Americans had known that California was an earthquake zone but the state’s residents had long played ostrich, pretending that their homes weren’t actually built along a fault line. Now, terrorized shouts of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” were heard along the same streets where Roosevelt had paraded on his Great Loop tour of 1903. Then, Roosevelt had proclaimed San Francisco the shining white Acropolis of the glorious west coast, the juggernaut of manifest destiny. Now everything was covered with smoke clouds, and the air was poisonous. People contended for jugs of water, worried about dehydration. Soot-blinded horses frantically neighed and frothed in front of brownstones that had toppled into heaps of rubble. Triage stations were set up in fields. After a while, however, an eerie calm blanketed the city, a collective numbness, as people grew weary of trying to put the fires out. The New York Times said that the exact scope of the disaster in terms of terror and damage “will never be known.”16
Statistics came pouring into the White House about the devastation in California. The quake was felt for about 375,000 square miles from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Los Angeles and well into Nevada’s Great Basin. More than 28,000 buildings had been destroyed. Following Roosevelt’s direct order, the army and navy quelled public unrest and effectively evacuated residents to safety. The armed forces also provided food and shelter for the homeless. The USS Preble was anchored offshore from San Francisco to provide humanitarian relief. At the request of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, martial law was imposed, with orders to shoot looters. The USS Chicago evacuated 20,000 people by sea (numerically a world record until Dunkirk during World War II).
On April 22, Roosevelt announced that relief efforts were to be overseen by the Red Cross. Congress had appropriated $2.5 million in aid. Determined to show the world that the United States could handle its own problems, Roosevelt declined foreign aid of any kind (relief money nevertheless trickled in from abroad). When the San Francisco mint was raided by looters, federal troops unloaded their guns, killing more than thirty people. But mostly the recovery efforts went well. More than 1,500 tons of provisions were expertly delivered daily to fifty-two food distribution centers. Exuding optimism, Roosevelt claimed that within the decade San Francisco would be rebuilt. And so it was.
III
Besides grappling with this situation, Roosevelt devoted a lot of energy to Niagara Falls. Since 1904 the State Department had been negotiating with Canada, by means of an International Waterways Commission, to protect the integrity of the falls. With Great Britain brokering the bilateral negotiation, a regulated equitable division of water power between the two countries was obtained. But Roosevelt wanted Canada to agree to protecting the “aesthetic value of the falls.”17 Roosevelt became obsessive about creating an international park between Canada and New York. Not to do so, he said, was sacrilegious. Eventually, in June 1906, a bill passed Congress authorizing the secretary of war to supervise the preservation of the falls. Although there are no documents to prove it, Roosevelt seemed to be threatening Canada, by implying that if the Canadians didn’t cooperate properly with the War Department, the United States would seize control of Niagara Falls and run it as an American national park.
That spring, Roosevelt also resumed regular contact with the prolific artist Frederic Remington, who had illustrated Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. Remington’s sketchbooks of heavy-duty paper had themselves become American heirlooms. A few of Remington’s illustrations from Ranch Life—“An Agency Policeman,” “Making a Tenderfoot Dance” and “Cowboy Fun”—had grown in popularity since the 1890s.
And in October 1902 Remington published a novel that the president adored: John Ermine of Yellowstone (about a Caucasian boy who is raised by Crow Indians and becomes a scout in the U.S. Army). The New York Times said that this novel was reminiscent of Wister’s The Virginian. Remington’s characters included Sitting Bull, Crooked Bear, and the White Weasel. What stood out for Roosevelt was Remington’s brilliant description of life among the Crow as they roamed in the western prairies. Remington also did a fine job of illustrating John Ermine of Yellowstone, thirty drawings in all.18 In one drawing, the well-cut John Ermine looks a lot like the blond, blue-eyed George Armstrong Custer before the Battle of Little Bighorn. Conceived as an epic western, John Ermine of Yellowstone was an oddly complex tale of an intermixing of European American and Native American strains. The lead character, Ermine, is torn between both cultures, incapable of fully assimilating into either. The novel got solid reviews; one reviewer said that Remington had captured the imperishable quiet of Wyoming’s forestlands.
“My dear Remington,” Roosevelt wrote to Remington on February 20, 1906. “It may be true that no white man ever understood an Indian, but at any rate you convey the impression of understanding him! I have done what I very rarely do—that is read a serial story—and I have followed every installment of The Way of an Indian as it came out.”19 Flattered by Roosevelt’s praise of him in the parlors of Washington, D.C., as the Karl Bodner or George Catlin of their generation, Remington made Roosevelt a small wax bronze titled Paleolithic Man as an appreciation. It depicted, Remington wrote, a Darwinian representation of a “human figure bordering on an ape, squatting and holding a clam in right hand and a club in left.” Remington had created the sculpture at a makeshift studio on Cedar Island in the Chippewa Bay archipelago in the Thousand Islands area, along a scenic stretch of the Saint Lawrence River in New York. Suffering from health problems caused by overeating, Remington, who had become a quirky odd duck, was hiding from the world. Jokingly, Remington added in his note that the bronze was modeled after “the original inhabitant of the original Oyster Bay—whenever that was—.”20
Oh, boy! Did Roosevelt ever fancy that piece of Remingtonia! Hurrah for Darwinian art! Whatever tension and mistrust had developed between Roosevelt and Remington in the 1890s had vanished. Although Roosevelt never purchased a Remington, he had amassed a fine collection of items, which had been bestowed on him as gifts. Even though fanciful artists like Maxfield Parrish were now the rage, Roosevelt stood steadfastly by Remington, whose struggle with obesity had taken on tragic dimensions. (At over 350 pounds he weighed more than Secretary of War William Howard Taft, and his weight was obviously affecting the functioning of his vital organs.) The Paleolithic Man statue thrilled Roosevelt. “We hail the coming of the original native oyster,” he wrote to Remington. “Mrs. Roosevelt is as much pleased as I am with it. I think it is very appropriate, for undoubtedly Paleolithic man feasted on oysters long before he got to the point of hunting the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.”21
Throughout the spring of 1906 Roosevelt corresponded with John Burroughs, sharing the excitement of spying all the springtime birds around the White House. Oom John was busy raising a few vegetables while writing essays about rural neighbors, salt breezes, and maple syrup. All the features of farm life in the Catskills (and the universe at large) were Burroughs’s bailiwick. Of course, the two naturalists chatted about birds. “That warbler I wrote you about yesterday was the Cape May warbler,” Roosevelt told Oom John. “As soon as I got hold of an ornithological book I identified it. I do not think I ever saw one before, for it is rather a rare bird—at least on Long Island, where most of my bird knowledge was picked up. It was a male, in the brilliant spring plumage; and the orange-brown cheeks, the brilliant yellow sides of the neck just behind the cheeks, and the brilliant yellow under parts with thick blade streaks on the breast, made the bird unmistakable. It was in a little pine, and I examined it very closely with the glasses but could not see much of its back. Have you found it a common bird?”22
There was a warmth and kindness to Roosevelt in spring 1906 that had been missing since the hurly-burly of becoming president. He seemed proud that talented outdoorsmen like Burroughs, Wister, Remington, Chapman, and Merriam were his real friends—not those New York money changers deformed by “swinish greed” and by “vulgarity and vice and vacuity and extravagance”23; or, for that matter, those Chicago meatpackers whose aston
ishing workplace uncleanliness Roosevelt called “revolting.”24 Writing to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Roosevelt, as if taking stock of his friends, boasted that his “intimate” fellows were “men I met in the mountains and backwoods and on ranches and the plains.” He meant Bat Masterson, Will Sewall, Joe and Sylvane Ferris, Seth Bullock, John Willis, Jack Abernathy. If you had a biographical history in the West—the old West—Roosevelt was sympathetic.
Echoing Grinnell, Roosevelt insisted that Native American tribes had to be treated fairly under his administration. Sometimes Roosevelt acted as if America had been better off before Wounded Knee, when the Indians still rode freely in the Great Plains. There was something in the president of John Ermine of Yellowstone. Roosevelt worked with Inspector James McLaughlin of the U.S. Indian Service to negotiate more than forty tribal agreements on behalf of his administration. Native Americans were opposed to land allotments, but the federal government was allotting land anyway. Roosevelt worked to keep fraud out of the system.* And, almost miraculously, the planned reintroduction of buffalo at Wichita Forest and Game Preserve in southwestern Oklahoma scheduled for 1907 was welcomed by both cowboys and Indians.
Roosevelt also continued to encourage his naturalist friends to write big popular zoology. For example, he sent Henry Bryant Bigelow, a junior staff member at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (who had written about caribou and wolves), a glowing note of endorsement, urging him to try composing gorgeous zoological prose like On the Origin of Species or Birds of America. “We need that the greatest scientific book shall be one which scientific laymen can read, understand, and appreciate,” Roosevelt wrote. “The greatest scientific book will be a part of literature; as Darwin and Lucetius are.”25
All this natural history and yearning for the high country awakened Roosevelt to new possibilities for preservationism. By June 1906, as Congress adjourned for the summer, Roosevelt grew anxious about the fate of United States’ western sites, particularly the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Devils Tower, and Mesa Verde. With regard to these, getting commitments out of legislators was like tearing tin. Arrogantly, Congress was also stalling on whether to accept from the state of California two magnificent gifts: Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove. What in hell were the stingy western senators thinking? That’s what Roosevelt wanted to know. Piqued at Congress’s hesitation over further preservation of Yosemite, Roosevelt wrote to Senator George Clement Perkins of California, a Republican who was an embarrassment to the Republican Party, a sharp letter demanding that Congress, without delay, seize these old-growth redwoods, spectacular waterfalls, and unparalleled scenic wonders for the enrichment of the public domain. With San Francisco three-quarters destroyed by the earthquake, and people living in tent cities on the outskirts of town, the federal government needed to do something special for California.
“It seems to me that it would be a real misfortune if this Congress adjourned without accepting the magnificent gift of California of the Yosemite Park,” Roosevelt wrote. “What is the status of the matter? Is it not possible to have it put through? I earnestly hope you will look it up and let me know. It would be too bad if, either from indifference or because of paying heed to selfish interests, the United States Government fails to act as in my judgement it is morally obligatory upon it to act in view of the generous action of California.”26
IV
On June 6, 1906, President Roosevelt signed into law “An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities.” It allowed for a president to designate “historical landmarks, historic preservation structures, and other objects of scientific interest” as national monuments. Drafted by the team of Lacey and Hewett, the act was stunning in its exclusion of Congress. It was an unparalleled tool for a president to use.27 The preservationists involved (who included W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution and the Reverend Henry Mason-Baum, known for excavations in the Holy Land had so carefully crafted the language of the legislation that it sounded inoffensive and whisked through the Senate (on May 24) and the House (on June 5) practically unaltered. It gave the president the unencumbered power to unilaterally declare the protection of landscapes of archaeological, scientific, and environmental value federal land.28 As the historian Robert W. Righter has said in the Western Historical Quarterly, now Roosevelt could seek “rapid presidential action” instead of a “dillydally” with a “tortoise-paced Congress.”29 At last Roosevelt had a legal way to circumvent Congress in these matters.30
More than any other policy Roosevelt adopted as president, the signing of the Antiquities Act has earned him praise from modern environmentalists; it represented the self-proclaimed “wilderness hunter” as a high-minded naturalist statesman. Roosevelt had confounded pro-development interests in the West with a preservationist program for both now and tomorrow. There was no longer a need to negotiate with the timber and mining lobbies over such sites as Devils Tower or the Petrified Forest. The resourceful Roosevelt had given America a way station for these places on the road to national park status. The genius of Lacey and Hewett’s effort was that the Antiquities Act didn’t limit the acreage a president could designate as national monument lands on behalf of science. Basically, the acreage was entirely up to a president’s discretion. In wiggle words, the act stated simply that the monuments were to be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” But Roosevelt’s idea of “small was bigger than anybody else’s in official Washington.
Until, June 1906, Congress saw Lacey as the bulwark against Roosevelt’s overreach. Colleagues knew that Lacey was eager to save abandoned ruins of prehistoric peoples in the Southwest, but he was also a man of compromise. Lacey, imbued with the European social ideal of a strong central state, had pounded on doors on Capitol Hill asking for assistance in saving El Morro (Inscription Rock), Montezuma Castle, and Chaco Canyon. He was always soft-spoken and modest in demeanor. As chair of the House Committee on Public Lands he was, however, a formidable power broker, particularly with the delegations from the Middle West and West. So it was understandable that congressmen and senators from Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and other western states agreed to Lacey’s antiquities project. Why not? Their reaction was as old as politics. They’d scratch Lacey’s back and, as a quid pro quo, he would ease up on issues such as timber leasing, mining contracts, and grazing laws in the national forests. These western legislators surely must have worried. But about Roosevelt’s overdoing the designation of national monuments, the worst case scenario was no worse than the bird refuges of 1903 to 1905: nothing more than a few hundred acres of prehistoric ruins and natural oddities scattered about the American landscape. That would be a tolerable progressive indulgence compared with the grabs of forest reserves.
Congress, in effect, had been tricked by the otherwise ethical Lacey. The Antiquities Act was a dangerous precedent to set with Roosevelt in the White House. The legislation had placed a new conservationist weapon—the national monument—at T.R.’s disposable. To think that Roosevelt wouldn’t stretch his new powers to the extreme was naive. Certainly Roosevelt was honest about the prehistoric ruins in New Mexico and Arizona: these resources were preserved for the sake of science. No longer would southwestern pot hunters or tourist vandals have free rein to desecrate these ancient sites. Where Roosevelt grew mischievous, however, was in exploiting the loose language of the Antiquities Act, which stipulated that national monuments were ipso facto of scientific value. To Roosevelt a marsh, an arroyo, and a limestone cliff were all of scientific interest. What wasn’t a biological or geological birthright to him? And now, as of 1906, the federal government would become the caretaker of historically significant ruins.
At first, the Antiquities Act would permanently protect part of the Four Corners region in the West. Lacey had traveled earlier that spring from Santa Fe to Durango, Colorado, and had been aghast to see thieves taking artifacts from Mesa Verde. He knew that Roosevelt wan
ted to make life miserable for such heirloom robbers. Lacey began pushing harder for the Anasazi cliff dwellings near Durango, Colorado, to become a national park. Along with Hewett, he also championed preserving the ruins of the Pajarito Plateau in New Mexico near Los Alamos. A grassroots effort was forming to create a “national cultural reservation” on the Pajarito Plateau. When Lacey first visited the region in August 1902, he had been mesmerized by the deserted caves, communal ruins, and adobe villages where Indians still lived. And he knew that the trail guide at Four Corners, John Wetherill, was Roosevelt’s idea of a great American. Wetherill was a real-life John Ermine in the Navajo-Apache-Hopi lands.*
Old photographs show Wetherill with deep-set eyes and a pronounced nose, looking looking like a weathered, desert version of Seth Bullock. He wore a turquoise stone to ornament his favorite belt buckle, and his hair was cut bare on the sides; this midwesterner had clearly adopted the Southwest as his home. The novelist Zane Grey wrote about Wetherill, idealistically but simply, in his essay collection Tales of Lonely Travels. Once the Antiquities Act was passed, Wetherill made recommendations in the Southwest as requested by Forest Order 19, which asked national forest supervisors to report on prehistoric structures and other artifacts and sites of scientific interest located on the western reserves.
Born in Kansas in 1866, “Hosteen John,” as he was called, had moved to Mancos, Colorado in 1880. Although ranching was the family business, Hosteen John became obsessed with the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. By 1900 Wetherill, with his wife, Louisa Wade, moved to the Navajo lands of New Mexico. Tired of dealing with droughts and rustlers, he decided to own trading posts at Ojo Alamo, Chavez, and Chaco Canyon. Besides selling trinkets and provisions he became the best-known trail guide for the entire, vast Four Corners region. It was Hosteen John who had taken Hewett and Lacey to see the astounding prehistoric ruins there.31
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