The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Even the White House was permanently altered by Roosevelt’s embracing of the Oklahoma buffalo. As part of his redesign of the White House in 1902, Roosevelt had the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White decorate in a neoclassical style. Construction was also begun on a new executive office building known as the West Wing. He demanded that the East Wing do away with the grand staircase at the west end of the Cross Hall in order to enlarge the state dining room. Roosevelt was quite pleased with the firm’s work, but a flare-up occurred with Edith on an issue of interior design. She insisted that stone lions’ heads be placed on the mantel in the state dining room. Roosevelt thought these would look un-American. Nevertheless, he capitulated to Edith. But with the success of the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve, with his bison surviving their first winter, Roosevelt grew bolder. Off with the African lion heads! In 1908, in a letter to the architectural firm, Roosevelt demanded that the stone lions be recarved as bison heads because bison “made a much more characteristic and American decoration.”125

  In the summer of 1962, John F. Kennedy had the “bison mantel” buffed and restored. Seventy-eight-year-old Alice Roosevelt Longworth was invited to the White House for the unveiling of the frontier symbol her father had championed.126 It had become one of the most distinctive features in the White House. And in 2006—to honor Quanah Parker—the recently founded Comanche Buffalo Society, based in Mount Park, Oklahoma, was created to honor the chief Theodore Roosevelt had considered a blood brother for understanding that America without bison wasn’t America.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE NATIONAL MONUMENTS OF 1906

  I

  Staring out the White House window one mild spring morning in 1906, President Roosevelt watched his sons Archie and Quentin sculpture little mud monuments in a sandbox. “What a heavenly place a sandbox is for two little boys,” Roosevelt wrote to Kermit about his brothers. “Archie and Quentin play industriously in it during most of their spare moments when out in the grounds. I often look out of the office windows when I have a score of Senators and Congressmen with me and see them both hard at work arranging caverns or mountains, with runways for their marbles.”1 With such a crowded indoor schedule, the president lamented that he couldn’t join the lads outside to play like a prairie dog. Deadlines and commitments were getting the best of him. Much like his sons, only on a vastly larger scale, Roosevelt was preoccupied with reconfiguring landscapes (by Executive Order, that is) for the United States. Arranging for the designation of wonders, in fact, was an apt description of the Roosevelt administration’s conservation policy in 1906. No longer was Roosevelt inventorying possible western landscapes to preserve; he was actually preserving them.

  Accordingly, some of Roosevelt’s indoor bureaucratic chores of 1906 were of the inspiring outdoors type. For example, paperwork was being drafted at the General Land Office to save Devils Tower in southeastern Wyoming—perhaps the strangest molten rock configuration in North America. This isolated Devil’s Tower outcropping soared over the Missouri Buttes—five dome-shaped rock formations four miles away from it—in the northwest corridor of the Black Hills. Looming over the Wyoming Valley at 1,267 feet above the river, Devils Tower looked like a huge stone tablet on which the Ten Commandments were said to have been set.

  Devils Tower had no cultural features like the prehistoric dwellings in the Four Corners region that Congressman John F. Lacey and Edgar Lee Hewett wanted saved. It was a perpendicular columnar laccolith, a gray horn formed during the Triassic Period about 250 million years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed. Surrounding the main stumplike rock formation of Devils Tower were pine forests, woodlands, and grasslands—in short, an unspoiled sanctuary for teeming wildlife. Devils Tower was a sacred site to more than twenty Plains tribes, including the Arapaho, Crow, Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Shoshone. They used it like an altar, a place for prayer offerings, vision quests, marriage ceremonies, and funerals.2 There was an enduring Indian legend that long ago a huge bear had clawed the tower’s side, leaving deep scratches or grooves there. This seemingly otherworldly tower served, appropriately, as a setting in the director Stephen Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To geologists, Devils Tower was an important site: an amazing formation at 5,112 feet above sea level, composed of red sandstone and maroon siltstone, with the oxidation of iron mineral causing the outer surface to look almost rust-colored. It was more difficult to climb than the Tetons (near Yellowstone) or El Capitan (in Yosemite). “There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man,” N. Scott Momaday wrote in The Way to Rainy Mountain. “Devils Tower is one of them.”3

  In early 1906 Roosevelt considered how Devils Tower could be saved for posterity. Because it was only a mile wide, it didn’t seem to be large enough for a national park (although the much smaller Platt and Hot Springs were national parks). And Roosevelt didn’t want Devils Tower declared part of a national forest, because it was a “wonder,” not a utilitarian natural resource for the Forest Service to manage. Roosevelt, who was familiar with the history of the U.S. Geological Survey, knew that Colonel Richard I. Dodge had named Devils Tower in his 1876 book The Black Hills. To Dodge, it was “one of the most remarkable peaks in this or any other country.”4 Bully for Dodge! And the geologist Henry Newton had written that it was an “unfailing object of wonder.”5 Bully for Newton, too!

  Devils Tower in Wyoming became Roosevelt’s first national monument, created in 1906.

  Devils Tower National Monument. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)

  A scholarly debate has continued for decades about whether Roosevelt actually climbed or even visited Devils Tower. Some bogus literature propagated by the tower’s boosters claims that he did. At best, that is a half-truth. During his trips to the Black Hills and Bighorns in the 1880s and 1890s he did see it (geologists say it looked about the same then as it had 10,000 years prior).6 After all, the Little Missouri River flowed within twenty or so miles of it. But Roosevelt probably never stood any nearer to its base. On his Great Loop tour in 1903, his train had made stops in the Wyoming towns of Gillette, Moorcroft, and Sundance, so he probably saw Devils Tower from a distance. And he had visited the South Dakota communities of Edgemont and Ardmore on that trip—both within sight of the tower. But touch it: no. Nevertheless, as with Mount Olympus in Washington state, Roosevelt revered Devils Tower as a Wyoming site of great value. And strangely, the “Tree Rock,” as the Kiowa called it, was part of Roosevelt’s life as a rancher because its lore was persuasive throughout the Dakota Badlands.

  Roosevelt wasn’t alone in his admiration for Devils Tower. It had its share of cheerleaders during the progressive era. In 1891 Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, a pleasant-looking man in his mid-forties, tried to establish “Devils Tower National Park,” introducing Bill S.3364. It was shot down by Congress. Every few years Warren would reintroduce the legislation, only to have it repeatedly rejected.7 However, Senator Warren was able to have Devils Tower classified as part of a federal timber reserve. This at least bought him some time for negotiation. Roosevelt, who was struggling to get the Grand Canyon officially declared a national park, didn’t want to have Devils Tower fail again owing to congressional indifference. But even though he had Warren on his side, politicians in Wyoming were anti–federal government. Since the 1890s, when the Boone and Crockett Club had roared against the segregation of Yellowstone National Park by the railroad company, Roosevelt had been disliked by a substantial number of Wyomingites.

  What Roosevelt wanted was an executive order to save places like Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, Mount Olympus, and the Petrified Forest. And he wanted it without confronting dimwitted legislators whose insatiable craving for profit blinded them to the inspirational value of geological landmarks. Congressman Lacey—as head of the House Committee on Public Lands—ballyhooed Devils Tower’s weirdness as an asset for tourism. The nation became intrigued about the tower. By what process had Devils Tower been formed? Was i
t created by volcanic material, or was it an immense mass of igneous rock? Had it once been part of the bottom of an old sea? Who could solve this geological mystery? Roosevelt, collaborating with Lacey, inquired whether there wasn’t a clever way to save Devils Tower in the name of archaeology or paleontology. A concerted legal effort commenced in conservationist circles to devise a new presidential prerogative for preserving extraordinary wonders like Devils Tower from commercial destruction. Congressman Lacey, with his extensive knowledge of land law in the developing West, was a strong advocate of placing this “volcanic plug” in the public domain as a contribution to science.8 Decode the mysteries of Devils Tower, the thinking went, and geologists would finally understand how the Black Hills came into being.

  Part of Roosevelt and Lacey’s concern in early 1906 was that “big oil” was an octopus with tentacles that harmed consumers and landscapes alike. That January, in fact, Missouri’s attorney general, Herbert Hadley, had initiated court hearings against Standard Oil Company of Indiana, Republic Oil Company, and Waters-Pierce Oil Company for “monopolistic conspiracy.” With Roosevelt cheering, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, was hit with thirty-four subpoenas. For a while, Rockefeller hid from the law. By June 1906 the attorney general of Ohio got into the act, anxious to prosecute Standard Oil of New Jersey for violating Ohio’s antitrust laws. Recognizing that oil companies never were good stewards of the land, and worried that natural gas hunters would despoil the Dakotas and Wyoming, Roosevelt encouraged the U.S. attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, to prosecute Standard Oil of New Jersey under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

  Roosevelt actually wanted Standard Oil of New Jersey (a holding company, which controlled more than sixty other companies) dissolved. He felt virtuously outraged by Rockefeller and others who always had a price and were never concerned about the dignity of land. So while Roosevelt was on the offensive to save places like Devils Tower and the Petrified Forest of Arizona in 1906, he was also on the warpath against the “swine,” corporate types like Rockefeller who were interested only in personal enrichment. By contrast, Roosevelt himself was concerned for public enrichment, and his trust-busting was making him wildly popular. Building on the damning evidence amassed by Ida Tarbell in her two-volume History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Roosevelt had his Bureau of Corporations further investigate the oil industries; a report was due in the summer of 1907. This was part of Roosevelt’s “campaign against privilege,” which was “fundamentally an ethical movement.”9

  II

  Saving Devils Tower and the Petrified Forest was on Roosevelt’s mind during early January 1906, when he learned that his trusted hunting guide in Colorado, John Goff, had been mauled by a cornered cougar. Roosevelt seemed more grimly interested in how the cougar had attacked Goff than in how many stitches Goff needed. Did the cougar lunge? Was it rabid? Or had it been protecting cubs? How deep were the incisions? “Do let me know about it,” President Roosevelt anxiously wrote to Yellowstone Park’s superintendent, John Pitcher. “I am interested for Johnny’s sake, and besides, I have a zoological interest and am anxious to know how the job was done.”10

  Roosevelt was highly attuned to western affairs that January. Even though he was fighting for appropriations to build the Panama Canal, passing legislation concerning railway rates, and calculating a tariff for the Philippines, he vigorously championed statehood for the three western territories of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. In addition, the process for creating Sevier National Forest in south central Utah began that January (eventually, more than 375,000 acres were set aside by the U.S. Forest Service). Utah’s Great Basin—known for spectacular canyon scenery—was becoming a federally protected wonderland. In Utah, communities like Ogden, Salt Lake City, or Provo seemed like run-of-the-mill settlements compared with the magnificence of the canyonlands.

  There were also hard fought battles going on in Colorado, pitting railroads against coal companies over land. Roosevelt jumped right into the controversy with shirtsleeves rolled up, like a negotiator for labor and management. In Idaho and Montana, angry miners were starting to organize behind radical groups, including the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), which had been founded in June 1905. Roosevelt insisted that the so-called Wobbly syndicalists (Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones, and other industrial unionists) must be law-abiding and operate without violence. To Roosevelt the danger of industrial unionism was that its proponents saw it as superior to Americanism. The IWW had been created, in part, because the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had organized only 5 percent of the nation’s workers. Roosevelt didn’t care for the IWW, for two specific reasons: it was trying to monopolize labor, and it was a threat to free-market capitalism. And Roosevelt, refusing to be intimidated, sent federal troops into Goldfield, Nevada, to crush a miners’ strike. He deemed the protest harmful to the nation. “I wish labor people absolutely to understand that I set my face like flint against violence and lawlessness of any kind on their part,” Roosevelt wrote a friend, “just as much as against arrogant greed by the rich.”11

  It would take a good psychiatrist to understand why Roosevelt hated anarchy in any guise. If there wasn’t order, he couldn’t function properly. But still he surrounded himself with birds and animals that scurried all around in his homes—macaws squawking, dogs barking, cats jumping on papers, turtles wandering about. His tolerance of animal behavior and his intolerance of human behavior were like night and day. There may have been an inner struggle between his childlike obsession with disappearing into the freedom of the wild—responsibility be damned—and his compulsion to be biologically precise about every songbird, tree, grass blade, and insect antenna. The masculine side of his nature wanted to hunt big mammals while his feminine side wanted to nurture small songbirds. He believed that studying all wildlife had helped sharpen and attune his senses. “Roosevelt loved animals, both wild and domestic,” the historian Edward Wagenknecht observed. “Even on the hunting field they were individuals to him. He always hated to shoot a cow, always took care not to frighten a doe away from her babies.”12

  Among the early-twentieth-century conservationists, only John Muir had the temerity to stand up to Roosevelt—at Yosemite in 1903, Muir had challenged Roosevelt to reform his boyish hunting ways. And how was Muir rewarded for his candor? At first, well: Mount Shasta, Mariposa Grove, and Yosemite Valley were all saved by the federal government. But over time Roosevelt repaid Muir’s casual insult by saying that Muir didn’t know birds and then by siding with Pinchot on turning Hetch Hetchy into a man-made reservoir. There were consequences for challenging Roosevelt—and these might involve policy. The sycophant got farther with Roosevelt than the challenger. Nevertheless, Roosevelt continued to admire Muir for rallying to nature’s defense. In this regard Muir was embraced by the president as a “radical” in the best sense of the word. Here was the difference, in Roosevelt’s mind: the strikers in Goldfield, Nevada, wanted more for themselves whereas groups like the Sierra Club of California were fighting for national betterment. And there was in Muir’s carriage, Roosevelt thought, the radiance of Yosemite itself, which the president truly honored.

  That spring, just as Roosevelt was ready to expand the boundaries of Yosemite National Park, a disaster rocked California: at daybreak on April 18, an earthquake destroyed San Francisco. Within a few minutes the streets around Union Square and Chinatown filled with mounds of debris. Three hundred thousand people were left homeless. Gas mains had snapped, and storefronts went up in flames. Boats capsized at Fishermen’s Wharf. Broken glass from apartment windows rained down like hail. Beautiful hotels like the Winchester and the St. Francis were wrecked. Merchants shouted in disbelief. People walked about dazed, with fretful eyes, scared that at any minute the entire city would sink into the Pacific Ocean. A human flow out of the Bay Area commenced, under the U.S. Army’s leadership. The Chinese had considered 1906 the year of the Fire Horse—a time of mass confusion—and th
is proved to be prophetic. “The entire event which was to destroy an American City and leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation,” the historian Simon Winchester wrote in A Crack in the Edge of the World, “had lasted for just over two and a half minutes.”13

  Reports of the earthquake aroused Roosevelt’s martial temperament. This was no middle-size quake like the one in 1868. Unfortunately, he was 2,500 miles away in New York and was unable to order naval action. Shaking an impotent fist at the ground was all he could at first do. Reports of buckling aftershocks came over the telegraph directly into his office in downtown Oyster Bay. Then the telegraph shut off. At best, communication with northern California was hit-and-miss. Telephones weren’t working at all in the Bay Area—everything was broken in the stricken city. More than 3,400 people died throughout northern California. 14 Roosevelt issued a national condolence: “I share with all our people the horror felt at the catastrophe that has befallen San Francisco, and the most earnest sympathy with your citizens. If there is anything that the Federal Government can do to aid you it will be done.”15

  Many San Franciscans were in a condition of panic. Social dislocation and even mayhem took over. The San Andreas Fault from northwest of San Juan Bautista to the “triple junction” at Cape Mendocino had ruptured the ground, cracking it open like an eggshell. From above, it looked like a zigzagging chain down the spine of California in the cracked earth. Towns anywhere near the fault line suffered severe damage. Geologists were confounded by the violent power of the vibrating earth. Survivors said that that the experience was like walking on a trampoline or falling into a tar pit. Although the event is known to history as the San Francisco earthquake, virtually all towns in northern California suffered extensive damage, and the outlook for a quick recovery was bleak.