Cinder Cone was particularly striking for its complexity of color. At least five lava flows had occurred at the site, giving the cone a multihued, unweathered surface. Whereas Lassen Peak offered the exquisite beauty of Mount Shasta, Cinder Cone seemed unassuming but was a menacing geological freak. Cross-country skiers were easily fooled: under the silent snow of winter, Cinder Cone was a fiery inferno of red-hot lava—a fact best not forgotten. At night over Cinder Cone, the stars shone with a brightness that pierced through the dark clouds which often hung overhead. But at any given moment, pillars of fire could shoot like a dragon’s breath high into the sky from this volcanic hazard, washing away the dwarfish evergreen forests in a cataclysmic sweep of lava—nature at its most brutal. Someday, scientists would have to more fully analyze the paleomagnetic reason for this.
On May 22, 1915, such an event happened at Lassen Peak National Monument, the crossroads of three biological provinces: the Cascades, Sierras, and Great Basin desert.39 After 27,000 years of dormancy, the volcano erupted, spewing rivers of lava and blowing dark ash all the way to Reno. An avalanche turned trees into debris. The dramatic scene became known as the “Great Explosion.” The only other U.S. volcano to erupt in the twentieth century was Mount Saint Helens, on May 18, 1980; this eruption was triggered by a 5.1 earthquake. A thousand years may pass before Lassen Peak or Mount Saint Helens erupts again—or it could happen next year, or tomorrow. That’s part of the mysterious appeal of such sites. As for Lassen Peak and Cinder Cone, they were upgraded to national park status in 1916 as a single unit under the Department of the Interior. Lassen Volcanic National Park is considered by many the hidden gem of the California eco-system.
IV
That June 10, 1907, President Roosevelt, with the Antiquities Act a success, delivered a major address on conservation before the National Editorial Association in Jamestown, Virginia. Roosevelt was appealing to the newspaper world’s better nature. The core of the grim problem, the president explained, was that America lacked “foresight” in managing natural resources. Factories polluted the air. Rivers had been turned into cesspools. Lakes were fished out. Crops weren’t being rotated. Deforestation without even a slight thought for the future was occurring in county after county. What a dump America could become! In a combination of defiance, humility, schoolmarmish lecturing, and guilt, Roosevelt pleaded with his hundreds of listeners to start a conservation revolution befitting the twentieth century. Journalists had a serious responsibility to the nation to shed light on the problem. By not covering his agenda for national forests they were in effect entering a suicide pact.
There was genuine passion in Roosevelt’s remarks. Moreover, he had chosen an ideal venue for this address. At Jamestown, where in 1607 settlers had established the first permanent English colony in the New World, Roosevelt could present himself as an advocate of conservation for the long term. A group known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities was trying to save 22½ acres of the historic sites made famous by Captain John Smith and Pocahontas—some of these places had a real connection to Smith and Pocahontas; others were imagined to have such a connection. The group hoped to generate future tourism. But there was a problem in Jamestown: insidious erosion by the James River was eating away at the historic village. By visiting Jamestown, where red and white mulberry trees had been planted by the first settlers, Roosevelt was sending a strong conservationist message, which included both preservation of antiquities and national forestry. “We have tended to live with an eye single to present, and have permitted the reckless waste and destruction of much of our National wealth,” he said. “The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem in our National life.”40
But at this time Roosevelt also continued to push forward his reclamation projects. That same spring of 1907, Roosevelt appointed an Inland Waterways Commission to analyze America’s river systems, the development of water power, flood control, and land reclamation. To Roosevelt national monuments were his left punch and reclamation was his right punch. Together they formed the “Roosevelt Doctrine” of conservation. What they had in common was his fervent belief that the federal government, not individuals or corporations, was the best steward of the land. And what both sides of the debate admitted was that water was king. Therefore, everybody thought Roosevelt’s Inland Waterways Commission made perfect sense. It was perhaps the one thing Roosevelt did in 1907 that wasn’t contentious.
That September, shortly before Roosevelt left to take a journey for the Inland Waterways Commission down the Mississippi River, little Skip died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill. He had been a poem of a dog. The president had owned many pets, but none were as special as Skip. Nights at Sagamore Hill had often found Roosevelt reading history and novels with a snoring Skip in his lap or at his side. They had constituted a harmonious blending of two spirits into one. “We mourn dear little Skip,” Roosevelt wrote to Archie, “although perhaps it was as well the little doggie should pass painlessly away, after his happy little life.” 41
At the end of September, President Roosevelt headed to Iowa for a journey on the Mississippi River. His wife had traveled down the Mississippi in the yacht Mayflower from Vicksburg to New Orleans earlier that year. It was now his turn. Fulfilling an old dream, getting to play at being a riverboat captain, the president lived on a steamboat for four days (October 1–4). His enthusiasm for the trip was inexhaustible. Boarding the boat in Keokuk, Iowa, he was joined by the former congressman John Lacey, Gifford Pinchot, and other friends. It was the finest company imaginable, and piquant and witty remarks were the main fare. But no matter how interesting the conversation was, Roosevelt reserved the presidential prerogative of abruptly turning his head (like a lizard following the course of a fly) whenever an usual bird or a driftwood log appeared. The Mississippi was both the spiritual heart and the economic backbone of America. Roosevelt knew that a tree branch thrown into the Mississippi in Minnesota would float away toward Davenport, Cairo, Greenville, and Natchez; would reach the Gulf of Mexico and go past his bird rookeries and then around the Florida Keys; and might eventually be found by a fisherman in Senegal or Ghana.
Officially, this was an inspection trip on behalf of Roosevelt’s Inland Waterways Commission. Incredibly to Roosevelt, who liked infrastructure improvements to be made quickly, the Mississippi River levees, which had ruptured and collapsed in the flood of 1882, still weren’t properly fixed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was trying to control the wild waterway, but with only limited success. There was some repair activity: wing dams were being erected to deflect the strong current, and dikes were being built. But, as Twain had prophesied in Life of the Mississippi, the riverfront communities would “get left” to ruins the next time the spring rains were heavy.42 (That is precisely what happened in 1912, 1913, 1927, and beyond.) Nevertheless, sounding like James B. Eads, Roosevelt promoted river engineering over wild, scenic nature for the sake of enhanced commerce on the Mississippi River. Commerce ruled the river. Barges were the gods. The entire Mississippi watershed, Roosevelt believed, needed to be treated as a single unit from sources to stream mouths. Full coordination between the Army Corps of Engineers, Reclamation Service, Forestry Bureau, Division of Soils, Geodetic Survey, and Mississippi River Commission had to commence at once if there was to be even a remote chance of containing the Mississippi.43
The river floods were terrible, but Roosevelt liked to brag that the Mississippi Delta had the richest soil in the world. He believed that wherever a Mississippi levee system was built properly, and fears of flooding were removed, the delta would become densely populated, and Memphis and Baton Rouge would become huge transportation hubs. But if the levees weren’t secure, if the Mississippi was allowed to rampage, then settlements like Cape Girardeau or Helena would become shells of their former selves. “At present the possibility of such flood is a terrible deterrent to settlement,” Roosevelt lamented, �
��for when the Father of Waters breaks his boundaries he turns the country for a breadth of eighty miles into one broad river, the plantations throughout all this vast extent being from five to twenty feet under water.”44
Meanwhile, there was plenty of horseplay and suspender snapping aboard the steamer. Every dinner of catfish, hush puppies, and wine was accompanied by bursts of laughter. Churning down the Mississippi, paddle wheel grinding on and on, naturally caused the men to think of Fink, Shreve, Grant, Pike, and all the rest associated with the river called the “Father of Waters.” It was fun to watch Pinchot plucking his thick mustache as he told comical anecdotes about his trips to the west coast conifer forests. And each town they passed was of historical interest: Hannibal, Quincy, Saint Louis, Sainte Genevieve, Osceola. All the way to Memphis, Tennessee, the USS Mississippi churned, past old Native American mounds, modern locks, and earthen levees built in ancient times.
Formally attired, wearing his top hat on the deck, sitting in a rocking chair and reading Inland Waterways Commission reports until the aperitif hour, Roosevelt prepared for his big address to the Great Lakes–to–Gulf Deep Waterway Association in Memphis. Basically, Roosevelt’s speech in Memphis on October 5 was a rehash of his conservationist address at Jamestown earlier that year. That October, in fact, marked Roosevelt’s last reclamation project, in Oakland, California. Pinchot had cleverly suggested that in May 1908 Roosevelt hold a White House Governors’ Conference to tackle all of America’s serious natural resources issues. Without hesitation Roosevelt agreed. “It ought to be among the most important gatherings in our history,” Roosevelt said, “for none have had a more vital question to consider.” Staying in Memphis for only an evening, Roosevelt left the Peabody Hotel, a mid-South institution, for a stroll to the house where Ulysses S. Grant lived before the siege of Vicksburg.
President Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot conferring about conservation while traveling down the Mississippi River in October 1907.
T.R. and Pinchot. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Roosevelt liked the feel of Memphis and how the Chickasaw bluffs rose dramatically several hundred feet along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. The bluffs afforded protection from floods and access to river commerce. When the Civil War began in 1861 about 1,000 steamboats had plied the river. Now, owing to the advent of railroad traffic, there were far fewer river vessels. But Roosevelt didn’t pine for the steamboat era, per se. His romanticism was always tilted more toward horseback riding on the prairie. With his type A personality, he didn’t like being confined on a boat. It made him feel antsy, and also helpless—the very thought of boiler explosions, snags, and sandbars made him restless. He was proud that his great-great uncle Nicholas Roosevelt, a gifted associate of the inventor Robert Fulton, had been the first to steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the New Orleans, traversing thousands of miles before the vessel reached its namesake city and anchored across from The Cabildo (where the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803, doubling the size of America).45
Following his speech in Memphis, Roosevelt headed by train to Stamboul, a hamlet in East Carroll Parish, Louisiana. Stamboul was known for its cypress timber, for its pecan trees, and—henceforth—for President Roosevelt’s having set foot there.46 As usual, Dr. Alexander Lambert was at Roosevelt’s side, this time along with two other physicians. Originally Roosevelt was hoping to meet Reverend Herbert K. Job to inspect the Breton Island Federal Bird Reservation, and then to visit Avery Island, which had become a privately managed nursery for the preservation of egrets.47 But time constraints forced him to settle for a hunt for black bears in northern Louisiana, a short way from the Mississippi River, with John M. Parker and John McIlhenny as his hosts in the canebrakes. Concerned about bad publicity (which he had received in Mississippi five years earlier), Roosevelt banned reporters and gawkers, and even the Secret Service men did not know where his camp was. When reporters followed Roosevelt around on such hunting trips, he saw them as mice looking for sensational copy so as to become rats.48
The ever-obliging John Parker took a chance in hiring the uncouth fifty-three-year-old pot hunter Ben Lilly as Roosevelt’s guide through the Tensas bayou wilderness in search of black bear. Lilly knew the extensive bottomlands of this part of the alluvial Mississippi Valley better than anyone else. By all accounts Lilly seldom washed; was scraggly, grizzled, and unkempt; and refused to sleep indoors—he preferred hollowed-out logs and switch cane. He had a full beard and intense, wild blue eyes, and was deemed a “goofy old coot” by Roosevelt because of his obsessive muttering. Roosevelt’s first impression of Lilly, when the guide arrived in camp dressed like a blacksmith, was a “religious fanatic.”49 As night began to lower, Roosevelt nevertheless strategized with Lilly about their best tracking options come morning. It was as if the president were testing uncertain ice. An early autumn cold had crept into camp, and the men were already getting sniffles and coughs. Roosevelt and Lilly stayed up late and talked about Louisiana black bear and water moccasins, enjoying each other’s openness of manner. “I never met any other man,” Roosevelt wrote, “so indifferent to fatigue and hardship.”50
Roosevelt, however, never fully warmed to Lilly. A wise man once said that a person (like Lilly) unable to live in society was either a beast or a god—and Lilly, raised a hunter, was clearly of the first type. But Roosevelt found the whole concept of a wild man anthropologically fascinating. Lilly was called the “most skilled hunter who ever followed a hound,” and he was hired throughout the Mississippi Delta to hunt (for a bounty) menacing bears or cougars who had destroyed livestock.51 Because the canebrakes grew ten to twelve feet high, it was difficult for hunters to see in front of themselves; hence the brakes were a fine cover for bears. Comparing Lilly to James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer in “woodcraft, in handihood, in simplicity—and also in loquacity,” Roosevelt began sketching Lilly’s character traits in rather psychologically complex prose for Scribner’s Magazine. It was unusual for Roosevelt to write in this way about people, but Lilly was so like an animal—the kind of man who knew how to die standing up—that he couldn’t resist. “The morning he joined us in camp, he had come on foot through the thick woods, followed by his two dogs, and had neither eaten nor drunk for twenty-four hours; for he did not like to drink the swamp water,” Roosevelt wrote. “It had rained hard throughout the night and he had no shelter, no rubber coat, nothing but the clothes he was wearing, and the ground was too wet for him to lie on; so he perched in a crooked tree in the beating rain, much as if he had been a wild turkey.”52
Rain fell all over the Delta that October. It was pouring on every stretch of the soggy plains, on the cottonfields, on Poverty Point all the way eastward across the Mississippi River to Port Gibson, and on the dark, sinuous Mississippi riptide. It was falling, too, on the federal cemetery on the bluff in Vicksburg, where Union and Confederate soldiers lay under marble slabs. It rained heavily on every interesting wildlife-rich area along the Tensas River bottomland hardwoods, open water pools, and old runs as Roosevelt’s party set up a tent camp near Bear Lake, everything turning into a dull mud.
The Roosevelt party was in the thickest patch of this hardwood habitat. Bottomland forests were rapidly being clear-cut for conversion into agricultural areas. So there was a sense that this was the “last” hunt. Garfish were caught. An alligator slid into the water, and a couple of crows pecked for food in a field. Black squirrels made a commotion in the trees, living in easy community with wood rats. The swamp rabbits were amphibious, behaving like muskrats. Bats bawked. Roosevelt described the snapping turtles he encountered as “fearsome brutes of the slime, as heavy as man, and with huge horny beaks that with a single snap could take off a man’s hand or foot.”53
The Louisiana Canebreak was a place where a man could die and not even be noticed. The fleas had disappeared, and even though winter was approaching, the oak trees weren’t bare. “Palmettos grow thickly in places,” Roosevelt
wrote. “The canebrakes stretch along the slight rises of ground, often extending for miles, forming one of the most striking and interesting features of the country. They choke out other growths, the feathery, graceful canes standing in ranks, tall, slender, serried, each but a few inches from his brother, and springing to a height of fifteen or twenty feet. They look like bamboos; they are well-nigh impenetrable to a man on horseback; even on foot they make difficult walking unless free use is made of the heavy bush-knife.”54
Clearly this fourteen-day hunt wasn’t a dignified sport like shooting quail in the sedge. Roosevelt grew perturbed when he was told that there were only four or five bears left in the Louisiana canebrakes (although bears were reported regularly in the more western parishes of Ouachita and Lincoln). As the world’s leading advocate of wildlife protection, Roosevelt could have called it quits and headed back to Memphis and the silk bedsheets of the Peabody Hotel. Instead he started insisting that the Mississippi tracker Holt Collier was needed lickety-split. Collier could definitely find a Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) in high water. It seemed that Roosevelt had entered the realm of fantasy, barking orders like a colonel while also imagining that he was the type of old-fashioned bayou character Mayne Reid had written about in The Boy Hunters. To understand Roosevelt’s hunt in the canebrakes, it is necessary to realize that he wasn’t after just any bear. He wanted a Louisiana black bear, distinguished by having a longer, narrower snout than most bears, and one of the sixteen recognized subspecies of black bears in America. Long ago this subspecies had been widespread from Mexico to Canada, but now it was dwindling under the pressure of human encroachment. Roosevelt wanted to shoot one to use for a museum display.
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