In the old town of Albuquerque Roosevelt, with Governor Miguel Otero at his side, inquired about the various southwest Indian ruins in the territory that Congressman Lacey had been pestering him to preserve, such as Chaco Canyon and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The tireless Hewett, in a series of fine articles, had proposed establishing national cultural history parks in the Southwest. Hewett warned that vandals were looting pottery and old cooking utensils from the sites, sometimes using dynamite to blow holes in archaic dwellings. Without federal protection soon, there would be nothing left of these antiquities and their sites. In Utah, reports were coming out about petroglyphs 4,000 years old.74 Hewett, whose nickname in archaeological circles was “El Torro,” had legions of friends—and enemies. Roosevelt was squarely in the camp of his friends. Even though Hewett was disliked by governors, ranchers, and landowners in New Mexico, Roosevelt saw him as a territorial treasure in his own right. All of Roosevelt’s communication with Hewett was through Lacey. Generally speaking, Roosevelt supported saving all the prehistoric ruins in the Southwest as quickly as possible.
New Mexico’s current motto, “Land of Enchantment,” is not its first. An earlier motto was “The Land of Sunshine,” which Roosevelt found appealing and true.75 The mild, dry weather of New Mexico served as a balm. Little girls dressed in wedding-dress white made sweet appeals to Roosevelt for New Mexico’s statehood, singing patriotic ballads for his pleasure. All the president could do was beam. He gave a spectacular speech in the Old Town followed by luminaries at sunset around the plaza casting everything in a golden glow.
Then, leaving Albuquerque at dusk, the Pacific Coast Special headed for the Grand Canyon. A quick stopover was made in the Painted Desert during the early morning. Roosevelt had time for nothing more than a few inhales and a surveyor-like scan of the flatness. Congressman Lacey had been telling Roosevelt about the Petrified Forest of Arizona and the president now got a feel for the topography under the entrancing moonlight. (A few years later Muir would come to the Petrified Forest to study fossils and draw up a map for upholding the area as a national park.) Arriving in Flagstaff at nine o’clock on the morning of May 6, waking up to the light of the sun, Roosevelt felt well rested. Surrounding him were Merriam’s San Francisco Peaks (where Merriam, as head of the Biological Survey, had first discovered this stratification of life zone in 1898). In Flagstaff, the world was full of geological possibilities. Roosevelt had clearly left the hysteria of national politics back in Washington, D.C., 1,900 miles away. He felt isolated and happy. Glory to the West! Glory to John Wesley Powell! Glory to the Arizona Territory! Glory to the Grand Canyon, which at long last he was going to see! Roosevelt was in a glorious frame of mind.
Roosevelt standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with Governor Brodie of the Arizona Territory.
T.R. standing at the Grand Canyon. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)
V
The president’s arrival at the Grand Canyon (or the Big Ditch, as locals called it) on the morning of May 6 would, in retrospect, become one of the greatest days in environmental history. The Grand Canyon seemed as if it had been born of a cataclysm, with no eyewitnesses or reliable records. Amaranth in color, with a weird purple-orange glow, it also seemed cosmic, full of yearnings and teachings. In A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open Roosevelt called the Grand Canyon “the most wonderful scenery in the world.” He also declared that “to all else that is strange and beautiful in nature the Canyon stands as Karnak and Baalbec, seen by moonlight, stand to all other ruined temples and palaces of the bygone ages.” 76
Many Rough Riders were there that May to stand and gaze at the canyon with him. David Warford was among them.77 It is not hyperbole to say that Roosevelt’s jaw dropped in disbelief. The geologist Clarence Dutton—whose Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District Roosevelt had recently read—called this dynamic chasm of the earth’s surface “a great innovation in modern ideas of scenery,” adding that “its full appreciation is a special culture, requiring time, patience, and long familiarity for its consummation.”78 Roosevelt now understood what Dutton meant. He had long suspected that the Grand Canyon was the premier natural wonder in America, and now his hunch had been confirmed. He was dying to learn more of its geological secrets. Staring over the ledge of the Grand Canyon made the heart stop at the immensity of it all.
What disturbed Roosevelt, however, was that the Arizona territory was debating whether to preserve the canyon or mine it for zinc, copper, asbestos, etc. Preservation in this case was so obvious that even engaging in debate seemed almost criminal. To Roosevelt, the Grand Canyon was beyond debate by the locals: it must become the exclusive property of the United States to be saved for future generations. Roosevelt immediately resolved to make it a national park following the 1904 election. Thereafter, only horse trails would be allowed. “In a few places the forest is dense,” Roosevelt wrote, “[but] in most places it is sufficiently open to allow a mountain-horse to twist in and out among the tree trunks at a smart canter.”79
Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Grand Canyon was uncompromising: he flat-out refused to let corporate avarice or citizens’ ineptitude desecrate the greatest American treasure. He’d go through all the proper motions of getting Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park, and if it refused, an executive order would prevail. Roosevelt vowed to make sure that Arizona’s developers never drilled an inch of the Grand Canyon. He hoped his presidential visit would start a widespread grassroots movement to preserve it all—every damn acre in the 1,904 square miles—for perpetuity. Public education in Arizona had to be initiated at once. Too many Arizonans simply looked at the Grand Canyon, Roosevelt scolded, instead of living within its geological essence. The Rough Riders who greeted Roosevelt—by and large the most popular public figures in Arizona—were his first line of preservationist defense. They would ride over any ridge for their beloved colonel. Now, in a public forum, Roosevelt suddenly found himself asking them to crusade with him again, this time on behalf of preserving the magnificent Grand Canyon, which developers denigrated as useless, like Death Valley.
“I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it,” Roosevelt, at the rim, urged the crowd of Arizonans. “In your own interest and the interest of all the country keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you won’t have a building of any kind to mar the grandeur and sublimity of the cañon. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children and your children’s children and all who come after you as one of the great sights for Americans to see.”80
This speech, for which all the leading Arizonan politicians were in the audience, marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s ceaseless determination to save the canyon from destruction. Overawed by its immensity, enjoying even the ground squirrels running across the naked rock, Roosevelt was in rapture. There is something about the Grand Canyon’s power that makes one consider immortality. It was grander than all the music Roosevelt had heard; it was finer than all the Transcendental poetry he had read. John Burroughs had written in Locusts and Wild Honey about the gospel of the ledge, which was nothing less than “eternity” Roosevelt now understood what Oom John had meant.81 To Roosevelt’s mind this ledge was a no-growth zone. If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president, his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents. Middle Granite Gorge, the Redwall Cliffs of Havasu Falls, Kaibab Plateau, Marble Canyon, Mount Trumball—all topographically part of what would become the Grand Canyon National Park—became treasured places that miners or loggers would never lay to waste, thanks to Roosevelt’s strenuous advocacy. Even industrial activity anywhere near the Grand Canyon wasn’t acceptable to Roosevelt. If Carlyle was correct in saying that all history is forged by the deeds of great men, then Roosevelt earned his place in the American pantheon by simply refusing to let commercial interests desecrate the Grand Canyon.
Clearly, to Roose
velt the Grand Canyon was more than a weather-worn chasm or scarred ledge cutting deep into a mountainous region. It was one the world’s most spectacular examples of the power of erosion. Time was on display at the canyon as nowhere else. At the comfortable El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim, Roosevelt—seeing the Grand Canyon as a symbol of unifying nationalism after the Civil War—told a reporter for the New York Sun that it was one of the “great sights every American should see.”82 Once again, the president sounded like a Baedeker guide to the West. Instead of considering the canyon as just a singular natural wonder (like Crater Lake or Wind Cave), he saw it as an irreplaceable part of the Colorado Plateau landscape, which covered approximately 13,000 square miles in northern Arizona, western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and eastern Utah. At meetings of the Boone and Crockett Club he used to insist that Yellowstone was the finest geological site in America, but now he knew better. Taken as a whole, the Colorado Plateau included the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Glen Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, the Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Arches, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, San Francisco Peaks, Oak Great Canyon, and dozens of other sedimentary attractions. What a stunning terrain! What a watershed! Although Roosevelt had extensive experiences in the Dakota Badlands moonscape, the Colorado Plateau was beyond anything he’d ever fathomed.83
The plant life around the Grand Canyon also greatly interested Roosevelt, despite his weakness in the realm of southwestern botany. He could identify only 100 or so of the 1,500 species of plants found around the canyon’s rim. He could, however, name most of the 300 types of birds that inhabited the area. The sharp-skinned hawk flying above the South Rim he knew would be headed to Central America come fall, and the broad-tailed hummingbirds that whirred about the Hotel Tovar had arrived because the persimmons had started to bloom. The Townsend’s solitaires and Clark’s nutcrackers simply did not migrate: they changed elevations as the weather changed.84 He didn’t have to be William Rand or Andrew McNally to know that the abrasive Colorado River didn’t start or end in the Grand Canyon. But an impressive 277 twisting miles of the Colorado coursed through the Grand Canyon; it was considered the most exhilarating whitewater run in the American West. Peering down at the immense canyon floor, Roosevelt understood that a working naturalist would try to comprehend the ecosystem from the bottom up. Unfortunately, as a president on the run, he didn’t have the time for a careful scientific approach. But the Grand Canyon was the vortex of America’s four great deserts—Great Basin, Sonoran, Mojave, and Chihuahuan—and this explained why dozens of cactus species, all amazingly adaptable, many still without names, appeared all around him on the rim. And he vowed to return to the Grand Canyon with his sons.
Insisting on seeing the sun set from the Grand Canyon’s north rim, the warm sky ablaze with ragged bands of orange, pink, and purple, Roosevelt leaned over the ledge to soak in the drama. His train didn’t leave for Barstow until six o’clock that evening, when the dusk would have thickened. Night comes to northern Arizona fast, as if someone were blowing out a candle. Back at the White House twenty-eight days later, he kicked himself for not having allowed two or three free days to explore the canyon. At the very least, he wished Oom John had been at his side during his unforgettable afternoon there. They could have philosophized about ledges. What was becoming clear from the looping 14,000-mile railroad journey was that the beauty of the American West—the real West—once again had Roosevelt spellbound. From the Grand Canyon onward to Los Angeles, all of Roosevelt’s speeches promoted, with intense vitality, the holy trinity of irrigation, forestry, and preservation.
VI
Roosevelt was immediately mesmerized by the high, dry light and yellowish shadows of southern California’s deserts, mountains, valleys, forests, and ocean. No wonder so many people were seeking out its charms. Aridity was a problem for California, so the more forest reserves the state had, the better off it would be. After Roosevelt crossed the Mojave, his pulse quickened as his train approached the San Bernardino Valley. A skirting of timber could be seen in all directions. In his speeches, he became blunt and outspoken about keeping paradise intact. Wherever Roosevelt went in southern California that May, his popularity with children was unprecedented for a politician—they adored him. Too young to remember Lincoln or the generals of the Grand Army of the Republic, boys aged five to fifteen had adopted President Roosevelt as their generation’s George Washington. They knew nothing of Yorktown or Chancellorsville but everything about the gallantry at Kettle Hill. They were in awe of their top-hatted hero, who shouted “Dee-lighted” and “Bully!” from platforms with a theatrical roar, as if he were giving the Rough Riders the order to “Charrrge!”
Riverside. Pomona. Claremont. Pasadena. Los Angeles. Strangers came up to Roosevelt offering their goodwill. Carrying himself straight as a ramrod, the president enjoyed being a moral exemplar—he was the heir of Lincoln and Emerson with a dash of Boone for good measure. Someday historians, he knew, would tell hundreds of stories about his frenetic time in southern California, so he leaned into his own character even more extravagantly than usual. In city after city he was greeted like an American immortal, never to be laid low. On soapbox after soapbox he whipped up Californian onlookers with fine Bryanesque oratory. They could almost burn calories just watching his body language. No American president had ever expressed America’s identity in such a flamboyant, kinetic way. Whether he was lunching at the Westminster Hotel or participating in the annual Fiesta de las Flores, Roosevelt was in love with southern California, particularly the San Gabriel Mountains, which spilled in all directions. Somehow the sky over the 165,000 square miles of California seemed to dance differently from the sky in the east, Roosevelt thought, showcasing shades of blue, purple, red, and gray he’d never known before in his brief acquaintance with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona.85
“I am glad, indeed, to have the chance to visit this wonderful and beautiful State,” he told a crowd of 10,000 in front of the Hotel Casa Loma in Redlands. “But for the country itself, though I had been told so much of its beauty and its wonders, I had never realized or could not realize in advance all I have seen. Coming down over the mountain, I was impressed with the thought more and more of what can be done with the wise use of water and forests of this State. The people have grown to realize that it is indispensable to the future of the country to conserve, properly to use, the water and preserve the great mountain forests…. I think our citizens are realizing more and more that we want to perpetuate the things both of use and beauty. Beauty surely has its place, and you want to make this State more than it even now is—the garden spot of the continent.”86
Such rapturous talk about California continued as Roosevelt headed north along the Pacific coast with the powerful Transverse and Santa Lucia ranges looming on the eastward side of the tracks. Ventura. Montecito. Santa Barbara. San Luis Obispo. To promote the Santa Inez and Pile Mountain forest reserves, Roosevelt asked that the U.S. government rangers serve as his special guard. This was a smart, visual way to help locals understand that rangers were akin to the police. According to the New York Times Roosevelt was in his “best spirits” ever, enthralled by the Pacific blue and bleached skies, the wildlife-thick Channel Islands, the pock-marked Franciscan missions dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the flocks of gulls. And for once, reporters didn’t have to hurry up and wait. They could bank on Roosevelt’s punctuality. Perhaps because Roosevelt was praising Catholics while he was in California, the Vatican announced that a special goodwill letter was on its way to the White House from Pope Leo XIII.87
By the time Roosevelt arrived in Santa Clara County, most Californians were eager to impress him. Already he had become close to the locals. His almost magical personal charm had worked wonders. Californians in effect crowned him king of the sequoias. With U.S. Army forest rangers at his side he toured the gorgeous seaside sites around Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay. There were shifting seascapes, coastal pines
, crashing waves, expansive ocean views, hulking rocks, dizzying cliffs, and grass-covered headlands ornamented with purple and yellow wildflowers. Seeing the Pacific Ocean in all its glory buoyed Roosevelt; it allowed him to believe that all his pro-western expansionist views since childhood had been spot-on. Could anybody imagine America without California? With a burst of nationalistic enthusiasm, Roosevelt proclaimed that every seal rock or lone cypress he saw was a U.S. treasure. The groves of sequoias, in particular, filled him with unmitigated joy. No photograph, he said, could possibly do them justice. “You have a wonderful State,” Roosevelt proclaimed on May 11. “I am glad to see your big trees and to see that they are being preserved. They should be, as they are the heritage of the ages. They should be left unmarred for our children and our children’s children, and so on down the ages.”88
Accompanying Roosevelt on this leg of the California tour was Columbia University’s president Nicholas Murray Butler, whose unobtrusive intelligence the president enjoyed. (Butler didn’t seem to mind that Roosevelt, on May 14, received an honorary law doctorate from a rival of Columbia, University of California–Berkeley.89) Following an alfresco luncheon in Santa Cruz with naval reservists, Roosevelt, as he would do again in the coming days, threw away his planned remarks and spoke spontaneously about the ethical imperative of saving sequoias and redwoods. They seemed rarer to Roosevelt than a centaur, a hippogriff, or a winged donkey. “This is my first glimpse of the big trees. I desire to pay tribute to the associations, private owners, and State for preserving these trees.”90
However, Roosevelt believed that the redwoods’ protectors—well-meaning conservationist citizens all—had demeaned the lordly trees by hammering placards on them such as “Big Pete,” “Old Fremont,” or “Uncle John.” The sight of these advertisements fretted and annoyed Roosevelt. Even though he posed in front of one bearing such a sign—“Giant”—he thought the practice tasteless. “Let me preach to you a moment,” Roosevelt said. “All of us desire to see nature preserved. Above all, the trees should not be marred by placing cards of names on them. People who do that should be sternly discouraged. The cards give an air of ridicule to the solemn and majestic giants. They should be taken down. I ask you to keep all cards off the trees, or any kind of signs that will mar them. See to it that the trees are preserved: that the gift is kept unmarred. You can never replace a tree. Oh, I am pleased to be here among these wonderful redwoods. I thank you for giving me this enjoyment. Preserve and keep what nature has done.”91
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