The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Early on, some critics of Roosevelt’s reservations at Klamath basin said that only a lunatic would have the audacity to declare Oregon’s tule land a breeding grounds for birds. As their argument went, this wasn’t Mount Rainier or Crater Lake but a swamp splotched with bird excrement! Other critics said that Roosevelt’s penchant for bird-watching was warped, occultism. Scoffing at such thinking, Roosevelt said that preserving the Pacific coast’s wildlife was democratic in spirit. There was nothing warped about protecting canvasback and white pelicans. In fact, he wanted to protect endangered birds all over American territory, from the eskimo curlews in Alaska to the whooping cranes in Michigan to parrots in Puerto Rico. That some fellow Americans couldn’t understand the inherent morality of species survival was troubling to Roosevelt. But so what? Before leaving the White House he planned to create even more than the twenty-five bird sanctuaries of 1903 to 1908. It was as if he had found in wildlife protection his autumnal passion. And he had Grover Cleveland’s famous “midnight reserves” to use as a presidential precedent.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE PRESERVATIONIST REVOLUTION OF 1908

  I

  Old John Muir could barely believe the stunning news. On January 9, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an unexpected proclamation designating a wondrous 295-acre strand of coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) as the Muir Woods National Monument in northern California.1 It was a magnificent tribute to the self-described “poetico-trampo-geologist.”2 Situated across the Golden Gate Bridge near Mill Valley in Marin County, Muir Woods was an ideal forest to honor the “sage of the Sierras.” The giant trees along Redwood Creek, each casting a hulking shadow on its way skyward, seemed a trenchant retort to the unchecked capitalism of the gilded age. Sunlight filtered down to create a living silence in the forest. This fine uncut coastal redwood strand had been donated to the federal government by William Kent, a wealthy disciple of Muir’s, originally from Chicago, who had purchased it in 1905 for $45,000.3 A businessman, philanthropist, and amateur naturalist (who would later be a congressman from California), Kent couldn’t stomach lumbermen clear-cutting the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais for a “few dirty dollars” and criminally depriving “millions of their birthright.”4

  Muir Woods was really something special. Eternity was somehow present in the delicate greenery of the redwood foliage, and the thick fog of the Pacific dripped into the forest offering moisture year-round. In fall, ladybugs swarmed Redwood Creek, and the big-leaf maples turned yellow. During the winter months, steelhead and silver salmon migrated up the creek to spawn. Sweet berries ripened in the springtime meadows, interspersed with a dazzling display of purple and pink wildflowers. In the Bohemian and Cathedral groves, visitors could see sequoias more than 250 feet high and fourteen feet in diameter.* Many were 2,000 years old or more. Because the rather slender redwoods had little resin, they were insect-resistant. They had survived windthrows, wildfires, and the march of progress. And although the coastal redwood trees were always the main year-round attraction at Muir Woods, the site wouldn’t have been complete without its stands of Douglas fir, tanbark oak, and bay laurel. On the forest floor, mushrooms often emerged after the frequent rain showers and helped regenerate the soil. For bird-watchers, there were squawking Steller’s jays, melodic thrashers, cawing ravens, and the “zree-zee-zee” of the golden-crowned kinglet. Around every bend there were spontaneous bird sounds piercing the divine silence. It was poetically appropriate that this wonder of biological diversity in California bore Muir’s imprint—a perfect confluence of place and name.

  Kent had stipulated that the forest be dedicated to Muir. Already in California, individual sequoias were named after great men: for example, General Grant in General Grant National Park and General Sherman in Sequoia National Park.5 Even burned, hollowed “goose pens” where early pioneers used to hide poultry often had individual names. Although Muir himself was deeply averse to the materialism and filthy lucre of his age, he nevertheless recognized that the national monument bearing his name was a gift only wealth could have bestowed. In California the words “John Muir” had become part of the land. Glaciers advanced and retreated, but Muir—and his woods—would last for the ages. “Saving these woods from the axe & saw, from money-changers & water-changers, & giving them to our country & the world is in many ways the most notable service to God & man I’ve heard of since my forest wanderings began,” Muir wrote to Kent with profound gratitude, “a much needed lesson and blessing to saint & sinner alike. That so fine divine a thing should have come out of money-mad Chicago! Wha wad a’thocht it! Immortal sequoia life to you.”6

  Except for naming a large swath of the Catskills the John Burroughs National Monument, little could have made Roosevelt happier than the gift of these California redwoods—one of the greatest accumulations of biomass in the world. Of the original 2 million acres of coastal redwoods in America, more than 80 percent had been logged; the sawmills’ blades had to slow down. But Roosevelt’s satisfaction with Muir Woods was also tinged by envy. Thus far in his illustrious career his only namesake in nature was a rare species of Olympic elk. “I have just received from Secretary Garfield your very generous letter enclosing the gift of Redwood Canyon to the National Government to be kept as a perpetual park for the preservation of the giant redwoods therein and to be named the Muir National Monument,” Roosevelt wrote to Kent. “You have doubtless seen my proclamation of January 9th, instantly creating this monument. I thank you most heartily for this singularly generous and public-spirited action on your part. All Americans who prize the undamaged and especially those who realize the literally unique value of the groves of giant trees, must feel that you have conferred a great and lasting benefit upon the whole country. I have a very great admiration for John Muir; but after all, my dear sir, this is your gift. No other land than that which you give is included in this tract of nearly 300 acres and I should greatly like to name the monument the Kent Monument if you will permit it.”7

  But Kent modestly declined the honor. He considered himself a mere instrument in the whole affair, and insisted that Muir’s name was a much worthier one for these woods. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your message of appreciation, and hope and believe it will strengthen me to go on in an attempt to save more of the precious and vanishing glories of nature for a people too slow of perception,” Kent replied to Roosevelt. “Your kind suggestion of a change of name is not one that I can accept. So many millions of better people have died forgotten, that to stencil one’s own name on a benefaction, seems to carry with it an implication of mandate immortality, as being something purchasable.” As for the Kent family name, he had “five good husky boys” to carry it forward. Should they fail to make something of themselves, Kent concluded, “I am willing it should be forgotten.”8

  Attached to Kent’s letter were exquisite photographs of the gargantuan trees at Muir Woods, which led Roosevelt to reflect on his own legacy. His oldest son, Ted, was a few months away from graduating from Harvard University. Like many fathers, the president realized that his brood had suddenly grown up on him. Kermit—little Kermit—was now almost six feet tall. Roosevelt wondered if he’d been as good a father as his own, Theodore Sr., had been. Why hadn’t he taken his boys to see Crater Lake or Key West or Mesa Verde? “Apparently, I have saved up more last year than I ever have before,” Roosevelt wrote to Douglas Robinson the day after establishing Muir Woods, “and I am mighty glad of it, for next year Ted will go out into the big world, and from that time right along the little birds will hop off one after another out of the nest.”9 It saddened him to recall that he had left both Ted and Kermit at home during his sojourn of 1903 to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt now resolved to bring his teenage boys along when he bivouacked in remote parts of Africa, Arizona, or the Amazon.

  Except for the pursuit of wealth, one’s legacy is often the strongest motivator for powerful figures. Everybody supposedly had at least one memorable ser
mon in him, and Roosevelt’s was American conservationism. He had far exceeded any other individual in U.S. history in his efforts to preserve the natural wonders of the West. But he was also uncomfortably aware that his preservationist accomplishments were geographically scattered and isolated, and that his objectives were still hobbled by a slow-moving legislative process. Roosevelt needed a better weapon against congressional lethargy in matters of conservation, and he found it in federal bird reservations, big game commons, and national monuments (as set forth by the Antiquities Act of 1906).

  Accustomed to pushing against limits, Roosevelt was determined to put the theoretical power of the “national monument” as a legislative maneuver to an audacious practical test. He wasn’t going to allow the size of a national monument to be a stumbling block with regard to the Grand Canyon. On January 11, 1908, just two days after the Muir Woods initiative, the president snatched the Grand Canyon from the preservation-versus-development debate by declaring it a national monument. His goal was straightforward: to save the Grand Canyon, unmarred. It was, by any measure, a bold step. Until then Roosevelt, with persistence, had put aside only monuments of limited acreage such as Devils Tower, El Morro, Montezuma Castle, the Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, Lassen Peak, Cinder Cone, and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. And Muir Woods had been a generous gift by Kent to the federal government; who could argue with such beneficence? But the Grand Canyon wasn’t a small site preserved for scientific interest, as stipulated by the Antiquities Act. This was 808,120 acres of mineral-rich land in Arizona, larger than some New England states. The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that “each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon.”10 This may be true, but only Roosevelt could claim, on a return visit to the canyon in 1913, that he was its presidential protector. “The importance of the canyon will likely outlive the parochial American idea of wilderness designation as world heritage site and mass tourism,” the historian Stephen J. Pyne surmised in How the Canyon Became Grand. “A place that can hold a score of Yosemite Valleys and in which Niagara Falls would vanish behind a butte, that could absorb the shock of American expansionism and democratic politics, that could transcend a century of intellectual inquiry from Charles Darwin to Jacques Derrida, has not exhausted its capacity to refract whatever light nature or humanity casts toward it provided a suitable overlook exists from which to view it.”11

  By 1908, Roosevelt’s characteristic impatience had made it difficult for him to abide by the old rules and wait for legislators to see the light. Most politicians of his day made backroom deals, but the supremely self-confident Roosevelt did most of his political maneuvering in full view of the public. He always welcomed scrutiny. He would just declare something and let the chips fall where they may. And if Congress and Arizonan lawyers were confused about the Grand Canyon’s irreplaceable aesthetic value, he would make them see it. If Congress was drowsy, Roosevelt was going to wake it up; if it was operating in the gutter, he was going to teach it to look at the stars. His job as president was to procure the most happiness for the most people. The Grand Canyon was a truth for all time, not to be denied to future generations—a holy spot.

  So Roosevelt abandoned noisy ideas and went for a premeditated fait accompli in northern Arizona. Purposely oblivious of the legal obstacles, Roosevelt aimed to evict the Kaibab Cattle Company, for example, from the scenic and scientifically invaluable area. In the nineteenth century, explorers such as Robert Stanton, John Hance, and William W. Bass had promoted the Grand Canyon as a magnet for tourists. As tourism increased, the calls for its becoming a national park did too. But Congress was too scared to move, worried about the reaction from miners and ranchers who were against any alteration that would limit their access to public land.12 As the historian Hal Rothman noted in Preserving Different Pasts, designating the Grand Canyon as a national monument allowed Roosevelt to “circumvent the fundamentally languid nature of congressional deliberation and instantaneously achieve results he believed were in the public interest.”13 When the dust cleared, the Grand Canyon was a national monument. More important, Roosevelt had conclusively demonstrated the elasticity—and thus the power—of the Antiquities Act, the new favorite instrument of the conservation movement. As Rothman put it, “no piece of legislation” had ever before (or since) “invested more power in the presidency,” than the Antiquities Act. The elastic clause “objects of historic or scientific interest” made it “an unparalleled tool” for Rooseveltian conservationism.14

  The Antiquities Act was to Roosevelt a contraption with which he could dictate land policy in the West, circumventing Congress. Nature may not have proceeded by leaps, but Theodore Roosevelt now did. Roosevelt claimed that those 800,000 acres of Arizona contained prehistoric ruins and hence had scientific value. True, there were ruins in the Grand Canyon, but only very meager ones. There was nothing to match Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, or Montezuma Castle. As for ethnographical research concerning the residents, the Havasupi were a dwindling tribe content with foraging around the Colorado River, as they had done since the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. Yet Roosevelt wasn’t wrong when he claimed this vast part of Arizona had ruins and had Indians. If the ruins were “diminutive by regional standards,” they nevertheless provided a political pretext for Roosevelt to invoke the Antiquities Act and remove the area for special protection within the public domain.15 As ex-president, in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, Roosevelt declared all of Arizona and New Mexico an anthropologist’s dreamland.16

  The apparent ease with which Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a national monument belied what a long slog it had actually been to save the site. Local opposition to such a huge national park at the Grand Canyon—particularly among corporate cattle, sheep, lumber, and mining outfits—was fierce. Communities surrounding the Grand Canyon, such as Flagstaff, Williams, and Peach Spring, saw the resource-rich proposed parklands as their own. The concept of a “monument,” they believed, was a shenanigan, which the courts would rule unconstitutional. Truth be told, their proprietary claims to parts of the canyon were not groundless. The federal government, after all, had encouraged these Arizona pioneers to displace the Hualapai and Havasupai, and to construct their own wagon roads and stagecoach lines. Over time, they had legally purchased grazing lands, mineral deposits, and spring holes. They had developed an interior network of trails at considerable cost. They had already constructed gateway villages along the approach to the Grand Canyon to welcome tourists. Now Roosevelt, disregarding the wishes of an adjourned Congress, was telling the pioneers to step aside for the Department of the Interior.

  For those Arizonans displaced by the Antiquities Act, Roosevelt could muster little sympathy. He saw only their greed or simplicity, and he firmly believed that when archaic land claims from the mid-nineteenth century clashed with the moral imperatives of the progressive era, morality must win out. Beyond that, however, this was a struggle between personal profit and the public good. The country’s future depended on the outcome. So he took a stand. The resources of the Arizona Territory belonged not to local residents only, but to all Americans. Arizonans would have to shake off ignorance and accept that the Grand Canyon was a national treasure. His former Rough Riders who lived in the territory had already done so.

  When Benjamin Harrison was a U.S. senator, after Reconstruction, he had introduced legislation in 1882, 1883, and 1886 to preserve the Grand Canyon as a “public park.” The bills had all perished in committee. When he became president, he used his new executive powers to create the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve. But Harrison’s legislation had allowed entrepreneurs to construct commercial monstrosities on the rim, and these had cheapened the canyon’s appeal. With hotels now appearing along the rims, and tourists arriving in unprecedented numbers by both road and rail, Roosevelt maintained no illusions that the Grand Canyon would remain completely “unmarred,” as he had called for in 1903. However, Roosevelt insisted that the north rim stay exactly as it had been when Spanish explorers first encountered it in the earl
y sixteenth century. He believed that by repeatedly refusing to declare the Grand Canyon a national park, Congress had thrust the responsibility for protecting it on his shoulders. This time, he wouldn’t give Congress a chance to stop him. Somebody had to change the old land-use ways for the new progressive ethos. As Mark Twain once quipped, Roosevelt may have been a “spotless” character, but he was always ready to “kick the Constitution into the back yard.”17

  Weighing the options presented to him by the Department of the Interior, Roosevelt decided to again implement the Antiquities Act of 1906, using it to confer national monument status on the Grand Canyon on January 11, 1908. In the following decades, Arizonan libertarians would claim (accurately) that the Antiquities Act had been intended only to preserve scientifically valuable sites of 5,000 acres or less, and that Roosevelt’s edict was an abuse of executive power. But regardless of the legality of Roosevelt’s maneuver, the Grand Canyon—the great American temple of nature—would never again return to private hands. From 1908 to 1918, even as the land-use status of the new national monument was hotly debated in both Arizona and Washington, D.C., the increasing tourist appeal of the Grand Canyon made its reprivatization politically unfeasible. The Grand Canyon finally became a national park by an act of Congress on February 26, 1919. The now legendary announcement came just a month after Roosevelt’s death. Furthermore, in 1975 President Gerald Ford passed the Grand Canyon Enlargement Act, placing the entire Colorado River corridor under the management of the National Park Service.18 In 1990, the area between Bright Angel Point and Cape Royal was renamed Roosevelt Point to honor the twenty-sixth president.19 And tourists come by the millions to experience what is now a World Heritage Site, just as Roosevelt predicted during his presidency. “To none of the sons of men,” Roosevelt wrote of his new national monument, “is it given to tell of the wonder and splendor of sunrise and sunset in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.”20