The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  When Roosevelt was elected vice president in 1900, Steel was a forty-six-year-old Republican diehard with unimpeachable conservationist credentials. No firm information exists about whether he knew anything of Roosevelt’s pro–national park convictions. He was a longtime bachelor known for weekend forays into vagabondage, devoted night and day to the cause of Cascades preservation, and the wheel of fortune was starting to turn his way. That February he had married Lydia Hatch, who was said to be the one and only love of his life. Besides having his wedding reported in the Portland press, Steel started receiving communitywide praise for his program to introduce rainbow trout into Crater Lake. Reports from southern Oregon indicated that his “planting” of rainbow trout had worked; the trout were flourishing, easily surviving the bitter-cold winters (skeptics had feared that this was impossible). Steel, in essence, had provided a welcome twist to wildlife reintroduction efforts, which usually were like those of the Boone and Crockett Club. For in the case of Crater Lake, there was no “re” to be concerned about. Recognizing that the clear waters were ideal for trout, he introduced them to a new habitat in the Cascade Mountains. Congratulatory letters came his way from anglers all over America.

  Ironically, Crater Lake’s fortunes took a turn for the better when President McKinley was assassinated. With Theodore Roosevelt as president, the chance that it might become a national park was increased tenfold. Over the years Steel had made many friends in the burgeoning conservation movement from coast to coast, mailing copies of The Mountains of Oregon to judges and legislators in the hope of teaching them about the pristine Cascades.16 Of all the valuable contacts Steel had cultivated, however, none outshone Gifford Pinchot. In 1896 Steel had an opportunity to take Muir and Pinchot on a camping excursion to Crater Lake. Although Muir was only moderately impressed, Pinchot was knocked out by the sparkling blue water glistening in the midday sun. As he wrote in his memoir Breaking New Ground, “Crater Lake seemed to me like a wonder of the world.”17

  Further bolstering Steel’s effort to create a national park was the fact that neighboring Washington state had won a campaign to have 14,411-foot Mount Rainier become a national park in 1899; the park was so large that it created its own weather system and sometimes received 1,000 inches of snow annually.18 Playing on the rivalry between the two Pacific Northwest states, Steel reminded Oregonians that Crater Lake was every bit as gorgeous as the peaks of the Tatoosh range. Whenever Steel’s sales pitch for Crater Lake was falling flat or a setback occurred, he knew Pinchot was available for encouragement. No sooner had Roosevelt delivered his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1901 than Steel solicited letters of endorsement from Muir, Pinchot, and others. Muir begged off—he was preoccupied with his own agenda in Yosemite—but Pinchot rallied to Steel’s side like a knight in shining armor. “You ask me why a national park should be established around Crater Lake,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on February 18, 1902, in a letter intended for public dissemination. “There are many reasons. In the first place, Crater Lake is one of the great natural wonders of this continent. Secondly, it is a famous resort for the people of Oregon and of other states, which can best be protected and managed in the form of a national park. Thirdly, since its chief value is for recreation and scenery and not for the production of timber, its use is distinctly that of a national park and not a forest reserve. Finally, in the present situation of affairs it could be more carefully guarded and protected as a park than as a reserve.”19

  By procuring this testimonial from Pinchot and using it as exhibit A when presenting the Crater Lake bill to Congress, Steel had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. Quite naturally Roosevelt would defer to Pinchot’s wisdom about the Oregon backcountry. Steel met a formidable roadblock—Speaker of the House David Henderson, a heavy-fisted politico from Iowa. Ticked off because Steel and Pinchot were foisting a national park on Congress even though T.R. had been president for only a few months, Henderson, representing the antiunion Midwest and western timber-mining interests, offered an adamant “no.” By dint of his intimidating seniority he blocked the bill from even being debated. As the first U.S. congressman from west of the Mississippi River to serve as House Speaker, Henderson was mistrustful of federal interference with the free enterprise system. Cranky for a midwesterner, Henderson, whose obstinacy could quickly turn to fury, had worried that Roosevelt had gone too far in pushing natural resource preservation in his First Annual Message to Congress. But at heart Henderson—who had been a valorous colonel in the Civil War and had lost a leg in 1863—was supportive of Roosevelt’s militarism.20 With a little arm-twisting by the new president, Henderson, bristling all the way, reluctantly capitulated. After all, in the context of picking and choosing fights Crater Lake hardly seemed worth crossing swords with the Roosevelt administration.

  It didn’t hurt that Roosevelt had backup support for the Crater Lake bill from Congressman John Lacey—also from Iowa—who worked mightily on getting Henderson to change his mind. Lacey had visited Oregon in 1887. He was immediately drawn to the Cascades, and he understood that the Pacific Northwest forests were the greatest in the world. Places like Mount Hood and Crater Lake, he knew at once, should be saved for posterity. The slow, sad death of the great trees as a result of wildfires sickened him. “The whole country was covered by a pall of smoke from the burning forests,” Lacey recalled to the Chicago Tribune. “This was more wicked than the destruction of our forests on the Atlantic only because the great woods of the Pacific are finer, and for the further reason that they are our last.”21

  Double-teamed by Roosevelt and Lacey, Henderson acquiesced and did an about-face, and the Senate passed HR 4393 on May 9. “You give me more thanks than my small share in getting the Crater Lake bill passed deserves, but I am sincerely glad it has got along so far,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on May 15. “There is no doubt, in my judgment, that the President will sign it.”22

  Although Pinchot wouldn’t lead the U.S. Forest Service for three more years, the impressive power he exerted in creating Crater Lake National Park was a prelude of grand conservation achievements to come. Not only did the utilitarian Pinchot enter the preservationist domain with Crater Lake, but he solidified his alliance with Steel. Mountaineers in arms, both men loathed the reckless way the General Land Office (GLO) of the U.S. Department of the Interior was dealing with the unexplored Cascade Mountains. The saving of Crater Lake was a marker in the conservationists’ struggle in the Pacific Northwest, an early indicator that the Roosevelt administration was going to play hardball against the shameful unregulated timbering. Just as important, Pinchot had found a “world wonder” for his boss to establish as America’s sixth national park, one which wasn’t mired in too much controversy. The word “wonder,” in fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was the term conservationists used in public discourse to save wilderness sites. A mere forest or lake might seem commonplace, but a “wonder” might bring much needed tourist dollars into local towns. And it worked! Using the U.S. Geological Survey as their base, the tag team of Pinchot and Steel tried to insert the words “deepest” and “wonder” into any public conversation about Crater Lake.

  When President Roosevelt signed the Crater Lake bill on May 22—setting aside 240 square miles—he was proud. America had its sixth national park, and its first in Oregon.* Crater Lake was saved for both “great beauty and scientific value.”23 Earlier that day Roosevelt had participated in a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery honoring the soldiers killed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War; he was one of 500 veterans present.24 The signing of the bill saving Crater Lake took only five or ten minutes of his busy schedule that afternoon; it was incidental. Still, it was a rewarding few minutes. A sentimentalist at heart, Roosevelt now knew what it must have felt like to be Ulysses S. Grant thirty years ago, creating Yellowstone. As a courtesy, Roosevelt had the signing pen shipped to Steel in Portland as a well-deserved souvenir. Applauding Roosevelt and the
U.S. Geological Survey for the first-rate report, the New York Times described Crater Lake as a natural wonder whose “grandeur” rivaled “anything of its kind in the world.”25

  II

  Inspired by the saving of Crater Lake, President Roosevelt looked for another natural “wonder” to designate as a national park. The whole notion of “scenic nationalism” was in vogue.26 During the 1880s, while living in the Badlands, Roosevelt had perhaps heard about a site in the Black Hills: a “hole that breaths cool air,” considered sacred by the Lakota people.27 It was known as Wind Cave, and the Lakota believed that a beautiful woman—the “buffalo woman”—had once floated out of it to give her people bison. Other tribes believed that a demon or dragon lived in its depths. Some Native Americans believed that the cave had magical powers, that it could predict weather. They weren’t completely delusional: the cave opening did serve as a sort of primitive barometer. When the weather was good, air would blow into the cave. However, when a storm approached the low air pressure caused higher pressure to swell inside the underground cavern, causing air to be forced out in a loud, dramatic fashion.28

  Even though Wind Cave is one of the longest underground mazes in the world (encompassing more than 130 miles of passages), when Jesse and Tom Bingham stumbled upon it while deer hunting in 1881 there was only one entrance: a twelve- by ten-inch “blowhole.”29 As legend has it, the air pouring out of the hole blew the Binghams’ cowboy hats off their heads, like a gust off Lake Michigan. Hoping that they had discovered a gold mine, the Binghams returned to Wind Cave the following day with curious friends, only to have their hats now sucked into the maw of the cave; the wind had shifted 180 degrees in less than twenty-four hours. The Binghams were afraid to explore the cave. Perhaps they would be attacked by bats or snakes. But Charlie Crary wasn’t hesitant. Boldly he climbed into the blowhole, as if he were Professor Lidenbrock in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. He unraveled a reel of twine so that he could find his way out, and he emerged from Wind Cave unscathed and almost stuttering with excitement. His mind was dazzled by the elaborate, delicate, honeycomb-patterned boxwork he had encountered, fragile crystals deposited around like glitter. In his historical study The National Park, Freeman Tilden matter-of-factly describes the cavernous rooms as “lacy compartments.”30

  Crary had seen one of the most amazing boxwork formations in the world. More than 300 million years old, Wind Cave is a subterranean wonderland of fractured limestone, crystal fins, and calcium deposits. Words cannot do justice to the diverse geological formations and underground lakes. A whole new geological vocabulary, in fact, was created to describe various types of boxwork: for example, starburst, nail quartz, gypsum flowers, and helictite bushes. With a constant temperature of fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit, the cave network was a perfect retreat from the Black Hills’ cold winters and hot summers. Some of the passageways are wet and slippery. An astounding 95 percent of the world’s mineral boxwork was found in the cave. Yet much of it was fragile, snapping off when a spelunker’s head bumped it or a hand grasped it.

  Between 1881 and 1890 South Dakotans hoped that gold could be grubsaked in Wind Cave, as it had been in the Black Hills. Miners tried, but with no luck. Instead, the cave complex started attracting explorers and curiosity seekers. Periodically the local Custer Chronicle called Wind Cave a “wonder,” and the Hot Spring Star added the mystical note that “no bottom” had been found. It was frustrating for locals to sit on a great mineralogical assemblage and not be able to turn a profit. Alvin McDonald of the South Dakota Mining Company considered finding the cave’s bottom a challenge akin to Robert E. Peary’s going to the North Pole. During 1890–1893 McDonald worked underground, keeping a detailed diary about various caverns and rock formations. He also did some drilling. Cave passages were enlarged for tourists and wooden staircases were erected. McDonald emerged with plenty of artifacts and reams of descriptive prose about stalactites worthy of Verne—he named rooms and mapped trails like an explorer in a work of science fiction—but he was forced to give up the “idea of finding the end of Wind Cave.”31

  When Roosevelt became president, the effort to learn more about Wind Cave was put on a fast track. Homesteading was banned anywhere surrounding the cave’s entrance. On April 4, 1902, the GLO commissioned a surveyor in Rapid City to map as many rooms and passageways as he could. Many locals, however, considered this a fool’s errand. The U.S. government was also keenly interested in determining the precise amount of minerals available for possible mining. Lawsuits over who owned Wind Cave were put aside as the U.S. government tried to inventory and map the labyrinthine caverns.

  As the GLO went about its work, Senator Robert J. Gamble of South Dakota—a Republican—introduced a congressional bill declaring Wind Cave America’s “second wonder” (after Yellowstone National Park).32 Worried that vandals and thieves were stealing crystals and rocks, Gamble claimed that the U.S. Geological Survey and Theodore Roosevelt were on his side in creating the new national park. The New York Times aided the cause by publishing remarks by an unidentified U.S. government employee who said that Wind Cave was a “wonderful evolution of nature” exuding “grandeur, grotesqueness and beauty.” The Times itself said that giving Crater Lake the status of a national park was a wise move and recommended the same for Wind Cave. “There are something like 3,000 chambers and 100 miles of passages,” the Times enthused, “containing many curious features and formations.”33

  Once again Congressman Lacey came into the act, like a bird going after split grain or thistle seed, backing Senator Gamble’s action. Lacey’s friends worried that he was fatigued by the legislative struggle; he would arrive at his congressional office at six AM and not leave until nine PM. When he sponsored the bill in Congress in June 1902, fresh from his success with Crater Lake, Lacey argued that Wind Cave had to be a national park in order to stop vandals from destroying it. Reportedly, he said, boxwork thieves were out of control. The same grim fate was befalling the Petrified Forest of Arizona and the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. And there was another component to Gamble and Lacey’s argument. For meteorological reasons alone, they said, Wind Cave needed to be saved and maybe someday bottled up to furnish electrical power. (More than 1 million cubic feet of air was emitted or taken in every hour at the blowhole entrance.)

  When both the House and the Senate approved bills to establish America’s seventh national park, Roosevelt was gleeful. On January 9, 1903, without ceremony, he reserved 10,522 acres in western South Dakota to become Wind Cave National Park (eventually it would be enlarged to 28,295 acres). Although it is doubtful that Roosevelt realized this at the time, in addition to the boxwork formations he saved a fine example of mixed-grass prairie, one to which, in coming years, the Bronx Zoo bison would be reintroduced. Wind Cave National Park also became a prime bird-watching location, especially for enthusiasts seeking for the uninhibited song of western tanagers and lazuli buntings. Hunting and fishing were prohibited in the park, and no ponderosa pines could be chopped down for firewood. Rule Number 1 of the General Regulations for Wind Cave was that removal of formations was forbidden and nobody could ever again enter the cave without the approval of the U.S. government. The posted notices read: “All Persons Are Liable to Prosecution.”

  Wind Cave has proved to be the “wonder” Senator Gamble called it. The mapping and exploring of its passageways continued unabated. When Wind Cave National Park celebrated its centennial in 2003 only an estimated 5 percent of the cave had been explored. Visitors were routinely dumbstruck by its size and complexity. Like the ocean floor it once was, the cave complex remained an unfathomable mystery for future generations to take up. The Carnegie Institution was founded in 1902, and there was some hope that grants could be given to scientists to solve the cave’s mysteries. With Roosevelt’s new national parks—Wind Cave and Crater Lake—a fait accompli, under the safekeeping of the Interior Department and U.S. Army, two important links in the chain of American “wond
ers” had been strengthened. And President Roosevelt, as far as western sites were concerned, was just getting started.

  III

  Contributing to Roosevelt’s promotion of the American West was the publication of his friend Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains in 1902. Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt,* it told the story of a cowboy, a natural aristocrat, who was involved in Wyoming’s Johnson County War in the 1890s. Wister’s sophisticated use of cowboy imagery and the cowboy culture had echoes of Roosevelt’s own days in North Dakota. Wister, a Harvard graduate (summa cum laude) whose short stories in Harper’s were extremely popular, had hit the mother lode with this action-packed novel, where right (even vigilante justice) prevailed over wrong. The Virginian became an overnight sensation; more than 200,000 copies were sold in 1902–1903 alone. While it lacked the humor of Mark Twain and the sophistication of Henry James, The Virginian was nevertheless a novel of considerable distinction. (Unfortunately, it is usually remembered only for the Zane Grey pulp western phenomenon it inspired.)

  President Roosevelt had proofread part of The Virginian before publication, wanting Wister to tone down the sadistic violence and gratuitous blood and gore. Roosevelt insisted that the protagonist—the heroic cowboy, who is never given a name—should become the arbiter of western culture and morals, a citadel of manly virtue. Amazingly, Wister agreed to make the changes. Like Roosevelt, Wister had traveled all over the West—in Arizona, California, and Washington, always going back to Wyoming—to study cowboys closely. Often depressed, failing to find a producer for his opera about Montezuma, Wister clung to his notebooks, which were filled with reportorial details of his ranch days north of Laramie. In The Virginian, Wister, with Roosevelt cheering him on, apotheosized the cowboy as the American hero, a Natty Bumppo writ large, redefining western mythology. Wister was in Wyoming during 1885, which the historian Walter Prescott Webb deemed the halcyon year of the “cattle kingdom”—and he masterfully captured the raw essence of that era with a realist’s eye for accuracy.