The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Bookstores throughout the United States set up displays of The Deer Family, complete with handsome illustrations of sixty-seven-inch Alaskan moose antlers and Wyoming antelope grazing on the open range. And although Van Dyke, Elliot, and Stone were coauthors, the dark green cloth cover read only: “The Deer Family by Theodore Roosevelt and Others.” In fact, President Roosevelt had written only one-third of the book, but his lively chapters were far and away the most popular. Upon opening The Deer Family the reader immediately encountered a brief “Foreword” by Theodore Roosevelt—written in June 1901, when he was vice president. “This volume is meant for the lover of the wild, free, lonely life of the wilderness,” he wrote, “and of the hardy pastimes known to the sojourners therein.”55

  Roosevelt’s chapters in The Deer Family are beautifully written, combining a nearly childlike rapture for hunting with an adult conservationist philosophy.56 Not only did the president offer compelling scientific details of the exact bifurcations of a mule deer’s main prongs or the pugnacity of elk herds; he made his field observations discernible to the average American. When writing about these mammals the president insisted on biological precision, seamlessly weaving into his narrative a steady succession of scientific facts, big-bored .505 Gibbs flashbacks, and earthy descriptions of Western scenery. In The Deer Family were echoes of the naturalist prose that Roosevelt had first showed off in The Wilderness Hunter, to the hearty approval of John Burroughs. For example, here is Roosevelt on the North Dakota prairie in The Deer Family:

  It was beautiful to see the red dawn quicken from the first glimmering gray in the east, and then to watch the crimson bars glint on the tops of the fantastically shaped barren hills when the sun flamed, burning and splendid, above the horizon. In the early morning the level beams brought out into sharp relief the strangely carved and channeled cliff walls of the buttes. There was rarely a cloud to dim the serene blue of the sky.57

  Nostalgic passages like these, in which the writer is hungering for open spaces, made The Deer Family a minor best-seller for three or four weeks. Literally every review the book received was respectful. From the perspective of time, 100 years after it was written, The Deer Family—even more than The Wilderness Hunter—may be the most important of all Roosevelt’s books for our understanding of his evolved views on conservation. No longer does Roosevelt regale readers with his derring-do across the immensity of the continent. Nor does he champion mountain men in nativistic, white-man’s-burden fashion. In The Deer Family, Roosevelt—speaking as a U.S. president—became an environmental crusader and scold. Derision toward unsportsmanlike hunters was more amplified than in his previous outdoor books and essays. “The big game hunter should be a field naturalist,” Roosevelt wrote. “If possible, he should be an adept with the camera; and hunting with the camera will tax his skill far more than hunting with the rifle, while the results in the long run give much greater satisfaction. Wherever possible he should keep a note-book, and should carefully study and record the habits of the wild creatures, especially when in some remote regions to which trained scientific observers but rarely have access. If we could only produce a hunter who would do for American big game what John Burroughs has done for the smaller wild life of hedgerow and orchard, farm and garden and grove, we should indeed be fortunate.”58

  He urged all sportsmen to immediately become naturalists, keeping detailed notes about wildflowers, prairie grasses, and swamp fronds. Even if the would-be hunter didn’t “possess the literary faculty and powers of trained observation necessary for such a task,” Roosevelt instructed, he could nevertheless “do his part toward adding to our information by keeping careful notes of all important facts which he comes across.” Attempting to create North American field guides from the ground up—something akin to the later regional WPA guides—Roosevelt wanted everyday citizens to partake in inventorying the nation’s natural resources. “Such note-books would show the changed habits of game with the changed seasons, their abundance at different times and different places, the melancholy data of their disappearance, the pleasanter facts as to their change of habits which enable them to continue to exist in the land, and, in short, all their traits,” he wrote. “A real and lasting service would thereby be rendered, not only to naturalists, but to all who care for nature.”59

  Unbeknownst to Roosevelt’s opponents in spring 1902, his desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had already become a rubber-stamp center for any serious-minded conservationist or natural resources specialist with an honest agenda. Already he was thinking of how best, with a modicum of good sense, to repopulate a federal forest reserve with his Bronx Zoo bison. Regularly, he was staying in touch with William T. Hornaday. Together they also had high hopes of someday creating a national elk reserve near Yellowstone. “Surely all men who care for nature, no less than all men who care for big game hunting, should combine to try to see that not merely the states but the Federal authorities make every effort, and are given every power, to prevent the extermination of this stately and beautiful animal,” he wrote of elk. “The lordliest of the deer kind in the entire world.”60

  Although this is a chicken-or-egg situation, the Bronx Zoo had made a special effort to advertise its elk, mule deer, caribou, and moose as all being part of what it called “The Deer Family.” Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm of Hornaday and Roosevelt, the zoo was failing in its efforts to breed moose and caribou in captivity. The sultriness of New York City in summer was, as Hornaday later noted, “decidedly inimical” to the project. “This densely humid and extremely saline atmosphere is about as deadly to the black-tail, caribou and moose as it is to the Eskimos,” Hornaday wrote, “and thus far we have found it an absolute impossibility to maintain satisfactory herds of those species in the ranges available for them.”61 It wasn’t enough to breed buffalo or elk in captivity. Big game refuges were needed in their western habitats. Worried about a band of dwarf elks in Kern County, California, Roosevelt had the Biological Survey move them to Sequoia National Park, where the Department of the Interior assumed the responsibility for their case.

  Furthermore, on January 7, 1902, the executive committee of the Boone and Crockett Club issued its final report on how to create wildlife refuges. Washington insiders called it the Roosevelt Report (knowing full well that the president would adopt the club’s recommendations). At the core of the final report was the belief that U.S. game reserves should be established inside national forests. For example, President McKinley had established Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains Forest Reserve in 1901 to protect natural resources. The Boone and Crockett Club’s report suggested that part of this forest could become a buffalo or deer preserve. Because the U.S. government already owned the Wichitas, it had the authority to fence off thousands of acres to save vanishing wildlife. The report also recommended that the economic needs of locals always be factored in when policy recommendation were made.62

  Prudence, of course, was the tenor of President Roosevelt’s directives regarding forest preservation and wildlife protection. As an accidental president, coming into power because of McKinley’s death, Roosevelt wanted to avoid unnecessarily kicking over a hornets’ nest. Senators from Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Utah, and Colorado already had their long knives out for him. He had to move with caution concerning the regulation of game animals and birds in any new forest reserve he created, to avoid an outcry of states’ rights sentiment. His strategy was to start slowly with just one or two forest reserves, where the political opposition would be next to nil. Then, if he was elected in his own right in 1904, depending on the magnitude of his electoral mandate, he would act more boldly and decisively, taking head-on what he called in An Autobiography the “great special interests” of the Far West that were destroying nature “at the expense of the public interest.”63 As of 1902 the United States had approximately 43 million acres of forest reserves at its disposal. Roosevelt, with Pinchot at his side, wanted the Forestry Bureau to quickly double or triple that amount. From a long-term planning per
spective Pinchot hoped to persuade Roosevelt to transfer the Division of Forestry from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture (he accomplished this goal with the Transfer Act of 1905).

  IV

  Throughout the first six months of 1902 the president fought for the federal government’s “conquest” of the arid lands of the West. Increasingly this involved irrigation. He believed instinctively that the huge undertaking of constructing large dams and reservoirs was an obligation of the federal government because its scope was beyond the capacity of private enterprise.64 Wanting to build on John Wesley Powell’s recommendations for the Geographical Survey, Roosevelt fought tooth and nail for land reclamation through hydrological advancements such as dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts as if he himself were the editor of Irrigation Age. (Ironically, Powell actually believed in decentralized irrigation, not huge, federally run Rooseveltian dams.) Rivers could be redirected, Roosevelt believed, so as to build sustainable western communities in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, and New Mexico. Although he had promoted saving bird habitats, Roosevelt seemed totally ignorant of the potential downside of advanced hydraulic drilling on the desert ecosystem. Filled with good intentions, the shortsighted Roosevelt was, sadly, unable to envision how potentially harmful the dams were to the western environment he so loved.65 Yet the goal of turning arid land to fields of green was, from a human development perspective, ennobling.

  Of course, Roosevelt wasn’t working in a vacuum. Many western politicians approved of selling public lands in sixteen western states to fund ambitious irrigation projects. Every politician west of Kansas City or Bismarck, it seemed, was floating a how-to-do-it irrigation bill. The idea was that once settlers prospered on the irrigated western lands, they would help repay the cost of the hydraulic projects by contributing to a revolving fund (something like the later Social Security system). Roosevelt and his followers believed these large-scale irrigation projects would dramatically transform the western economy, landscape, and farming. The days of decaying lumber would be over. As Roosevelt had stated in his First Annual Message, the federal government needed to create “great storage works” for water. Wise irrigation laws should be adopted in the West—laws that issued clear titles for water rights.66

  Doing all this reclamation legwork for Roosevelt were Pinchot and the young hydraulic specialist Frederick H. Newell, who in June 1902 became chief engineer under Charles D. Walcott, then director of the U.S. Geological Survey. “Pinchot and Newell actually did the job,” the president joked, “that I and the others talked about.”67 (Later, in 1907, when Walcott left the Reclamation Service to head the Smithsonian Institution, Roosevelt had Newell serve as director of a new Department of Interior Reclamation bureau.) In his unpublished memoir, written in 1927, Newell explained his commitment to Rooseveltian conservation, inspired, in part, by growing up in the lumber town of Bradford, Pennsylvania. With an aptitude for geology, Newell attended MIT, graduating in 1885 with a degree in mining engineering.

  In 1888 he started working for John Wesley Powell and became Powell’s right-hand man. A regular at the Cosmos Club, Newell was invited, along with Pinchot, to become a member of the “Great Basin Lunch Mess,” where intense discussions were held on western rivers, forestlands, geographical surveying, and soil conservation. As an author Newell was almost as prolific as Roosevelt—only there was no romance of nature in Newell’s utilitarian volumes, such as Oil Well Drillers (1888), Agriculture by Irrigation (1894), Hydrography of the Arid Regions (1891), and The Public Lands of the United States (1895). When modern-day environmental activists attack Pinchot, they often attack his sidekick Newell as well. Whereas Pinchot enjoyed hiking, Newell found pleasure in dynamiting. Unlike others in Roosevelt’s inner circle, Newell never wrote about the inherent beauty of nature. There was the kind of vacancy in Newell’s eyes, that a novelist such as Melville might have described as soullessness. As an entrepreneurial engineer he solely wanted to make money off the land. He had an inability to say no to western politicians. Newell initiated canals and dam projects, at such a rapid pace, that many failed owing to untested soils and unfeasible transportation. Only on his deathbed did he realize that federal reclamation—to which he had devoted his entire life—was unnecessary and even seriously damaging to much of the arid West.68

  On June 17, 1902, the Fifty-Seventh Congress created the Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation) by approving the Newlands Act (named for Francis Newlands, a Democratic representative from Nevada). Immediately the act was hailed as a triumph for the Roosevelt administration. “I regard the irrigation business as one of the great features of my administration and take a keen personal pride in having been instrumental in bringing it about,” Roosevelt wrote to Hitchcock that very day. “I want it conducted, so far as in our power to conduct it, on the highest plane not only of purpose but efficiency. I desire it to be kept under the control of the Geological Survey of which Mr. [Charles Doolittle] Walcott is the Director and Mr. [Frederick Haynes] Newell the Hydrographer.” 69

  The Newlands Act was a revolution for the American West. An overenthusiastic Roosevelt wanted to start with a few large dam projects divided among a few states. Overnight, however, Congressman Newlands was getting great press and Roosevelt grew envious. Why was everybody giving that Democratic fool Newlands all the credit? Roosevelt wanted the western Republicans—for example, William Morris Stewart of Nevada and Francis Emroy Warren of Wyoming—to have the credit for the historic irrigation act. Fuming to Secretary of Agriculture Wilson, Roosevelt threatened to attack Newlands’s reputation through back channels.70 To Roosevelt, Newlands was a shameless grandstander who didn’t deserve to have an important act named after him. Truth be told, as the historian Donald Worster points out in Rivers of Empire, neither Roosevelt nor Newlands was very instrumental in the federalization of western water issues; they were both, in essence, latecomers. Stubbornly, Roosevelt nevertheless insisted in both writings and public speeches that the landmark western irrigation measures should be called the Reclamation Act, not the Newlands Act. (However, at Pinchot’s insistence he does toss Newlands a bone in An Autobiography.71)

  Why did President Roosevelt throw himself wholeheartedly into the drama of the Newlands Act? Certainly, Roosevelt saw himself as a man of the American West. Even though his views on protecting forests had made him vehement enemies in the region, he was (to his mind) the first western president in American history. (This didn’t mean, however, that he abandoned the establishment privileges provided by his aristocratic New York upbringing.) Owing to the dispiriting brouhaha over Booker T. Washington, Roosevelt’s name had become a dirty word in the Deep South. With his astute political antennae, Roosevelt knew he needed western support to succeed in national politics. During 1902, with reclamation being debated by the House Committee on Irrigation of the Arid Lands, Roosevelt didn’t want to be sidelined.

  To Roosevelt, the West was the best hope for America. He rightly foresaw California, Oregon, and Washington as new Edens. Nobody believed more strongly than Roosevelt that the West had to be won; it offered landscapes of incalculable value. If the western citizens didn’t have water, he worried, they would perish, and their cities would become ghost towns. But dams and reservoirs (built cautiously, without pork-barrel waste) would allow the West to be settled by tens of millions of people. The American cities of tomorrow were Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Sacramento. The federal reclamation of the West, to Roosevelt, was the next natural step toward conquest. If reservoirs were created, the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle would be humming with jobs. With western populations swelling, Americans, he believed, would turn to the fabled China trade, using Hawaii and the Philippines as stepping-stones. And, finally, as Roosevelt envisioned it, with a proper reservoir system places like the Willamette Valley in Oregon and the San Joaquin Valley in California could become the most productive agricultural lands in the world; of course, he wasn’t wrong about this. “The forest and water problems,�
�� Roosevelt insisted, “are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States.”72

  By 1904 six reclamation projects were up and running. Even critics of the Newlands Act had to admit that Roosevelt had a genius for cutting red tape. Every year exciting projects were launched. For example, the linking of Colorado’s wild Gunnison River to the Uncompahgre Valley—a Herculean feat that required constructing a channel ten feet high, ten feet wide, and five miles long by blasting through mountain rock. In Arizona the Salt River was impounded by the 360-foot-high Roosevelt Dam, to create one of the world’s largest artificial bodies of water. Such reclamation projects led to agricultural booms in fruits, dates, sugar beets, alfalfa, on and on. More than 3 million acres of the West were cultivated under Roosevelt’s reclamation programs. Culverts, bridges, and canals were all engineered, at great expense. “The Roosevelt-Pinchot-Newell vision of millions of desert acres in bloom,” the historian Paul Russell Cutright wrote, “was well on its way to reality.”73

  Serious books have been written on the Newlands Act—and this is not the place to do them all justice. It’s safe to say, however, that unlike the western agricultural boom, the studies with an eye on the environment don’t have a happy ending. The grand irrigation projects—Panama Canals on a reduced scale—destroyed many natural wonders. On the other hand, the engineering done by the Reclamation Service was impressive in both scope and innovation, overcoming mind-boggling obstacles. While Roosevelt had sympathy for western farmers and ranchers worried about drought and rural poverty, one suspects an additional motivation behind his cheerleading for the Newlands Act: it smacked of American triumphalism. To Roosevelt the West—particularly the dry mountain air of the Rockies and the warm climate of California and the Southwest—was a cure for America’s industrial ills. Health-seekers by the trainload were moving to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, and San Diego, and he knew why.74