Terrible Swift Sword (61 page)

“There is going to be a fight after all,” George Bird Grinnell excitedly wrote in the January 11, 1883, issue of
Forest and Stream
magazine. “The Yellowstone Park is not to be put into the pockets of a few speculators without some resistance on the part of the representatives of the people. . . . . The Park is for rich and poor alike, and every one should have an equal interest in it.”
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Sheridan's report on the 1882 Yellowstone expedition had gotten results. Interior Secretary Henry Teller banned hunting inside the park, and, at Sheridan's urging, Vest took the first steps to protect the park by sponsoring a pair of resolutions in December 1882. Vest demanded that the Interior Department reveal all the concessions awarded inside the park. He also posed the question, How should the park be properly managed?

Vest got his answers, but he discovered that powerful interests were ready to thwart the changes that he sought. The Yellowstone Park Improvement Company and its parent company, the Northern Pacific Railroad, blocked Vest's attempt to curb the interior secretary's authority over the park. They also defeated his proposal to prohibit exclusive privileges and monopolies inside Yellowstone.

Vest persisted. In March 1883, he added an amendment to the Sundry Civil Appropriations Act that put the brakes on the park's development while also permitting the army to get a foot in the door. The amendment forbade the interior secretary to award monopolies or leases exceeding ten acres. No leases were permitted within a quarter mile of the geysers or Yellowstone Falls. Moreover, if trespassers, poachers, or vandals became major problems, the army could be deployed to protect the park.

This was an enormous setback for the Improvement Company, although it still controlled all ten acres where development was permitted. The company was determined to make the most of its ten-year lease. It quickly threw up temporary buildings: a boardinghouse, office, and stables.

The Improvement Company also accelerated construction of its 250-room National Hotel at Mammoth Hot Springs, which featured such rustic rarities as electricity, a six-by-twenty-two-foot kitchen range where fifteen cooks could work simultaneously, a barbershop, and a Steinway piano. The hotel's larder was stocked with elk killed inside the park—in defiance of Teller's January 1883 prohibition against hunting.
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The park superintendent now received a salary. His ten paid assistants patrolled the park to protect the game, timber, and scenic attractions from interlopers and vandals. There were not enough horses, so the policemen often had to patrol on
foot, which severely reduced their effectiveness in the massive park. Consequently, poaching and vandalism continued.

Exacerbating these problems was the fact that no penalties were attached to the park regulations that the assistants ostensibly enforced; an offender might be expelled from the park and his equipment confiscated, but nothing more. In March 1884, the Wyoming Territorial Legislature attempted to fix the problem by extending its jurisdiction, laws, and penalties over the park. Two justices of the peace and two constables were hired. While uneven, enforcement improved; however, this state of affairs was not destined to last. Complaints about the haphazard justice meted out by the courts prompted the Interior Department to dispatch attorney W. Hallet Phillips to investigate. Startlingly, he found that Wyoming's authority over the park was invalid because Congress had never affirmed it.

At about the same time, Joseph Medill, chairman of the National Republican Party, and his traveling companions, who included a judge and a congressman, were hauled before a Wyoming justice of the peace for failing to extinguish a campfire properly. Medill's indignant account appeared in his
Chicago Tribune
, along with his opinion that a national park should be subject to national laws. But no federal laws applied to Yellowstone, and after Wyoming repealed its 1884 law, no state laws did either.
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CHESTER ARTHUR BECAME THE first president to visit the park. Sheridan had persuaded him to see it for himself—and to get in some excellent hunting and fishing while he was at it. Arthur had succeeded President James Garfield after Garfield's assassination in 1881. The former New York machine politician had surprised everybody by running a clean administration and signing into law the Pendleton Civil Service Act in January 1883.

The expedition Sheridan led in August 1883 was the most prestigious ever to visit Yellowstone. Besides Arthur, participants included Vest; War Secretary Lincoln; Montana governor J. Schuyler Crosby, who was a Sheridan staff officer during the war; Judge D. C. Rollins of New York; Western Electric president Anson Stager of Chicago; Sheridan's brother Michael and other members of Sheridan's staff; and a seventy-five-man 5th Cavalry escort commanded by Captain Edward M. Hayes. Sheridan barred newspapermen from the party. “If we have a newspaperman along, our pleasure will be destroyed,” he said. Instead, Sheridan's brother and Hayes wrote dispatches that they sent by courier to the Associated Press.

At Fort Washakie, a delegation of Shoshones and Arapahoes presented Arthur with a pony for his daughter. Following the route that Sheridan had taken to Yellowstone from Green River, Wyoming, the previous year, the party left Fort Washakie at 5 a.m. on August 9. Later in the day, the president killed a trophy elk.

Arthur was an ardent fisherman, and in anticipation of the trip, he had bought $50 worth of gear. He and Vest put it to good use along the Snake River, together reeling in 105 pounds of trout in one afternoon.

When the expedition entered Yellowstone on August 23, Sheridan reminded his guests of the prohibition against hunting. The party spent a week touring the geysers and the waterfalls before leaving to board a train for home. After twenty-five days in one another's company, the men had become friends.

 

IF THERE WAS ANY question about Sheridan's motive for organizing the trip, his brother Michael answered it when he wrote in his later revision of Sheridan's
Personal Memoirs
, “General Sheridan was particularly gratified with what the journey had accomplished toward benefiting the Park, gaining for its future protection not only the good-will of his influential guests, but interesting the public in its preservation to such a degree that it became comparatively easy to induce Congress to safeguard it from speculators and plunderers.”

The results were evident before the end of 1883. Writing in the December 20 issue of
Forest and Stream
, Grinnell observed, “The trip . . . . is already, as we predicted last summer would be the case, resulting in action for the proper preservation of the Park.” Indeed, with Sheridan's encouragement, Vest and Illinois senator John Logan had little trouble persuading Congress to deny the requests by Northern Pacific Railroad's straw man companies to build spur lines into the park in 1884 and 1885—one of them ostensibly to serve gold mines on the Clarks Fork River. Another attempt in 1886 also failed.
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Unable to get a toehold in the park, the railroad and its spin-offs, shell companies, and allies in Congress attempted to strip Yellowstone of its national park designation and restore it to the public domain. The shoddy administration of the park warranted it, declared the pro-development forces, although conditions had recently improved. In August 1886, a House-Senate conference committee zeroed out the park's budget; the supervisor and his assistants might remain but without pay.

Congress soon had reason to rue its decision. Interior Secretary Lucius Lamar of Mississippi, a professor, judge, and former Confederate official, had one viable option remaining—Vest's amendment to the 1883 Sundry Civil Appropriations Act—and he acted on it. Lamar requested that the War Department send troops to manage, supervise, and protect Yellowstone. Sheridan ordered Company M of the 1st Cavalry, stationed at Fort Custer, Montana, to enter the park and operate it until further notice.
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CAPTAIN MOSES HARRIS HAD won the Medal of Honor in West Virginia before serving under Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley twenty-two years earlier. He commanded
the fifty men of Company M who reached Mammoth Hot Springs during the evening of August 17, 1886.

The troopers discovered that most of the park's now unpaid administrators had left. Superintendent David Wear was grappling with an array of problems that he was powerless to address, chief among them being three large fires burning out of control and an outbreak of lawlessness.

Making his headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs and christening it Camp Sheridan (it later became Fort Yellowstone), Harris began imposing order. He sent detachments to fight the fires—the first such federal fire control effort. Harris laid down rules for park visitors: no cutting green timber and no hunting or trapping. Campfires were restricted, and liquor sales were banned, except at the National Hotel. He forbade visitors to throw sticks, stones, or any obstruction into the geysers—including the tourists' favorite, laundry soap, which made them foam.
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The army's administration of the park was provisional—subject annually to renewal by Congress. But the military proved such an efficient manager that its tenure was routinely extended, and the government also sent soldiers to oversee three other parks. No one could have predicted that the temporary arrangement in Yellowstone would last the thirty-two years that it did, until the army ceded responsibility to the new National Park Service in 1918.

1885–1888

PHILIP SHERIDAN, THE CONSUMMATE WARRIOR who never lost a battle, became an avuncular figure around Washington, DC. A
New York World
reporter described him in mufti as he attended to the army's business in the capital: “He wore upon the back of his round, bullet head an old-fashioned silk hat about two sizes too small; a short, light yellow-gray overcoat which had only two buttons and they were ready to fly off from the undue strain of Sheridan's round figure. The trousers were a gray plaid and fitted very snugly on the General's fat legs. His boots were thick-soled and un-blacked.”

Sheridan had come far from the days when he habitually slept in a wrinkled, soiled uniform and often went without food. Although heavier, his hair now iron gray, he still bore himself with “the quick, elastic gait, erect figure, and soldierly presence acquired as a cadet,” wrote his brother Michael.

Sheridan made many friends in the capital; people liked his amiable, low-key manner. “Politeness is a cheap commodity that every one may possess,” he liked to
say, sounding like an etiquette scold rather than the renowned combat leader that he was.
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Indeed, middle age mellowed Sheridan and made him more thoughtful. During a speech in 1887, he optimistically predicted “a period when war would eliminate itself,” when diplomacy would replace killing. “Arbitration will rule the world.”

Sheridan began to enjoy some of the fruits of his years of hard service. He bought a summer cottage at Nonquitt, Massachusetts, and began spending time on Buzzard's Bay. Next door to the Sheridans lived Louisa May Alcott, author of
Little Women
.
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BUT HIS ENJOYMENT WAS not destined to last. In November 1887, he complained to his physician, Army major Robert O'Reilly, that he had felt unwell for months. Indeed, he was flushed and short of breath. After examining the general, O'Reilly gave Sheridan the gloomy diagnosis: he had heart disease “of the mitral and aortic valves.” Rest might prolong his life, but there was nothing then known to medicine that could cure him.

Although dismaying to anyone, the news was an especially hard blow for a man of seemingly iron constitution, who had spent a lifetime in robust health and endured years of fatigue and hardship without serious illness.
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The disease progressed rapidly. On May 22, 1888, feeling ill and exhausted after returning to Washington from a Western inspection tour, Sheridan suffered a severe heart attack. Several more followed days later.

When Sheridan's medical condition became known, Congress hastily resurrected the rank of four-star general of the army, which had been permitted to lapse with William Sherman's retirement. The day that the bill was enacted, June 1, President Grover Cleveland signed it into law. Sheridan became the fourth general of the army in the nation's history, following in the steps of George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Sherman.
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June brought more setbacks. After yet another heart attack, Sheridan said, “I nearly got away from you that time, doctor.” Believing that the sea breezes at Nonquitt might be restorative, Sheridan's doctor and family arranged to move him there from Washington.

On June 30, Sheridan, gaunt and pale, and his family boarded the US man-of-war
Swatara
. After stopping at Baltimore to take aboard two Catholic nuns to serve as Sheridan's nurses, the ship continued to Massachusetts.

At Nonquitt in July, Sheridan briefly regained some of his strength and energy, and he read and revised proofs of his
Personal Memoirs
. But on August 5, he suffered a massive heart attack. With Irene by his side, Sheridan died at 10:30 p.m.
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THE NEWS TRAVELED FAST that another of the great triumvirate of Union generals from the war was dead—Ulysses Grant having died three years earlier. Now, only Sherman remained, and he would survive for just two and half years more.