allowed to shoot only what he or she would personally eat. This was a very extreme, uncompromising stance. Hornaday and Roosevelt believed that market hunters, such as those who were killing off Bering Sea walrus for ivory and hides, should be arrested. Roosevelt also wanted to quadruple the number of wildlife wardens in Alaska. To protect seal rookeries, the Rooseveltian conservationists wanted taxpayers to provide the Biological Survey with two state-of-the-art vessels to patrol the 34,000 miles of Alaskan coastline. Poachers should be arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned. Congress, these conservationists argued, should immediately appropriate $50,000 for increased law enforcement to protect Alaskan wildlife. The sportsman’s code was coming to Alaska. “It is no longer right nor just for Indians, miners, and prospectors to be permitted by law to kill all the big game they please,” Hornaday wrote, “whenever they please.”30
Alaska’s declining bear population was also worrisome. There were no biological underpinnings to Alaska’s policies for controlling predators; just shoot what moved. Once statehood was achieved in 1959, Alaska’s bear population was appropriately managed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) and the Division of Wildlife Conservation established by the Board of Game (BOG). But in 1913, it was open season all 365 days of the year for the rancher-prospectors whose tools were rope, harness, sheep dip, branding iron, nail kegs, sledgehammers, and hunting rifles. Although the smaller black bear (Ursus americanus) still wandered across coastal and interior Alaska, intriguing subspecies such as the blue bear (Ursus arctos pruinosus) of the Saint Elias Mountains were in decline. The coastal ranges were thick with brown bear subspecies, with variations depending on geography: Kodiak bears (on Kodiak), Kidder bears (on Alaska Peninsula), the Admiralty bear (on Admiralty Island), and the Sitka bear (on Baranof Island). Mammalogists were working around the clock trying to create a brown bear sanctuary on Admiralty Island in Alaska to help these mammals survive market hunting.31
“I think that the attention of the Game Committee of the Boone and Crockett Club should be called to the very dangerous situation as regards bears of Alaska,” Charles Sheldon wrote to George Bird Grinnell in 1918, “which, at any time, may be threatened with extermination in the coast region.”32
While Sheldon was the point man for protecting Alaska’s bear populations, Grinnell had become the established voice on properly managing the territory’s salmon. The problems were many. To Grinnell’s utter horror, Alaskan fishermen would shoot any bear they encountered along a stream or shoreline because the bruins were competing with their commercial nets, lines, and traps. Grinnell told how, adding insult to injury, Alaskan fishermen used only about 20 percent of the salmon they caught, keeping only the choice belly meat and discarding the rest. To Grinnell, a veteran of the conflicts of 1880 to 1909 over protecting bison, the Alaskans’ professed belief—mistaken and possibly disingenuous—that salmon were abundant was all too familiar.33 According to Grinnell, if Alaskan fisheries weren’t managed properly, the salmon—sockeye, chinook, coho, pink, and chum—would die out.
What really set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge wasn’t just the vanishing bear and salmon populations. It was also President Woodrow Wilson’s cavalier attitude toward the Tongass and Chugach national forests; it suggested cowardice (like Taft’s) masquerading as blissful superiority. Wilson, a bespectacled Princetonian indoorsman, had the temerity to dismiss better-informed outdoorsmen who argued that the federal government should save vast swaths of wild Alaska for future generations. Roosevelt—who thought most Alaskan lands should be federally owned—seethed when Wilson delivered his first state of the union address in December 1913, sounding like a pitchman for Morganheim. “Alaska as a storehouse, should be unlocked,” Wilson announced. “We must use the resources of the country, not lock them up.”34
Chapter Seven - The Lake Clark Pact
I
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, twenty-six-year-old Aldo Leopold—whose philosophy was the antithesis of Wilson’s “unlock the storehouse” approach to natural resource management—felt liberated by Our Vanishing Wild Life. It had the same galvanizing effect on him that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on William Lloyd Garrison and the other abolitionists of the pre–Civil War generation. A whole new way of considering wildlife rights infused Leopold. No longer would details of policy or a political balance swamp his conservationist principles. Smoking his omnipresent pipe, carefully reading every line of Hornaday, he thought about all the animals he had seen slaughtered in the Flint Hills of Kansas, along the Mississippi River near Davenport, by market hunters. He thought of how the Midwest lowlands he so loved had been skinned by one-crop agriculture. Determined to make Carson National Forest of New Mexico his Walden Pond, Leopold was evolving into a combination of Thoreau (preservationist), Pinchot (forester), and Hornaday (advocate of wildlife protection). “The book galvanized Aldo’s conviction,” Leopold’s biographer Curt Meine wrote. “Never before had the case for game protection been so alarmingly stated. Never before had the argument been made so strongly that man bore a moral responsibility for the preservation and perpetuation of threatened game species.”1
Later, in the early 1930s, when Leopold was writing Game Management, inspired by Our Vanishing Wild Life, he explained how “the crusader” William Temple Hornaday had affected his thinking: “He insisted that our conquest of nature carried with it a moral responsibility for the perpetuation of the threatened forms of Wildlife. This avowal was a forward step of inestimable import. In fact, to anyone for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, it constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.”2
That same spring of 1913, when Our Vanishing Wild Life was published, Theodore Roosevelt left Oyster Bay by train to explore the Southwest. He first spent time in southern New Mexico. The Roosevelt party then moved into El Tovar Hotel on the south edge of the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt’s reasons for coming to Arizona were many. One was that he hoped Grand Canyon National Monument—which he had saved during his presidency, by an exective order in 1908—could be upgraded to a national park. The whole Kaibab Plateau was a wildlife paradise. Charles Sheldon, in fact, had spent much of 1912 studying the habits of bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon for the U.S. Biological Survey. “The sheep here act exactly like all the northern sheep I have ever seen—very watchful and alert,” Sheldon wrote in his Havasupais field journal on November 24, 1912. “Sheep (at least a few) probably go up the rim when the snow melts to get green food which may not grow down in the canyon until later. I have only seen two lambs. There are no enemies of sheep here, except golden eagles. The bobcats are so scarce as to be negligible.”3
With Roosevelt at the Grand Canyon were his two youngest sons, Archie and Quentin. The guide, cook, and horse wrangler was Jesse Cummings of Mesa, Arizona. In the days to come, the bristly-bearded Cummings, a native of Kentucky, would repeatedly impress the party, and Roosevelt in particular, with his expertise in this terrain. He had traveled from the Alleghenies to the western prairies and had never gotten lost. Cummings skillfully shepherded the Roosevelts toward a bank of the serpentine Colorado River where white-water rapids had cut gorges through rock for aeons. He continually pointed out colorful bird species such as mountain bluebirds, juncos, and chickadees—and homely ones, too. And Cummings, it turned out, could procure anything in the way of supplies; he was like an army quartermaster with the Midas touch.4
True to form, Roosevelt slept outside his tent more often than inside it. The riparian coyote willow, arrow weed, seep willow, and western honey mesquite were like tonics. Although Roosevelt wrote about coyotes (Canis latrans) and cougars (Puma concolor) during this Grand Canyon journey, and wanted the boys to hunt these predators, his own eyes seemed more a
ttracted to the wildflowers and birds. He was eager to share his own counts of Grand Canyon wildlife with Sheldon, proud that he was adding to the U.S. Biological Survey’s cataloging of the Southwest. “Although we reached the plateau in mid-July, the spring was just coming to an end,” Roosevelt wrote. “Silver-voiced Rocky Mountain hermit-thrushes [Catharus guttatus] chanted divinely from the deep woods. There were multitudes of flowers, of which, alas! I know only a very few, and these by their vernacular names, for as yet there is no such handbook for the flowers of the southern Rocky Mountains as, thanks to Mrs. Frances Dana, we have for those of the Eastern United States, and, thanks to Miss Mary Elizabeth Parsons, for those of California.”5
Roosevelt’s prose from the Grand Canyon in the Outlook, later collected in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, was unusual for its ease and impressionistic quality.6 His tone had tempered and softened considerably since he wrote his Dakota trilogy of the 1880s, and certainly since he wrote the gory African Game Trails. He now conveyed a feeling of tranquillity and harmony. Portraits and photographs from the southwestern trip, in fact, seem to confirm this alteration, capturing a less strident-looking Roosevelt—the hard lines of his famous grimace are somewhat softened by traces of a smile. The hats he wore were more floppy, no longer crisp and uncreased. He was playing the father and uncle. Roosevelt had always been a child of nature: this new Roosevelt seemed to verge on beatific pastoralism. The reader of his essay on the Grand Canyon, which appeared in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, is almost relieved when Roosevelt finally betrays a familiar ferocity, snapping at the despoilers of nature like a provoked grizzly bear: “Continual efforts are made by demagogues and by unscrupulous agitators to excite hostility to the forest policy of the government, and needy men who are short-sighted and unscrupulous join in the cry, and play into the hands of the corrupt politicians who do the bidding of the big and selfish exploiters of the public domain. One device of these politicians is through their representations in Congress to cut down the appropriation for the forest service.”7
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 20
