Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  Regional one-upmanship is inevitable in these types of talks, and Erin lands a few good-natured jabs. “How many of you are from Texas? I know you all think everything’s bigger in Texas, but see those large rocks over there?” she asks, pointing to a sprawling pile of boulders on our right. “We Coloradoans call that gravel.” She also puts Delaware in its place. “You can fit the entire state in Pike National Forest,” she says.

  Erin also directs our attention to the various trees along the way: blue spruces, Douglas firs, ponderosa pines, and quaking aspens, whose bark, we learn, can be rubbed on the skin to prevent sunburn. “It has a natural SPF of seven,” she informs us. There are also some two-thousand-year-old bristlecone pines, mere babes in the woods, I think, compared with the dearly departed Prometheus.

  By the time we reach 10,000 feet (we left at 6,320), the temperature has plunged substantially. Windbreakers and sweaters are being pulled out of backpacks and handbags, and Erin starts walking up and down the train making sure everyone is doing all right and answering questions. I ask her what types of dangers hikers would have encountered back in the 1850s.

  “There were—and still are—black bears, mountain lions, and poisonous snakes, but the weather would have been the greatest threat,” she says. “It can be warm and sunny one moment, then a blizzard can come in before you know it.”

  I’m about to ask her about J. A. Archibald, whom she hasn’t mentioned, but a teenage girl gets Erin’s attention, and I miss my chance.

  While Archibald was motivated mostly by the thrill of discovery and not wealth when setting out with the Lawrence party from Kansas, there was one other goal, and it was fully realized at the top of Pikes Peak. “I have accomplished the task which I marked out for myself,” Archibald wrote home on August 5, 1858,

  and now I feel amply repaid for all my toil and fatigue. Nearly everyone tried to discourage me from attempting it, but I believed I should succeed; and now, here I am, and I feel that I would not have missed this glorious sight for anything at all.

  In all probability I am the first woman who has ever stood upon the summit of this mountain and gazed upon this wondrous scene which my eyes now behold.

  How I sigh for the poet’s power of description, so that I might give you some faint idea of the grandeur and beauty of the scene.

  At a time when even other women—see “Middleton, Mrs. Robert,” above—disparaged the suffragists, Julia Anna Archibald Holmes (she often dropped her married name in her letters and journals) became one more irrefutable example that women could achieve whatever men could.

  To some degree, they had to be tougher. Female explorers were often ostracized and denigrated by their male peers (one of Archibald’s fellow travelers fumed in a letter home about being stuck with “strong willed women and weak-minded men”), their clothing was traditionally less suitable for rugged travel than garments worn by men (the most scandalous and politically radical aspect of Archibald’s journey was her dressing in pantlike “bloomers”), and they had to constantly guard against sexual assault and harassment. No accounts suggest that Archibald was subjected to either, but she modestly alluded to her appeal among the Native Americans. “One Indian wanted to trade [me for] two squaws,” she wrote, while others “approaching the wagon made signs for me to jump behind them on their ponies.” Archibald declined with a polite shake of the head. (I’ve only seen one picture of her, and in my opinion she looks like the movie star Julia Roberts.)

  Memorials nationwide pay homage to Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, and Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s indispensable Shoshone guide, all of whom charted new trails at enormous risk. But Julia Archibald remains largely forgotten, along with dozens of other intrepid women. Amanda Berry Smith, a former slave, crisscrossed four continents in the late nineteenth century as a missionary and educator, and her autobiography contains some of the earliest writings by any American on customs and daily life in remote African villages. Inspired by her globe-trotting father, Hawaiian-born Annie Montague Alexander traveled almost nonstop gathering fossils and hunting live animals for scientific study. She donated her massive collection along with considerable funding to create the Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, both in Berkeley, California. While Alexander was digging up bones and shooting wild animals (the Alaskan bear Ursus alexandrae is named after her), botanist Ynes Mexia was logging thousands of miles in Mexico and South America collecting 150,000 plant specimens. And in the spirit of Julia Archibald, a fifty-eight-year-old mountaineer named Annie Smith Peck was the first person of either gender to summit Peru’s 22,205-foot Mount Huascarán. A year later, in 1909, she planted a VOTES FOR WOMEN banner atop Peru’s Mount Coropuna.

  In her August 5 letter from Pikes Peak’s summit, Archibald lamented her inability to adequately convey the “beauty and grandeur” around her. Thirty-four years later, a Wellesley College professor followed in Archibald’s footsteps on July 22, 1893, and articulated the sentiments that had so eluded her predecessor. “It was then and there [on Pikes Peak],” Katharine Lee Bates recalled, “as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Bates immediately began jotting down verses. Unsatisfied, though, with her first draft, she tinkered with it for two years before publishing the poem. “O beautiful for halcyon skies,” it began,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountains majesties

  Above the enameled plain!

  America! America!

  God shed his grace on thee

  Till souls wax fair as earth and air

  And music-hearted sea!

  Bates revised it several times before finalizing the version of “America the Beautiful” we sing today. A giant, three-paneled memorial at the summit pays tribute to Bates, but there’s no mention of Archibald anywhere.

  When our train left this morning the temperature was in the high seventies. Here it’s in the low fifties. My T-shirt provides little protection against the stinging wind, and in no time I’m shivering so hard that I can barely hold my camera steady. There’s at least another five minutes to go before we’re supposed to be back on the train (“If you’re late, you’ll be left behind,” Erin cheerfully warned us), and I doubt I’ll be able to return here anytime soon. So this is really my only chance to photograph this historic view and fully take in the moment.

  My teeth start chattering uncontrollably. I think of Julia Archibald spending two whole freezing nights up here and try to convince myself to tough it out for the remaining few minutes.

  Another blast of cold air whips across the observation deck. Instinctively my shoulders hunch, and I cross my arms tightly against my chest. That does it for me. With head and pride hung low, I bolt for the train.

  MADISON GRANT’S RESIDENCE

  [We] feel deeply the loss of our beloved President, Madison Grant.… No more will his familiar figure be seen among us. Around our council fires we shall sadly miss his ready wit, his wise decisions, and the inspiration to spur us on to high endeavor. Yet, believing with the poet that they who dwell in our hearts never die, we shall, like the Norsemen of old, carry him with us to the halls of Valhalla.…

  Let us carve on the tablets of memory the Saga of Madison Grant.

  —From Madison Grant’s obituary, written by Frederick Russell Burnham for the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite group of hunters founded by Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and other avid outdoorsmen

  NO MAJOR TRIBUTES were ever carved on “the tablets of memory” for Madison Grant commensurate with his lifelong dedication to saving America’s wilderness. No bronze plaques mark the homes in which Grant lived, and there are no mountains, valleys, glaciers, parks, hospitals, trails, or highways named in his honor. (There is a Madison Grant elk refuge somewhere in California’s Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, paid for by his brother after Grant died in 1937, but when I called the park, no one on staff had heard of it.)
Nor is the Madison-Grant High School in Fairmount, Indiana, related to the man; Madison and Grant, a school administrator informed me, are simply the town’s two neighboring counties. Whatever public memorials to Grant do exist are so obscure as to be essentially invisible.

  Grant’s name first came to my attention while I was researching the pantheon of nature lovers who led America’s nascent conservation and preservation movements. (Although the words are often used interchangeably now, they weren’t originally synonymous: conservation meant the responsible management of wild habitats to ensure their long-term sustainability for the benefit of humans, especially hunters and fishermen, while preservation was about safeguarding these places for their own sake. The modern environmental movement is more closely associated with the latter.) And I was struck by how many of them were city boys, and, specifically, native New Yorkers. Along with Grant, the prestigious group included President Teddy Roosevelt; Wilderness Society founder Bob Marshall, who has a million-acre Montana preserve named for him; artist William Henry Jackson, whose 1871 photographs of Yellowstone galvanized congressional support for the national parks and who has Jackson Point in the Grant Tetons and Mount Jackson in Yellowstone named in his honor; and anthropologist and naturalist George Bird Grinnell, who has a mountain and a glacier in Montana dedicated to him. Grinnell founded the Audubon Society in 1886 and was an early advocate of saving the American bison.

  Pulling the bison back from the precipice of extinction is, in particular, one of the most extraordinary reversals in preservation history. An iconic photograph from the 1880s shows a gigantic mound, about forty feet tall and several hundred feet around, of what appear to be bright white rocks. Its size can be roughly estimated by the two unidentified gentlemen in dark suits posing next to and on top of it. What the men are posing with, in fact, is a small mountain made entirely of the skulls of slaughtered bisons.

  Tens of millions of these animals once populated North America, but by the early 1900s, a mere one thousand of them remained. Ranchers and railroad companies wiped them out in droves to prevent the massive beasts from trampling their property, and hunters shot and sold them for their meat, hides (to make robes), tongues (considered a delicacy), bones (to be ground up into fertilizer), and horns (for umbrella handles).

  At the forefront of the bison-rescue effort was Madison Grant. Working with Grinnell, Teddy Roosevelt, and the New York Zoological Society director William Hornaday, Grant was instrumental in establishing the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Montana’s National Bison Range, South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Game Preserve, and Nebraska’s Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge as safe havens for the animals. There are now approximately half a million bison in America.

  Despite his role in raising critical funds, helping to organize the American Bison Society, and educating Congress and the public about the animal’s urgent plight, Grant has been largely ignored. Partly this was his own fault. According to his acquaintances, Grant was a modest soul who gave few newspaper interviews and was quite content to let Grinnell, Roosevelt, and Hornaday garner the lion’s share of attention.

  A later battle for imperiled redwood trees, however, drew Grant front and center. “The impending destruction of these forests is the most serious question confronting California in the effort for the preservation of some portion of her vast inheritance,” Grant warned in the June 1920 issue of National Geographic. He then expounded on the history of the redwoods and their irreplaceable environmental and aesthetic worth. “The cutting of a Sequoia for grape stakes or railroad ties,” Grant argued,

  is like breaking up one’s grandfather’s clock for kindling to save the trouble of splitting logs at the woodpile or lighting one’s pipe with a Greek manuscript to save the trouble of reaching for the matches.

  After the fall of the Roman Empire the priceless works of classic art were “needed” for lime, and statues by Phidias and Praxiteles were slaked down for this purpose; but the men who did it are today rightly regarded as “vandals and barbarians.”

  At the end of the seventeen-page spread, Grant emphasized the “sentimental considerations” for ensuring the redwoods’ survival. “No one who has seen these groves,” he stated confidently, “can fail to love them.”

  Sentimentality itself must have momentarily gotten the better of Grant because he knew this wasn’t true. Plenty of logging executives had visited these same woods and seen only a cash crop. Gold lured the first wave of prospectors to California in the 1850s, but the “Redwoods Rush” that followed was equally (if not more) profitable. Within three decades, hundreds of sawmills had popped up in the region to cut and grind giant redwoods into lumber that was prized for both its beauty and its durability. From cradle to casket, the booming American population was dependent on redwood-based products, furniture, buildings, and homes. In the early 1900s, 95 percent of the original forests were leveled, and the timber barons themselves were predicting that, to meet demand, the rest would be gone within sixty years.

  Aghast at such a notion, Grant co-founded the Save the Redwoods League in 1918 with the paleontologists John C. Merriam and Henry Fairfield Osborn and proposed that the federal government use eminent domain to protect the trees, which all grew on private property. Grant, however, experienced staunch resistance to this suggestion, even among the League’s own board of directors.

  Then he had a brainstorm: Grant would appeal to his wealthy friends and colleagues to purchase from the landowners parcels of forests, or “memorial groves” as Grant called them, that would be maintained by the Save the Redwoods League in perpetuity. John C. Phillips, a Grant acquaintance who also served on the League’s board, agreed to buy a thirty-five-acre grove as a tribute to his brother-in-law Colonel Raynal C. Bolling, the first high-ranking officer killed in World War I. “Colonel Bolling and his comrades dedicated their lives to their country,” Grant remarked in a moving speech at the August 6, 1921, ceremony. “Let us dedicate ourselves to the task of keeping and preserving in its natural beauty a country which is worth fighting for.” There are now almost one thousand of these memorial groves representing more than one million acres of redwood forests.

  The corner of Seventy-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan hardly looks like an epicenter for America’s early environmental movement, but it was from his home at 960 Fifth Avenue, as well as his office at the New York Zoological Society (which he cofounded and which is now the Bronx Zoo), that Madison Grant worked day and night to save endangered lands and species.

  Had he wished, he could have lived a life of pampered self-indulgence. Born about a half mile from here into enormous wealth and privilege, Grant was educated by private tutors and traveled the world before attending Yale University, from where he was graduated with honors, and Columbia Law School.

  “What’s going on, my friend?” a burly doorman asks me after I’ve paced back and forth in front of the stately Upper East Side residence a few times to verify the address and find the best angle from which to photograph the building. I realize my wandering to and fro probably makes it seem like I’m casing the joint.

  “I’m traveling the country looking for unmarked historical sites,” I explain, “and this is one of them.”

  “Just don’t shoot any of the people coming in or out,” he says.

  I assure him I will not.

  Grant died here on May 30, 1937. Despite suffering from acute arthritis, up until the end of his life he was planning a trip to attend a conservation seminar in Berlin and exerting considerable energy helping newly created international organizations rescue species around the world at risk of dying out. His participation was critical in protecting, among many other animals, Sudanese white rhinos, koalas, African elephants, South African mountain zebras, and tortoises from the Galápagos Islands.

  Unmarried, Grant had no children to promote his legacy, and while alive he was more comfortable advancing the issues he held dear, rather than himself. Though mostly forgotten now, he did not die in complet
e obscurity. “MADISON GRANT, 71, ZOOLOGIST IS DEAD—SAVED REDWOOD TREES,” a long, glowing New York Times obituary announced. “Mr. Grant was born at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-third Street on Nov. 19, 1865,” the obituary continued. “Finding it unnecessary to earn a living, Mr. Grant turned a childhood interest in wild life into practical use. He first took up field zoology and then explored the scientific field of the higher forms of wild life [… and] is credited with the discovery of a number of North American mammals.”

  The obituary also listed many of Grant’s numerous accomplishments, including an assortment of publications he either contributed to or authored.

  Before flying off to visit Grant’s redwoods in Humboldt, California, and then a residential facility in Sonoma Valley for people with developmental disabilities, I purchase a now out-of-print book by Grant to better comprehend his perspective on humanity and the natural world. It’s a dense and academic work, not exactly light airplane reading, but it does help me understand why, despite Grant’s Herculean efforts to preserve lands and wildlife that still bring a sense of wonder to millions, there’s been no real push to build statues or memorials hailing him as a great and honorable man.