The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (65 page)

From the second Roosevelt was deposited on the lakefront dock from Seward Webb’s yacht
Elfrida
, he explored Isle LaMotte like a tourist. At his side was ex-Rough Rider Guy Murchie. A book had informed Roosevelt that the world’s oldest coral reefs existed around Isle LaMotte. The Chazy Reef was buried under the southernmost part of the island; its limestone was more than 450 million years old.
⁷⁸
Roosevelt couldn’t help marveling that Vermont—of all places—had once been under a tropical sea. There were other geological facts that probably intrigued Roosevelt and appealed to his insatiable curiosity about the island. Somehow, the few hundred residents of Isle LaMotte were able to quarry black marble limestone from the reefs without polluting the harbor. Some of the finest marble blocks ever discovered, in fact, came from Lake Champlain and were used as construction materials for the U.S. Capitol and Radio City music hall. There were other attractions on the island including a fish culture station said to be spawning more than 1 million eggs a week, incubated in a series of tanks, but he never got around to inspecting them, owing to a tragedy.
⁷⁹

That evening of September 6, much of Roosevelt’s talk to his fellow
conservationists centered on his recent cougar hunt in Colorado. Sitting in the audience was Philip Stewart, his hunting protégé and photographer, who gave him somebody to bounce his anecdotes off in a slightly humorous way. “Stewart took the hunt a shade less seriously than I did,” Roosevelt joked. “I wanted to shoot the lions but he wanted to Kodak them. He had a large and Catholic taste and wanted to
Kodak everything
. When the dogs treed the first lion I was riding ahead and had got within fifty yards of the tree and could see the animal in the tree snarling and spitting. I was immensely interested. Suddenly Stewart halted me in a tone almost agonizing in its earnestness, as though a pack of mountain lions was upon us when he proceeded with the air of a villain in melodrama to take a picture of a rabbit on a stump.”
⁸⁰

After the speech Roosevelt repaired to the grand estate of Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk, next door to where the Fish and Game League’s banquet had been held. He was going to talk off the record to various conservationists in a little while. Back in 1897 President McKinley had stayed at the mansion, where he claimed a cane chair as his own. Now Roosevelt, as a courtesy, was given the same chair. Roosevelt had anticipated having a delightful evening because the novelist Winston Churchill (the author of
Richard Carvel
) was on hand, along with Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont. Together they were sure to provide lively debates on politics and literature. At five-thirty that evening Roosevelt was called away from the veranda to the telephone, one of the few on the island. He was informed that President McKinley had been shot twice at point-blank range while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Burying his head in his hands, Roosevelt was heard to gasp “My God!”

To think that a wretched little anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, had tried to snuff out America’s twenty-fifth president set Roosevelt’s teeth on edge. Securing the only telephone line on the island for hours, Roosevelt was able to get a message to the hospital in Buffalo. Word of McKinley’s dire plight spread throughout the Fish and Game League crowd and everybody was aghast. Senator Redfield Proctor made a formal announcement which had the effect of nauseating the shocked conservationists even more. “Friends,” he said, “a cloud has fallen over this happy event.”
⁸¹
A short while later another call arrived, telling Roosevelt that the president was “resting quietly” and that recovery was likely. “Good!” Roosevelt exclaimed, his face relaxing.
⁸²

Announcing the positive news to the guests at the banquet, who listened with bated breath to Roosevelt’s every word, the vice president asked to be excused from the event. Roosevelt’s friend Dr. Webb, who
owned the
Elfrida
, was going to take him to Arrow Point on the mainland near Burlington, where he could take a special train (Engine 108), which pulled the private car of the president of Rutland Railroad to Buffalo. When Roosevelt was asked by a local reporter about the attempted assassination, his face became impassive. Staring straight ahead, with utter stillness as if he were a statue, he said, “I am so inexpressively grieved, shocked, and horrified that I can say nothing.”
⁸³

Nobody knew what Roosevelt thought as his night train traveled across New York state. There are no accounts to describing him as serene or anxious or melancholy. Oddly, this is one of the few historic moments in his life that he himself never recounted. Probably his heart had sunk into his boots, and his mind was reeling like the discord of untuned fiddles, for a collective ominousness held sway over America that evening. Had yet another president been killed in his prime? Not since a bullet struck President Garfield twenty years earlier had the nation’s nervous system been given such a jolt. President McKinley’s wound was quite serious; the bullets had penetrated his abdomen, damaging his stomach and pancreas. McKinley had been rushed to Exposition Hospital for immediate surgery. He was then moved to the home of John G. Milburn on Delaware Avenue to rest.

Arriving in Buffalo in the hush of dawn, catching a morning chill, Roosevelt hurried to McKinley’s bedside where, more or less, he stayed for the next three days. By September 10, President McKinley’s health had vastly improved. The situation didn’t look fatal; it seemed that the president was going to pull through. A very relieved Roosevelt didn’t want to hang around Buffalo any longer (like one of those Cuban land crabs or vultures circling the dead) so he said good-bye and headed for Oyster Bay and then the Adirondacks to reconvene with Edith. Everybody deals with tragedy differently, and Roosevelt now felt the urge to climb Mount Marcy. (Probably the ascent had already been planned and he was getting his itinerary back on track.) Roosevelt knew life was short and he didn’t want to miss his home state’s glorious peak, which had tugged at him since those long-ago campfire readings of
Last of the Mohicans
. To Roosevelt it was wrong for a governor of New York not to have climbed the great summit. Even though Burroughs had written extensively about his 1863 trek to Mount Marcy, the “sage of Slabsides” had never made it to the top; Roosevelt would do it for him.

For the first time since Yellowstone Edith agreed to climb a mountain with her husband, exited to see the virgin groves of birch, pine, spruce, and fir. Two of Roosevelt’s eager children—Kermit and Ethel—
were also going to make the climb and go swimming in Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. (Alice and Quentin were ill and couldn’t join the family outing.) Roosevelt’s conservationist friend James McNaughton had a hunt club near Mount Marcy in the hamlet of Tahawus which was going to serve as the Roosevelts’ base camp. His family was waiting for Roosevelt at the Tahawus Club when he arrived wet from the rain; the forest was cast in a blue gloom. Clearly, the hike wasn’t going to be a picnic. “The Adirondacks,” Edith complained, “is probably the wettest place in the world.”
⁸⁴

Two ranger guides had volunteered to lead the Roosevelt family from the Tahawus Club up to the summit dome, where there was a spectacular view of the divide between the Hudson and Saint Lawrence rivers. Also accompanying the Roosevelt party were McNaughton, a governess, and two law students from Harvard. Their first day on the Calamity Brook trail started out golden but turned to slate-gray as they boarded canoes and paddled toward Lake Colden at an elevation of 3,500 feet. There, at lakeside, they lodged in two cabins with, as Edith put it, “miserable little cots.” The next morning, September 13, a pall of fog hung in the air so thick that it was hard to see five yards ahead. The ledges were getting slippery. At this juncture Edith and the children bailed out of the expedition. Theodore had a ranger take them back down to the Tahawus Club. With his family out of harm’s way, Roosevelt, clutching a walking stick, waving the other men forward, grew more determined than ever to reach the summit. If Pinchot could pull it off in a blizzard, surely he could make it in a damp September rain.

As his correspondence bears out, Roosevelt was in a deeply reflective mood during those grim days since the attempted assassination of President McKinley. Like a falling barometer or a dropping temperature, Roosevelt’s mood had sunk low in Buffalo. He had written Jacob Riis a cryptic letter about losing his youth, saying that at age forty-two he felt a “shadow” coming over him like a dark shroud. Perhaps reaching the summit of Mount Marcy with his companions would help renew his optimistic spirit. After all, how could he not feel uplifted by the sight of wild New York unfurled beneath him, a blanket of green forestlands and long valleys and a pattern of blue lakes for as far as the eye could see. At that high an elevation, where only balsam fir and a few stunted spruce thrived, he could think in an unmuddled way.

The mountain climber Jon Krakauer, in
Into Thin Air
, wrote about the out-of-body sensation encountered when one is rubbing up against the “enigma of mortality,” finally reaching a summit after days of difficult
climbing. Krakauer’s reward was a glimpse across the “forbidden frontier” of death.
⁸⁵
Somehow 360-degree views from mountaintops, staring at the horizon in a cyclorama, remained the closest humans could get to comprehending the afterlife before the advent of modern aviation. Some climbers have called it a “rush.” To others it’s a “little taste of heaven.” To Roosevelt it was another moment of perfect clarity like the one he had on Mount Katahdin as a young man. For hours he basked in his own romantic profile; he was the explorer hero, at one with the backwoodsman on the trail in a Leatherstocking story at one with Audubon and Thoreau, Boone and Crockett, breathing fast, wondering what had happened to McKinley in Buffalo. He made a personal pact to become a habitué of Mount Marcy—the summit was that inspiring. “Beautiful country!” Roosevelt kept repeating, while standing on a great gray rock at the edge of an anorthosite cliff. “Beautiful country!”

Once the spell lifted, Roosevelt, his head cleared, started making his way down the mountain with the others. Unbeknownst to him, meanwhile, President McKinley had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Quite suddenly the vice president was desperately needed in Buffalo; the odds were high that he’d be sworn in as the next American president. The only problem was that nobody knew how to find Roosevelt. The press reported that the vice president was “lost” in nature. The
New York Times
, for example, headlined its story that day “Hunt over Mountains for Mr. Roosevelt.”
⁸⁶
Only the park ranger who had escorted Edith and the children down the mountain had a true idea of his whereabouts. At one-twenty-five on Friday, September 13, Roosevelt—eating a sandwich while sitting at Tear-of-the-Clouds—was met by a hyperventilating Harrison Hall. He appeared to be waving urgent dispatches from Buffalo. Roosevelt intuited what the message said.
⁸⁷

Racing down the mountain to rendezvous with his family, his combustible spirit restored, Roosevelt packed his belongings and then headed to the North Creek station. His drafts were now open and his chimney was drawing new air. Like a young giant he had sneaked Mount Marcy in just under the wire.
⁸⁸
Although McKinley had eminent physicians at his bedside, they had failed to detect a gangrenous infection. “For more than twelve suspenseful hours, the nation had no President,” the historian Margaret Leech noted in
In the Days of McKinley
. “Theodore Roosevelt was speeding on Saturday morning across the breadth of New York State.”
⁸⁹

At every railroad depot—Albany, Amsterdam, Utica, Rome, and Syracuse—reporters mobbed Roosevelt’s train in search of a quote. He stayed mum. Roosevelt was soon going to be the new president. He ar
rived in Buffalo at one-thirty PM on September 13, lodging at his friend Ansley Wilcox’s colonial mansion on Delaware Avenue. Every labored last minute had been an hour of agony for poor William McKinley. Roosevelt’s usual good nature and high spirits weren’t on display. He had a distracted look on his face and seemed self-contained. At two-fourteen AM on the morning of September 14, eight days after being shot, McKinley died. For the third time in thirty-six years an American president had been assassinated. A solemn Roosevelt, dressed in a frock coat, a thin gold watch chain hanging out of a pocket, was immediately sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president; the time was three-thirty PM.

At only forty-two years old Roosevelt had become the youngest president in American history. Oddly, when taking the oath, Roosevelt didn’t swear on a Bible; owing to the constitutional separation of church and state, nobody thought it was necessary. Perhaps his recent moments on top of Mount Marcy had brought him as close to God as he was going to get. And he waved off the military escort, claiming that a couple of mounted policemen were quite enough. An American president, he insisted, didn’t cower when something dreadful happened. Roosevelt, however, understood that the public needed to be reassured that the government was in stable and experienced hands. Immediately, he announced that all of McKinley’s cabinet officers—John Hay, Lynam Gage, Elihu Root, Philander Knox, and Ethan Hitchcock among them—would be retained. The old McKinley administration would continue to provide all the springs to the government. “I wish to say,” Roosevelt told the press, “that it shall be my aim to continue, absolutely unbroken, the policy laid down by President McKinley for the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our beloved country.”
⁹⁰

I

R
oosevelt’s wide, toothy smile took on a glint of extra assurance in the last days of September 1901 after he was sworn in as America’s twenty-sixth president. Indeed, the forces of destiny seemed to have had a governing hand in his triumphant storybook career. All over Washington, the phrase being bandied about was “Roosevelt luck.” Nobody, it seemed,
enjoyed
being president more than T.R., even though he had reached the mountaintop of American politics because of an assassin’s gun. In a conversation with the diplomat William vanden Heuvel during the 1970s, Alice Longsworth, Roosevelt’s daughter, was asked about the circumstances of her father’s suddenly learning, in the desolate Adirondacks, about President McKinley’s imminent death. “That must have been a terrible moment of sadness,” vanden Heuvel said. Alice, knowing her father all too well, answered, “Are you kidding?”
¹

Overnight, from the relative obscurity of the vice presidency, Roosevelt was now in a governmental position where his every action could be a thunderbolt. The subtle hazards and perils of being president never dawned on him. He was all forward motion, ready to rule by righteousness and a bit of the belt. A friend once famously quipped that Roosevelt was “the meteor of the age,”
²
imbued with unshakable self-confidence in his own ideas. In power of mind and disposition Roosevelt was an old-school military disciplinarian type always shouting “Charge!” and galloping up policy hills with flamboyant bravado. There was nothing fussy about him. Largely disdainful of automobiles and the telephone, Roosevelt remained a twentieth century saddle-horse man who favored written correspondence as his primary mode of communication.
³
Untiring at his desk, vigorous and direct in his opinions, he was a virtual writing machine. It’s been estimated that he wrote more than 150,000 letters in his lifetime. (Harvard University Press published eight thick volumes of them between 1951 and 1954; these are, in effect, an epistolary biography of Roosevelt.) These letters were like chess moves to Roosevelt, helping keep his hyperactive mind fresh and his fighting instinct well honed.
“Now talking with Roosevelt often does no good because he does all the talking,” William Allen White noted in December 1901. “But when you write him and he can’t talk back you get a chance to put in more.”
⁴

After only a few days in office Roosevelt started bombarding western friends with exhortations to gear up for a fight to protect America’s heritage. According to the Forest Management Act of 1897, timber and water were the only natural resources that the U.S. government was officially sanctioned to protect inside forest reserves. Therefore, this stop-gap act had opened forest reserves to mining claims. And it ignored foraging because allowing livestock to graze in the reserves was still being hotly debated in Congress. Within a few weeks Roosevelt made it clear that his administration would keep voracious sheep—those goddamn hoofed locusts—out of the forest reserves. “Intellectually a sheep is about on the lowest level of the brute creation,” Roosevelt had written; “why the early Christians admired it, whether young or old is…always a profound mystery.”
⁵
Roosevelt made it clear that sheepherders, or
borregueros
in the west, would be arrested if they trespassed on federal property. Instead, Roosevelt wanted to promote big game in its old, pre-Columbian range. Roosevelt insisted that white-tailed deer rather than livestock of any sort should populate places like the northern Arizona plateau. Eventually, after seven and a half years as president, he won that specific debate. There are literally hundreds of instances in which Rooseveltian wildlife protection trumped grazing. For example, when Roosevelt became president the Kaibab Forest of Arizona had only about 2,000 deer. Owing to Rooseveltian game management principles, this number swelled to 100,000 within a decade.
⁶
And not a single sheep’s bleat could be heard in the Kaibab Forest.

Furthermore, Roosevelt built on postulations promoted by Charles D. Walcott (director of the U.S. Geological Survey), who insisted that there were “sentimental” reasons to save forests; they had recreational as well as commercial value. But before Roosevelt’s “new conservationism” could soar, the obligations of continuity and stability were met as protocol dictated. Roosevelt retained stalwarts from the McKinley administration—notably Secretary of State John Hay and Secretary of War Elihu Root—to reassure the nation regarding foreign affairs. The American government would not abandon Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines on his imperialistic watch. There was only one clear deviation in foreign policy. A more energetic push for an isthmus canal would be prioritized; it was a pet issue for Roosevelt. And, of course, Roosevelt would continue to oversee the building of a first-rate U.S. Navy fleet, as dictated by Mahan’s security ideas.

On the domestic front, however, immediately deviating from McKinley’s policies, Roosevelt began professionalizing forestry and wildlife protection in both Interior and Agriculture. A battle royal for the future of the West had erupted, and he didn’t plan on letting his pro-conservationist side lose. “This immense idea (of conservation) Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation,” Robert La Follette of Wisconsin recalled of the months following McKinley’s assassination, “until the Nation heeded.”
⁷

Influenced by Pinchot, Roosevelt believed that the United States was in the Dark Ages when it came to proper scientific management of the reserves. In late 1901 showdowns between preservationists and developers over forest reserves had become common in the West. For example, a spur track had been laid from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a distance of sixty miles, slashing its way through forest. Besides increased tourism, eastern fortune seekers were pouring into the Grand Canyon region seeking minerals and timber rights. Other companies wanted to construct buildings at scenic sites. Plans were under way by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to erect the luxurious El Tovar Hotel on the canyon brink. Was the Grand Canyon going to be ruined? Roosevelt determined that forest rangers and wildlife protectors should be hired as a police force around the Grand Canyon to deal with the increased tourist, timber, and mining development. Not that Roosevelt was opposed to limited
wise
development.
⁸

In actuality, Roosevelt wanted more Americans to spend holidays in the West rather than waste time in Europe. What concerned him was that the U.S. government didn’t have enough army troops protecting, for example, California’s sequoias or Yellowstone’s petrified wood. Roosevelt hoped old-breed mountain men, husbandry experts, and Rough Rider-types could be employed in national parks and forest reserves as rangers. In the Sequoia National Park’s
Superintendent’s Annual Report of 1901
the term “park ranger” was used for the first time by the U.S. Army. Roosevelt liked the ring of it. According to the historian Charles R. Farabee Jr., in 1902 Roosevelt’s Interior Department created three classifications of rangers: Class A1 (deeply familiar with forestlands and able to survey and inventory) and Classes 2 and 3 (no complex requirements, “but they must be able-bodied, sober, and industrious men fully capable of comprehending and following instructions”).
⁹
Class A1 was paid ninety dollars per month; Class 2 got seventy-five dollars; Class 3 got sixty dollars.
¹⁰

Like a diligent ROTC recruiter, Roosevelt now went after one of
the ablest Class A1 westerners he knew—David E. Warford of Arizona, from the Troop B Rough Riders, who had taken two Spanish bullets in his thighs near Santiago—to watch over white-tailed deer and forestlands in the Kaibab Forest north of the Grand Canyon. To Roosevelt, Warford—who had returned to Arizona a war hero—was a “new prototype” of the forest ranger conservationist. Warford would protect the yellow pine groves of central-eastern Arizona in what is today the Apache, Coronado, and Tonto national forests. Because the nearly 4.15 million acres
*
of noncontiguous reserve lands had irregular boundaries—on a map the land looked like jigsaw pieces—it needed somebody who knew every swath of the entire Great Colorado Plateau like the back of his hand to protect the forests from exploitation. Such a vast territory needed a “ranger”—a term first popularized in America during the French and Indian War but appropriated by the Confederate Army during the Civil War. “You have been appointed a Forest Ranger,” Roosevelt wrote to Warford. “Now, I want to write to you very seriously to impress upon you that you have got to do your duty well, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of the honor of the regiment. I recommended you because under me you showed yourself gallant, efficient and obedient. You must continue to show these qualities in the government service exactly as you did in the regiment. You must let no consideration of any kind interfere with the performance of your duty. You are to protect the government’s property and the forests and to uphold the interests of the department in every way. Now, remember that I expect you to show yourself an official of far above the average type; and you are to stand or fall strictly on your merits.”

It was signed,
“Your old Colonel.”
¹¹

Bureaucratic confusion reigned supreme in late 1901 regarding the protection of national parks and western forest reserves. From 1886 to 1918, for example, Yellowstone, General Grant, Sequoia, and a couple of other national parks remained protected by the U.S. Army. Hence when Roosevelt became president the acting superintendent of Yellowstone was Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, known for his antipoaching zeal and hyperefficiency. Selected in 1902 as superintendent, a job he held for five years, Pitcher made great improvements in Yellowstone, establishing a fish hatchery, buffalo alfalfa fields, and trout bag limits in Yellowstone Lake. But owing to the Federal Reserve Act of 1891, the supervision of forest reserves adjacent to the park became the responsibility of the
Department of the Interior (not the army). Within Interior the reserves fell under the jurisdiction first of the General Land Office (GLO) from 1891 to 1901 and then, during Roosevelt’s administration, the Forestry Division. But—and herein lies one of the many confusions—the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also had a Bureau of Forestry. Interior and Agriculture divided the responsibilities of managing reserves. So in 1901 Yellowstone National Park, for example, was run by the U.S. Army, while the abutting Yellowstone Park Timber Land Reserve was overseen by the Secretary of the Interior. The United States desperately needed a streamlining of its natural resource policy. As President Roosevelt saw it, forest management and national greatness were one and the same.

What President Roosevelt recognized in the fall of 1901 was that, ironically, the key to making forest science work depended on Class A1 district rangers—men like Warford whom locals would respect as federal law enforcement officers. It was nearly worthless, Roosevelt believed, to appoint out-of-state Ivy Leaguers as rangers. Communities needed to respect the local ranger, who ideally would have a “shared heritage” with them. The new federal forestry rules and regulations had to be explained, because citizens in the West were accustomed to taking timber and foraging livestock at will. Limits had to be taught. The threatening “No Trespassing” needed to come from the mouth of a homeboy. One of the things Roosevelt liked about Warford, for example, was that he spoke Spanish, which allowed him to communicate with many locals in New Mexico and Arizona. Once this pillar of police ruggedness was in place, then the food scientists and biologists could come in as backup. Another innovation of Roosevelt’s was having student assistants—that is, Yale- or Biltmore-trained scientific forestry experts—spend time working side by side with the western-born rangers.
*
Roosevelt wanted to give the local men the “undivided responsibility” to oversee their respective forest reserve site.

Besides the Arizona reserves, Roosevelt turned to the Black Hills in South Dakota, where his old friend Seth Bullock, sheriff extraordinaire, had been employed as forest supervisor to protect the federal reserve as a result of Roosevelt’s lobbying as vice president. “As soon as I was appointed,” recalled Bullock, “Washington commenced to send a lot of
Dudes out here as Forest Rangers. I didn’t want them. I wanted Forest Rangers who could sleep out in the open with or without a blanket and put out a fire and catch a horse thief. I wrote the Colonel [Roosevelt] about it.”
¹²

Upon receiving Bullock’s letter, President Roosevelt instructed Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock to give Bullock a “free hand” in administering the 1,211,680-acre South Dakota reserve. The sixty-six-year-old Hitchcock wasn’t used to having a president run roughshod over him in such a brazen, unremitting fashion. An old-style southern diplomat from Mobile, Alabama, Hitchcock had been McKinley’s minister to Russia before accepting the secretaryship. He was a lineal descendant of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen.
¹³
A snappy dresser and a calm presence, Hitchcock epitomized Mark Twain’s belief that truly civilized men never rushed. Hitchcock dealt with everybody in formal niceties, allergic to conflict, gracious to the point of caricature. A low-grade conservationist himself, Hitchcock was deeply concerned that some of America’s richest timberlands had been recklessly destroyed and others were on the verge of destruction. Certainly Hitchcock understood that the combination of intensive industrial production, the application of science and technology to manufacturing, and the encouragement of land developers and urban growth was destroying natural habitats forever. Yet the optimistic Hitchcock knew that even burned-out forests could be reborn, eventually producing new yields. Nature could heal itself. For the most part Roosevelt and Hitchcock were in sync. Yet between 1901 and 1907 they feuded like obdurate brothers. Hitchcock resented the bullish way the president was going about things, acting like Cassandra, exaggerating the long-term societal dangers because America was consuming forests three times faster than they were being reproduced. Roosevelt and Hitchcock’s goals and vision concerning conservation had nearly identical implications for policy—where they differed was in the matter of
pace
. It was zoom versus incrementalism.