The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  On Sunday, September 16, more than 40,000 visitors came to the zoo and went to the monkey house to see Ota Benga. As a special attraction, Bi had been let out of the cage and was free to wander around the zoological park, though with a keeper at his side. “They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering and yelling,” the New York Times reported of the spectators. “Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.” Fearing for the pygmy’s life, the keeper put Benga back in his cage. “Me no like America,” Benga said. “Me like St. Louis.”58

  Eventually, unable to shake off the criticism, Hornaday cracked. Arriving at work on Monday, with a pack of newsmen firing questions at him, Hornaday threw in the towel. “Enough!” he said. “Enough! I have had enough of Ota Benga, the African pigmy. Ring up the Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Tell them that they can get busy tinkering with his intellect. I’m through with him here.”59

  Benga was shunted off to the orphan asylum, supposedly as a free man. But he really wasn’t free. In 1900, Governor Roosevelt had signed into law an act banning discrimination in public schools; yet, oddly, it wasn’t applicable in orphanages.60 Dressed in a white suit, Benga was kept as a sort of mascot at Howard. He remained something of a celebrity, and he was taught math and a few hundred English words and was introduced (forcibly it seems) to the New Testament. But because there were children at the asylum, Benga was segregated from the mainstream of the institution. The cooks fed him scraps in the kitchen, away from the children’s view. Because he became a chain-smoker, he was deemed a bad influence on young people. The relocation to the orphan asylum was becoming a failure for all involved, so another Plan B was tried. In 1910 Benga was shunted off to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he worked on a tobacco farm in the Tidewater region. Deeply disturbed by his experience as a zoo exhibit, and longing for his African homeland, Benga committed suicide in 1916: a pistol shot to the heart. When Hornaday heard about the suicide he was very unsympathetic. “Evidently,” Hornaday wrote, “he felt that he would rather die than work for a living.” 61

  The small world that is history ridicules Hornaday over the Benga episode. But his views about the University of Man were once taken seriously and given credence throughout America in the early twentieth century. All over the nation, government-run eugenics offices had opened. In 1910, in fact, there was a Eugenics Record Office, created and founded by rich industrialists. An effort was made by the strong to weed out the weak in the “American race.” This misguided movement was an outgrowth of a theory called social Darwinism and is often seen as a step toward Nazism. From 1900 to 1935, thirty-two states adopted laws that allowed sterilization of “defective humans.” Only half-jokingly, H. L. Mencken said that all the southern sharecroppers needed to be sterilized. As Karl W. Gibson points out in Saving Darwin, more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized in the early twentieth century because they had epilepsy or stuttered or were mentally challenged. Ota Benga was, in a sense, a victim of the eugenics movement.62

  IX

  On September 24, 1906, a few days after Ota Benga was transferred from the Bronx Zoo to Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, Roosevelt at last set aside Devils Tower on two square miles of Wyoming wilderness, as a national monument (A clerical error omitted the apostrophe in Devil’s Tower, and it has never been reinstated.) Once the Antiquities Act passed in June, Frank W. Mondell, representative at-large from Wyoming, began pushing for Devils Tower to become the first national monument. Although he was vehemently opposed to national forests, Mondell, a resident of nearby Newcastle, Wyoming, correctly surmised that Devils Tower could, if properly promoted, become a first-rate tourist attraction, bringing tourist dollars to Newcastle, Gillette, and Sundance. Although Devils Tower was out of the way, there was a possibility that tourists visiting the Black Hills would make a day’s outing to see the bear claw marks.*63 (Mondell wanted to build an iron stairway from bottom to top: evidently he didn’t think it would be obtrusive, possibly because he had no idea what “obtrusive” meant.) As a member of the House Committee on Public Lands, which Lacey chaired, Mondell worked with the GLO all summer to get the size of the site over 1,000 acres so that the tower could be properly cared for and managed.

  Depending on where a visitor was standing and what the angle of sunlight was, Devils Tower produced various impressions. At the top reaches the colors were grays; the bottom had soft reds, pastel rust, and yellow-olive combinations. There were almost no roads to the tower in 1906; travelers coming from the east had to ford the swollen Belle Fourche River seven or eight times. From a distance the Tower seemed, deceptively, to be always within grasp.

  A cursory look at the Wyoming newspapers of September 25 shows zero interest in the new federal designation. After all, to locals the site was still just forlorn Devils Tower. Unfortunately, the Roosevelt administration had no ranger to assign to the tower. The commissioner of the GLO, Fred Dennett, did provide a “special agent” based in Laramie, Wyoming, whose job included halting commercial vandalism and homesteading on the new national monument property. On the Fourth of July locals were allowed to attempt climbs to the top. What made national monuments so confusing was that, depending on what was expedient on a case-by-case basis, they were under the jurisdiction of one of three departments: Interior, Agriculture, or War. (Eventually, in 1916, they were all brought into the Department of the Interior.) 64

  Because the special agent didn’t live at Devils Tower, locals started chipping off hunks of the rock formation for souvenirs. Eventually “No Trespassing” signs were posted all around Devils Tower as a deterrent; these worked, to a limited degree. However, not until the 1930s, when roads were built, did Roosevelt’s first national monument finally become a major tourist attraction, with full-time federal protection services provided.

  If all Roosevelt had been doing from June to September 1906 was creating Devils Tower National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park, the academic debate over whether he was a preservationist or a conservationist would not arise. Clearly, his actions on behalf of these western sites, no matter how prosaic the language of the Antiquities Act, made him a thoroughgoing preservationist. Yet throughout the summer of 1906 Roosevelt was also deeply involved with the building of dams, bridges, and reservoirs in the frontier landscape of the West, under the Reclamation Act. Emblematic of the progressive era, his Reclamation Service now had more than 400 engineers and other experts working in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. More than 1 million acres of arid land was being irrigated (and this irrigation entailed digging 800 miles of canals, tunnels, and ditches). The Roosevelt administration was giving the American West a concrete and steel reconstruction for the sake of water. This activity by the Reclamation Service caused newspapers in the West to rejoice. Reclaimed land west of the Mississippi River, in fact, could soon sustain 100 million people, owing to wise water policy.65 “The crowded conditions of the eastern communities will be automatically relieved,” the Ellensburg (Washington) Dawn predicted, “a happy and contented, home-loving and home-owning people will occupy the present arid regime of the west.” 66

  Just as the Panama Canal was a triumph of engineering, so too was the hauling of 16 million cubic yards of American earth under the Reclamation Service’s guidance. Roosevelt had hired more than 10,000 men and 5,000 horses to reclaim the arid west. The days of general surveys and land examinations were over—the time had come for housing communities to be built in places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Oklahoma City. “We may well congratulate ourselves upon the rapid progress already made, and rejoice that the infancy of the work has been safely passed,” Roosevelt wrote to Gifford Pinchot. “But we must not forget that there are dangers and difficulties still ahead, and that only unbroken vigilance, efficiency, integrity, and good sense will suffice to prevent disaster…. There remains the critical question of how best to utilize the reclaimed lands by putting them into the hands of actual cultivators and homemakers, who will return the original outlay
in annual installments paid back into the reclamation fund; the question of seeing that the lands are used for homes, and not for purposes of speculation or for the building up of large fortunes.”67

  Because 1906 was a midterm election year, Roosevelt tried to push his conservation policy into the slipstream. He boasted about how smart he was to have Pinchot running the Forest Service out of Agriculture (not Interior). To Roosevelt, Pinchot remained a golden boy who could do no wrong. Roosevelt believed that under Pinchot’s stewardship the U.S. Forest Service was intensely engaged in making sure all western reserves resources contributed mightily to the “permanent prosperity of the people who depend upon them.” Western entrepreneurs lambasted Roosevelt and Pinchot’s forest reserve policies as socialism, but the president believed his administration’s foresight guaranteed future jobs to stockmen, miners, lumbermen, railroad employees, and small ranches. And it was helping to end rural water shortages. If the western forests were destroyed, there would be no water, and cities would become ghost towns.

  Furthermore, Roosevelt believed that Pinchot was doing a superb job of finding innovative ways to put out wildfires, both man-made and natural, which swept over the West in the summertime. He deserved an ovation. Wildfires were most common in zones where the terrain was moist for nine months of the year but then became extremely dry from July through September, creating a tinderbox. When scrub, leaves, twigs, or branches dried out, they became highly flammable. Entire national forests could be transformed almost instantly into smoldering mulch. Sometimes farmers would use fire (circumscribed burning) to clear land. This was often necessary, but it was dangerous. If a light wind picked up the flames and sparks jumped, they could cause an uncontrollable wildfire. Lightning fires were another problem for the dense forests and wind-beaten sagebrush of the West. An entire forest reserve could disappear in a few days. The chaparral in southern California and the lower-elevation deserts in the Southwest were particularly vulnerable to wildfires. Then, of course, there was human carelessness, as well as arson.68

  What Roosevelt had on his hands in 1906, however, was a feud between forest rangers and stockmen in the western wildlands. To reduce tension Roosevelt formed Forest Service advisory committees aimed at enlightening ranchers on why a steady stream flow and reservoirs were directly correlated with more grass for grazing. Forest rangers were their friends, not the enemy. Meanwhile, the USDA’s Biological Survey increased its predator control, teaching ranchers that poisoning coyotes was smart but shooting insect-eating songbirds was a mistake.

  “There is therefore no longer an excuse for saying that the reserves retard the legitimate settlement and development of the country,” Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot in a letter intended for public distribution. “The forest policy of the Government in the West has now become what the West desired it to be. It is a national policy, wider than the boundaries of any State, and larger than the interests of any single industry. Of course it cannot give any set of men exactly what they would choose. Undoubtedly the irrigator would often like to have less stock on his watersheds, while the stockman wants more. The lumberman would like to cut more timber, the settler and the miner would often like him to cut less. The county authorities want to see more money coming in for schools and roads, while the lumberman and stockman object to the rise in the value of timber and grass. But the interests of the people as a whole are, I repeat, safe in the hands of the Forest Service. By keeping the public forests in the public hands our forest policy substitutes the good of the whole people for the profits of the privileged few. With that result none will quarrel except the men who are losing the chance of personal profit at the public expense.”69

  What made Roosevelt so powerful when working to save western ranchlands was that he was speaking from firsthand knowledge. Insofar that landscapes were left to cowboys, places like Texas would be vulcanized into barren zones of burnt grass, as if vast acreage had been shaved by a giant razor. In 1905 Roosevelt had his Public Land Commission issue an alarming report based on data collected by a team of experts. “The general lack of control in the use of public grazing lands has resulted, naturally and inevitably, in overgrazing and the ruin of millions of acres of otherwise valuable grazing territory,” the report said. “Lands useful for grazing are losing their only capacity for productiveness, as, of course, they must when no legal control is exercised.”70 But as the historian Deanne Stillman noted in Mustang, this dire report was ignored by western Congressmen as taste-curdling U.S. federal government babble and “the range got worse.” 71

  X

  The fall of 1906 was the first occasion when Roosevelt was able to spend much time at Pine Knot that year. The timing of his visit to Virginia was simple: November 1 was the opening of the wild turkey hunting season in Virginia. Arriving on Halloween, Theodore and Edith stayed for the better part of five days at Pine Knot. The woodsy retreat made Roosevelt immediately content. Being in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the leaves were turning to dazzling fall colors, was sheer joy to the president. He had been consumed with the Cuban revolt, trust-busting, labor disputes, the Panama Canal, Indian matters, and a congressional election, and the thought of bagging a wild turkey for supper was a great relief from these pressures. The hunt was hosted by his friend Dick McDaniel, and the word around Charlottesville-Keene was that the wild turkeys were plentiful. A few well-intentioned local farmers tried to secretly stock plump turkeys on Roosevelt’s Pine Knot property to make the president’s hunt a guaranteed success. But word leaked out, and the scheme was aborted. Traipsing about the woods at Pine Knot, a local physician showed the president to a fine covey of quail in a clearing. Roosevelt waved him off. “I want,” he said imperiously, “bigger game than that!”

  Whenever possible Roosevelt fled the White House to spend time at his rustic cabin, Pine Knot, near Charlottesville-Keene, Virginia.

  T.R. races off to Pine Knot. (Courtesy of the Edith and Theodore Roosevelt Pine Knot Foundation)

  On November 4 Roosevelt got his bird. The Washington Post and the New York Times had articles about the wild turkey’s weight and colors.72

  Never before had Roosevelt eaten a turkey that tasted as fine as this one. Free from the White House’s tedious schedule, he enjoyed the simple nearby things at Pine Knot. Relieved of encumbrances, he wrote enthusiastic letters about the game bird to both his son Kermit and old Bill Sewall in Maine.73 In 1907, Roosevelt wrote an essay about the wild turkey hunt, “Small Country Neighbors,” for Scribner’s Magazine. As a literary effort the piece stylistically recalled “Sou’-Sou’-Southerly,” written twenty-seven years earlier, or something in a publication of the Boone and Crockett Club. “Small Country Neighbors” was a celebration of the American simple life: a turkey hunt, fresh vegetables, a small cabin or hut in the woods, a tent on the shore. Roosevelt wrote: “Each morning I left the house between three and five o’clock, under a cold, brilliant moon. The frost was heavy; and my horse shuffled over the frozen ruts…. It was interesting and attractive in spite of the cold. In the night we heard the quavering screech owls…. At dawn we listened to the lusty hammering of the big logcocks, or to the curious coughing or croaking sound of a hawk before it left its roost.”74

  The exaltation of hunting wild turkeys—and killing one—in the crisp air got Roosevelt thinking again about the Appalachians. He very much wanted to create an eastern forest reserve in the Blue Ridge Mountains to match the vast western reserves in the Rockies. But this idea was akin to heresy in West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. In 1901, in his First Annual Message, Roosevelt had proposed such an eastern forest reserve to Congress. He wanted it to include vast parts of the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee–North Carolina. Congress, however, had refused. By late 1902 Roosevelt had grown extremely frustrated that both Democratic and Republican politicians were hindering his plan for an eastern reserve. He wanted to strangle them. The nonauthoritarian part of being pr
esident—i.e., working with Congress—annoyed him no end. With regard to natural resource management before the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt’s authoritarianism was often foiled in the legislative process. “I should like to see the Government purchase and control the proposed great South Appalachian preserve,” he wrote to a friend, “but there are very grave practical difficulties in the way.” 75

  From his correspondence during the fall of 1906, it is clear that Roosevelt was deeply worried about the survival of the Blue Ridge Mountains if unregulated timbering persisted. Too many farmers in Virginia were wasting soil, water resources, and forestlands along the James River. Human greed never ceased to amaze Roosevelt. Studying the Round Rock depot outside Charlottesville one afternoon, taking a casual inspection stroll as he’d done as New York’s police commissioner, surrounded by green walls of trees, Roosevelt saw that once-pristine forests were girdled, and chopped-up trunks were piled high in lumberyards along the tracks. How utterly unnecessary and regrettable the scene was. To Roosevelt, cutting trees in the Blue Ridge to make room for the plow was a good thing. But massacring mile upon mile of land just for lumber was criminal, as was companies’ refusal to replant. “American consumption of lumber was greater than ever before,” the historian Roy M. Robbins writes in Our Landed Heritage. “It was estimated in 1905, that to supply the Portland [Oregon] mills alone, 80 acres of timber had to be cut every twenty-four hours.”76 The situation was just as bad—if not worse—in Virginia.