The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  In retrospect, Lacey, Hewett, and Wetherill were together the ideal advocates for southwestern antiquities: a congressman, an archaeologist, and a knowledgeable guide. After gathering information from both Hewett and Wetherill, Lacey felt certain he could get Congress and the Senate to approve of Mesa Verde. He was more worried about the Petrified Forest of Arizona (soon to become a favorite spot of John Muir and John Burroughs). Thousands of people there were stealing Pliocene fossils, pottery shards, and petrified logs. These thieves would just leave with whatever they wanted. When the Pueblo people had lived in the Painted Desert–Petrified Forest area, they had used fossilized wood for tools; in 1906, travelers en route to California collected chunks for souvenirs, sometimes by the wagonful. “This remarkable deposit has been subject to much vandalism already, and unless permanently reserved and protected, is sure of ultimate destruction,” Lacey wrote about the Petrified Forest for Shield’s Magazine. “The land is useless for agriculture, as it is in the heart of a desert. An attempt was made some years ago to work these trees up into table tops, but the prevalence of small holes in the body of the finest of the logs prevented the success of this commercial enterprise. Otherwise this great national curiosity would have long since become a matter of history only.”32

  Consumed with impatience, Lacey started learning every geological fact about Arizona’s Petrified Forest as if he were on assignment from the American Museum of Natural History. To draw attention to the great petrified logs, he wrote reports, delivered speeches, and lobbied the Santa Fe Railway about their value as a stopover attraction for tourists on the way to the Grand Canyon. Lacey also wrote a slogan for the railroad to use: “Come see the Grand Canyon (the greatest scenic wonder in the world) and the Petrified Forest of Arizona (the greatest natural curiosity).” When congressmen from California, Washington, Oregon, and Wyoming told Lacey that their states had petrified forests, too, Lacey grew exasperated. The fools didn’t understand. Of course, there were other petrified forests. But his was “The Petrified Forest of the World,” in a class by itself. “Yellow, red, blue, white, black, brown, rose, purple, green, gray, in fact, all the colors of the rainbow, are found in these trees,” Lacey said. “Many of them are five feet in diameter and 140 feet in length, and lie just as they were originally deposited, imbedded a few inches in the desert sand.”33

  Since the early 1890s Roosevelt and Lacey had made a lot of conservation deals together. They had become alter egos. But Roosevelt had never seen Lacey so stirred up as he was over the Petrified Forest. Lacey even quoted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had said that the great arches of Gothic cathedrals were a “petrified religion.” And the Arizona Territory—God bless the United States—had the most holy petrified valley in the western hemisphere. Lacey admitted that he wasn’t schooled in the principles of stratigraphy, but he nevertheless knew that the geologic history of the Petrified Forest was worth preserving. Whether they were using petrified wood for tabletops or chopping down old-growth redwoods for decks, Lacey was annoyed by the disrespect that business enterprises and commercial vandals were showing toward the western heritage. “As hard almost as the diamond, as brilliant in colors as the flowers of the field, this ancient forest, which was transformed into stone perhaps before man appeared on the planet, is still to be seen under the sunshine of Arizona,” Lacey wrote. “It should by all means be preserved for the admiration and wonder of generations yet to come.”34

  According to Professor Rebecca Conrad, author of Places of Quiet Beauty, Congressman Lacey inserted the words “scenic and scientific” into the Antiquities Act as a clever way to preserve places like the Petrified Forest of Arizona. Here wood had been turned to solid silica, rock, and quartz. Lacey also wrote an account of his 1902 trip to Arizona with Wetherill as his guide, and of how his idea for the Antiquities Act came into focus. The archaeological district known as Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs had Pueblo dwellings actually made out of petrified wood. It was all astounding! Borrowing a page from Merriam, Lacey cleverly chose the Roosevelt elk (T.R.’s beloved species) and the Petrified Forest as his original impetus for the Antiquities Act. “It was this trip which led to the introduction and passage of my bill for the preservation of aboriginal ruins and places of scenic and scientific interest upon the public domain,” Lacey wrote, “under which the Petrified Forest, the Olympic Range Elk Reserve and about two hundred places of ethnological interest have been designated as ‘monuments’ and preserved to the public.” 35

  What a pity that Congressman Lacey has been left out of most environmental history textbooks covering the Roosevelt era! With the exception of Char Miller, Hal Rothman, Rebecca Conrad, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, few western historians have taken the time to realize all that Lacey did to save prehistoric ruins, desert ecosystems, bird sanctuaries, petrified forests, plug-dome volcanoes, wildlife-rich areas, and national wonders. But Roosevelt, at least, understood that Congressman Lacey was the man, the shrewdest pro-conservationist legislator of his time. Lacey’s secret had four aspects: he was a committed outdoorsman, amateur ornithologist, and Indian scholar, and he wasn’t a credit monger. He championed places like Mesa Verde, the Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, and El Morro, even though he earned no votes in Iowa’s Sixth District for doing so—Lacey was, therefore, a true American patriot. The Pajarito region of New Mexico, in particular, captivated him with its ancient rock drawings of the sun, snakes, and deer. All the caves and ruins of the Zuni, Taos, and Acoma, he believed, needed to be saved. As for the Petrified Forest, the trees had hardened into a complete and priceless landscape. “Let these trees be protected from vandalism and they will endure forever,” Lacey pleaded with the Senate. “It is to be hoped that the public sentiment which has urged and warmly approved of the action of the House of Representatives in thrice passing the bill to set aside this land as a public national park will in the near future bring about favorable action in the Senate. That lover of nature, the President, will be glad to sign such a bill.”36

  Just three days after Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, there was a strange event in Iowa. At the Republican county convention in Fairfield, a prankster let loose an elephant—wearing a banner that read “G.O.P.”—to rampage through the crowded hall. Mayhem ensued in the hall as the frightened elephant trumpeted madly about. Republican delegates fled through the windows and doors. According to the New York Times, one terrified politician broke an arm in the panic. When the elephant was finally calmed down and the shock of the event had subsided, there was a police inquiry. As it turned out, a group from the pro-Roosevelt and pro-Lacey wing of Iowa’s Republican Party had hired the elephant from Robinson’s Circus for the prank. “The elephant’s name is ‘Teddy Roosevelt,’” the Times reported, “and the convention was afraid of it.”37

  At Lotus Lake in Long Island that June, Robert B. Roosevelt’s health was breaking down: he was seventy-nine and had many ailments.38 Reports circulated that he wouldn’t live long.39 Nevertheless, R.B.R. led a high-profile campaign on Long Island to replant white pine trees wherever any had previously been chopped down. Even on his deathbed, R.B.R. was engaged in life. Having already planted white pines at his own estate, he implored all his neighbors from Montauk to Brooklyn to do the same. Long before Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, R.B.R. had started a regional forerunner on Long Island. It was a crusade for him, just as stopping the indiscriminate killing of birds and fish had been following the Civil War.40

  President Roosevelt was at Oyster Bay on June 14 when Uncle Rob died. Coincidentally, the president had just had a species of trout named after him in California. The obituary in the New York Times noted that R.B.R. had been the famous author of The Game Fish of North America, The Game Birds of the North, Superior Fishing, Fish Hatching and Fish Catching, and Florida and Game Water Birds—all notable conservationist accomplishments. A funeral was scheduled, and the president came to say a proper good-bye. An era had ended, but all of R.B.R.’s conservation
ist aspirations—everything he had stood for, except his bohemian lifestyle and his philandering—lived on in his nephew in the White House.

  Following the funeral, in July 1906, President Roosevelt started planning to save both Devils Tower and Petrified Forest in the fall. The paperwork was now in order. He dashed off a note of gratitude to Congressman Lacey for championing more knolls, buttes, spurs, ruins, and ravines than anybody else in America. It was Lacey who taught Roosevelt to look at petrified logs as gems or precious stones—they were that valuable. Believing that Lacey’s methodical approach to saving antiquities was good for the republic, Roosevelt told Lacey that “certain gentlemen” were filled with a “deep sense of obligation” for all his work. This rather dull and stern Iowan, a Civil War veteran of the Mississippi River campaign, who always wore a standard-issue gray suit, had done more for America’s environmental and cultural heritage during the progressive era than anybody else. He was a giant like Gifford Pinchot, Jane Addams, or John Muir. Roosevelt suggested that these “gentlemen” wanted to name a park, a monument, or a memorial in his honor for engineering the Antiquities Act of 1906: they wanted to honor him with a mountain, forest, or canyon. The modest Lacey was amused, and he demurred. Nevertheless, Roosevelt signed “An Act to Protect Birds and Their Eggs in Game and Bird Preserves” into law that June as a tribute to Lacey.41

  Encouraged now that Mesa Verde had become a national park, Lacey urged Roosevelt to use the Antiquities Act to declare the Petrified Forest a national monument. Time was short. Couldn’t the Roosevelt administration somehow circumvent the slow, tedious process of obtaining congressional approval for a national park? The miles of petrified logs, the multihued badlands, the Painted Desert, the historic buildings, and the archaeological ruins would, if preserved, be Lacey’s legacy. Roosevelt had the Department of the Interior look into it at once. Meanwhile, as the logistics were worked out, Roosevelt wanted trespassers arrested for stealing prehistoric pottery fragments or for setting off a rock slide from a hill in the Petrified Forest. Wetherill was keeping Lacey informed about any syndicates stealing wagons of petrified wood—but the small-time thief was nearly impossible to apprehend.

  V

  After the success of the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt’s intensity in the West increased. On June 19 he signed a joint congressional resolution enlarging Yosemite National Park by 41.67 square miles (nearly 27,000 acres)—no small clump of trees. Suddenly two of California’s crown jewels, which Roosevelt had seen on his 1903 western trek with John Muir at his side—Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove—were acquired by the Department of the Interior. But instead of being elated, Roosevelt grew concerned. Lacey was right. If Congress was so slow to act on behalf of an already established national park like Yosemite, what would it do when he introduced the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Mount Olympus for consideration as national parks? Would the extractors be able to prevail over the protectors during the congressional process? For a national park designation, Roosevelt needed Congress; but designation as a national monument required only determination.

  An ardent believer in statehood for the Territories, Roosevelt now indicated that admittance into the Union entailed a quid pro quo—turning over natural and archaeological wonders like the Grand Canyon, the Canyon de Chelly, and the Petrified Forest to the Department of the Interior to become national monuments). This horse-trading wasn’t put in writing—he wasn’t that foolish—but the precondition was implied. In territories like New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma the president had the advantage (just as he did in establishing the Luquillo National Forest in Puerto Rico). Consultation wasn’t essential for action in de facto colonies. “The Territories are filled with men and women of the stamp of which I grew to feel so hearty a regard and respect during the years that I myself lived and worked on the Great Plains and in the Rocky Mountains,” Roosevelt wrote to Mark A. Rodgers, secretary of the Arizona Statehood Association. “It was from these four Territories that I raised the regiment with which I took part in the Cuban campaign. Assuredly I would under no circumstances advise the people of these Territories to do anything that I considered to be against either their moral or their material well-being.” 42

  Unquestionably, Roosevelt took a paternalistic attitude toward Arizona. He regarded Arizona’s mining, timber, and real estate interests with amused disdain, and with steadily increasing distrust. To most people on the Atlantic seaboard, Arizona seemed far, far away; but Roosevelt considered it his backyard. The Geological Survey had reported, gravely, that Arizona’s mineral deposits (except for coal) would be largely extracted by the end of the twentieth century as a result of overmining. This prediction caught Roosevelt’s full attention. The insatiable mining outfits would destroy wild Arizona if the federal government didn’t intervene.

  Congressman Lacey was likewise disgusted by overindustrialization, but he took it as a given in the modern world. As Roosevelt saw it, the true enemies in the West were aridity, adroit political malfeasance, poaching of relics, and thieving of timber. Roosevelt failed to understand that his reclamation projects—especially hydroelectric dams—were aimed at dominating nature on behalf of settlers; they, too, ruined landscapes and made some regions dependent on federal funding. Lacey believed that the solution to western problems was more federal responsibility and preservationist morality, achieved by congressional authorization. But Congress seemed uninterested in the Four Corners region. Action was required. Roosevelt, the “preacher militant,” as of the summer of 1906, refused to accept a feather-duster approach to the Southwest. Roosevelt’s warrior side wanted to crush his enemies into the dust, not outfox them with legalities. To Roosevelt hate could be a creative impulse for the common good. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and national monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents’ faces in his wilderness philosophy of living.

  Still, underlying Roosevelt’s hostility toward despoilers was his fear of America without a wilderness. Conservation was a way for Roosevelt to grapple with this anxiety. By saving heritage sites and forests, Roosevelt was providing a way for the body politic to stay healthy. By reclaiming the prehistoric past, Indian relics, volcanic mounds, hidden lakes, fish-filled streams, stands of trees, weird-looking buttes, desertscapes, and petrified wood, Roosevelt believed he could preserve the old pioneer spirit that had made American civilization so special. To Roosevelt, industrialization was a corrosive problem in that it led to urbanization, which in turn stripped citizens of their attachment to the land. A whole generation of youngsters were suffering from what we might now call a nature-deficiency disorder. It was the wilderness, Roosevelt insisted, with reverence, that made American special. The novelist Frank Norris had an octopus to war against—the huge agricultural concerns. Similarly, Roosevelt had the trust titans to rally against, because their concept of laissez-faire economics was unpatriotic. They valued money more than Old Faithful or the Great Smoky Mountains. “If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers,” Burroughs commented about the naturalists around Roosevelt in 1905 “we go to woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them than they were.”43

  VI

  It wasn’t just the Far West that Roosevelt was worried about. An ugly international incident had occurred in the Alaska Territory, involving Japanese seal hunters wielding clubs, knives, and guns in the Pribilof Islands. On July 16 a small fleet of Japanese vessels attacked the Alaskan seal rookery at Saint Paul Island. Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the Roosevelt administration maintained a small naval–biological research facility on this island, which is in the Bering Sea. The American sailors there were fond of the seals, which had originally been saved by President Grant and were celebrated by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book, first published in 1894. A few of the sailors intervened to stop the Japanese poaching raid, and a melee occurred. Sickened because the Japanese had clubbed baby seals and then skinned them alive, the Americans killed five of the ra
iders, wounded two others, and apprehended another twelve. An international brouhaha erupted over the Japanese butchery and the American’s heavy-handedness. The Japanese Times, for example, said that although seal poaching was a misdemeanor, the U.S. Navy had responded with murder. In contrast, the San Francisco press published gruesome details of the hunt, supported the U.S. Navy, and said that the merciless slashing and beating of American seals in American waters was outrageous.44

  One side effect of the San Francisco earthquake was a thoughtless increase in anti-Japanese prejudice on the Pacific coast. When people are under duress, they may look for a scapegoat: in San Francisco the recent Japanese immigrants provided one. The Russo-Japanese War had left the United States and Japan as the preeminent powers in the Pacific basin. The negotiated Portsmouth Treaty also bestowed on Japan strategic, political, and economic interests in Manchuria, and these threatened to undermine America’s open-door policy as formulated by Hay. Roosevelt greatly respected Japan but feared its rise to power. With nativist emotions running high in San Francisco, an anti-Japanese backlash occurred, manifested in school segregation, riots, and a spate of anti-Japanese legislation in Sacramento. In San Francisco between May 6 and November 5, 1906, for example, there were more than 290 cases of assault, most perpetrated against Japanese immigrants. Two eminent seismologists from Tokyo were stoned for investigating the San Andreas Fault; some San Franciscans didn’t want foreigners to tell them not to live on a fault. These racist attacks and stonings angered the Japanese government, particularly because it had given $246,000 to San Francisco for relief after the earthquake. Therefore, a deep distrust already existed between Tokyo and Washington, D.C. when the “Alaskan seal incident” occurred.