The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (85 page)

With this letter Roosevelt reentered the controversy over “nature fakers” yet again (even though Grinnell never leaked the letter to the press). Yellowstone, in general, had energized Roosevelt with regard to his responsibilities as a naturalist. Wandering with Oom John in the park had been good for his soul. On the way to Nebraska, Roosevelt retreated from the miasma of smoke in the dining car to ruminate about possibly breeding Impeyan pheasants to release in the Great Plains states.
⁵⁶

Meanwhile, Roosevelt enjoyed seeing the picture-postcard farms as his train rolled through counties that were almost larger than Rhode Island. Somewhere along a handsome open stretch of South Dakota the president once again met up with Seth Bullock, and the two rode around the Black Hills Forest Reserve and attended a cowboy show in Edgemont together. Eating at chuck wagons, talking to farmers about irrigation and tree farming, and petting a tamed buffalo, Roosevelt was certainly in his ele
ment. “The President unites in himself powers and qualities that rarely go together,” Burroughs wrote of Roosevelt after the Yellowstone trip. “Thus, he has both physical and moral courage in a degree rare in history. He can stand calm and unflinching in the path of a charging grizzly, and he can confront with equal coolness and determination the predaceous corporations and money powers of the country. He unites the qualities of the man of action with those of the scholar and writer—another very rare combination. He unites the instincts and accomplishments of the best breeding and culture with the broadest democratic sympathies and affiliations. He is as happy with a frontiersman like Seth Bullock as with a fellow Harvard man, and Seth Bullock is happy, too.”
⁵⁷

When President Roosevelt reached Omaha, 50,000 people were waiting to greet him in the swirling dust. Half a dozen horseless carriages were parked nearby, along with thousands of horses at hitching posts. People were scrunched together as if penned up in the Omaha stockyards, and there was an electric current in the air. According to the
Omaha Bee
, merchants in the midtown district and farmers in Douglas County were thrilled by the chance to glimpse a president in the flesh. All they usually got in Omaha was William Jennings Bryan. The overhanging eaves and second-story porches of Queen Anne homes on Wirt Street had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. The Cudahy Packing Company was also gussied up for the president, just in case he made a spontaneous inspection tour. But the ravages of deforestation were evident in this clattering railroad town: there was little greenery growing around the clapboard houses, and birds were in short supply. Construction and cattle seemed to matter most in Omaha.

Roosevelt challenged Nebraskans to start planting more trees and protect the original “scanty forests” of their state. He was proud that his executive orders of 1902, creating the Dismal River Forest Reserve and the Niobrara Forest Reserve, had already proved to be successful. Under Roosevelt’s executive orders, 70,000 jack pine seedlings from Minnesota and 30,000 ponderosa seedlings from the Black Hills had been planted that spring in Nebraska. Forest reserves in Nebraska were “good things,” as Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot, as long as “the homesteader or agricultural settler” wasn’t harmed.
⁵⁸
Certainly, prairie fires and the semiarid environment were a problem, but Roosevelt insisted that his treeless forest reserves would soon have an abundance of trees. He was right. In 1947, Pinchot, then near death, revisited the Nebraska National Forest (as the two sites were now collectively called) and declared it “one of the great successful tree-planting projects in the world.”
⁵⁹
That April Roosevelt at
tempted to explain the virtues of modern forestry to farmers. You might say he urged young Nebraskans to start playing Johnny Appleseed instead of Buffalo Bill. Then, it was back to the express train.

President Roosevelt enjoyed stocking his train compartment with only the essentials: toiletries, clean clothes, and a collection of John Burroughs’s books. His life was usually so full of clutter that he seemed to relish the enforced sparseness of train travel; his hectic world was reduced to the bare necessities. Known to tip generously, Roosevelt usually had a couple of porters in attendance outside his compartment, ready to fulfill his every wish. He spent many of his travel hours gazing from his open window. Often, the hamlets he saw resembled what we would recognize as Hollywood back-lot sets or exhibits in Dust Bowl museums. Whenever the train stopped at a depot, admirers swarmed the platform. Roosevelt never rejected a handshake, proud that his star was undimmed. A stenographer sometimes came into his compartment so that he could dictate a rambling letter to an ally or a foe. He did this often. The only time Roosevelt became rude was when he learned that a presidential missive of his hadn’t been delivered speedily. He reacted
immediately
to communication, and mail delays often triggered a presidential tantrum. One can imagine the joy with which Roosevelt would have used the Internet; his letters about his trips were like high-spirited blogs full of in-the-moment musings.

As a favor to John F. Lacey, his favorite congressman, Roosevelt ordered his Union Pacific train to make a stop in Oskaloosa, Iowa—Lacey’s hometown—on April 28. The previous year, Lacey had been reelected to Congress for the seventh time. Nobody in Washington, not even Roosevelt, had a longer, more distinguished career on behalf of wildlife protection than Lacey. Every aspect of Lacey’s career held special meaning to Roosevelt. He and Lacey walked around Oskaloosa together, with the congressman pointing out the sights; and Roosevelt christened a new YMCA building by giving a ten-minute speech in front of a hastily assembled crowd of 30,000.
⁶⁰
Lacey had urged Roosevelt to save the forestlands of Colorado, and he was now similarly animated about saving prehistoric ruins in New Mexico and Alaskan forest reserves. In terms of his personality, Lacey was what’s known in the Midwest as a “plain John”:
nothing
about his disposition spoke of a will to power or of narcissism. Yet Oskaloosans knew he was fiercely committed to conservation. As a boy, Lacey had played along the meandering streams of southeastern Iowa; his experiences might have come straight from James Whitcomb Riley’s idyllic poem “The Old Swimmin’ Hole.” But owing to deforestation, coal mining, and oil-natural gas drilling these old streams were virtually
dead, except for the occasional plump catfish and thick pockets of minnows. This environmental degradation sickened Lacey. “The trees had been felled and the springs had gone dry,” he complained. “The streams were gravelly beds, as dry as Sahara, except for a few hours after a big rain had converted them into muddy torrents.”
⁶¹

Hugging Lacey good-bye, Roosevelt headed to Keokuk, in the most southeastern part of Iowa. There he was met by the brother of William Hornaday, Calvin, who lived in that Mississippi River town. As a husbandry expert, Hornaday told the president about a new type of steel-link fence being manufactured by the Page Wire Fence Companion of Adrian, Michigan. The new wire had enough holding capability for bison. Immediately Roosevelt had the fencing acquired for both the New York Zoological Society and the National Zoological Park.
⁶²

Although the main event at Keokuk was Roosevelt’s pushing a big button to reopen John C. Hubinger’s factory (known for making starch), the president’s oratory near the tomb of the Sauk chief Keokuk in Rand Park generated the most lasting memory. Roosevelt liked everything about the town of Keokuk, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Des Moines rivers.

From there it was on to the greatest American confluence city—Saint Louis—where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers met. There, Roosevelt greeted former president Grover Cleveland. Together they participated in the dedication ceremonies at the World’s Fair, including a celebration honoring Thomas Jefferson. Roosevelt had little patience for Jeffersonian antifederalism, but he and Jefferson had at least one thing in common: acquiring large tracts of land. By 1909 Roosevelt had preserved more than 234 million acres of America—an area half the size of the Louisiana Purchase. Roosevelt never got the chance he hoped for to visit the American Bottoms around Cahokia, Illinois, where Jim Bridger used to camp. In Saint Louis, instead of preaching the gospel of conservation, Roosevelt concentrated on local road improvement. His worry was that farmers were becoming isolated from the city. “Roads,” Roosevelt said, “tell the greatness of a nation.”
⁶³

Compared with the wild graces of Yellowstone, visiting bustling Saint Louis seemed onerous to Roosevelt. He had to endure a Marine Band performance, photos with a cavalry regiment from Oklahoma, a visit to Saint Louis University to discuss Catholic issues, and a private meeting with Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock that took the form of a stroll along the Mississippi River levee. Hitchcock was going after Senator John Hipple Mitchell of Oregon for using political influence to enrich clients
with sweetheart land deals. Even though Mitchell was a Republican, T.R. considered him a forest despoiler and wanted him busted for corruption. Hitchcock was happy to oblige.

Too often, environmental historians have given short shrift to Hitchcock’s extraordinary work exposing land fraud in the West from 1899 to 1907. Under his watchful eye 1,021 timber depredators were indicted and 126 were convicted. More importantly, Hitchcock, following President Roosevelt’s direct order, unearthed collusion, espionage, forgery, bribery, and record falsification in the General Land Office. Hitchcock busted judges, governors, senators, and business tycoons. At issue was the integrity of the Homestead Act, Desert Land Act, and Timber and Stone Act. Hitchcock saw his job as protecting the public domain. To accomplish this, he set up dragnet operations in every state or territory that had public lands, to catch looters. Acting so boldly as an anticorruption reformer, however, had a downside; in August, unsubstantiated charges were leveled at Hitchcock for complicity in a land fraud case in Indian Territory.
⁶⁴
Roosevelt knew the charges were bogus. He
was
frustrated that Hitchcock had let requests for forest reserves pile up on his desk, unattended to, yet Roosevelt knew that for all his bureaucratic slowness Hitchcock was a man of integrity. “There seemed to be no limit,” the reporter Henry S. Brown wrote in a glowing profile of Secretary Hitchcock in
Outlook
, “to the rapacity of the land sharks.”
⁶⁵

From Saint Louis, the president journeyed west again on the Missouri Central, to Kansas City and Topeka. Joining him all the way to California was Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. Roosevelt’s train—complete with barbershop, parlor, kitchen, sleeping compartments, and baggage chambers—was an ornate house on wheels.
⁶⁶
Again huge crowds—often numbering about 20,000—gathered to hear him speak in city after city. As if he were running for president—and, in essence, he was—Roosevelt kissed babies (though he denied doing this), shook thousands of hands, tossed a football, and took photographs with local police departments. Everything about Kansas appealed to Roosevelt: wide-open spaces, clean air, well-maintained farms, sturdy silos, wheat and sunflower fields, an abundance of deer and game birds, a McGuffey
Reader
in every schoolhouse, and God’s grace at every supper table. On May 3, Roosevelt arrived on the Pacific Coast Special in the village of Sharon Springs (located on the west edge of Kansas at the border with Colorado). Because it was a Sunday the president followed a parade of kids to a Methodist church (where a Presbyterian minister from Kansas City
preached). The stern loneliness of the Book of Job always held Roosevelt’s attention in church; but this preacher dwelled on the more philosophical Ecclesiastes, and the president was bored. Roosevelt played peekaboo with two giggling little girls sitting across the aisle. Eventually the girls were summoned into Roosevelt’s pew so that the three of them could sing “Amazing Grace” from the same hymnbook.

After the service, Roosevelt went horseback riding along Eagle Tail Creek, accompanied by Kansas’s two U.S. senators: Joseph Burton and Chester Long, both Republicans. When he was back in Sharon Springs, ready to board the train for Colorado, a little girl suddenly appeared with a two-week-old badger. Her brother Josiah had trapped it alive, and she wanted President Roosevelt to raise it as a White House pet.
⁶⁷
To the surprise of the attending dignitaries, Roosevelt roared in delight, saying he would add Josiah (as he named it) to the growing White House menagerie. During the coming weeks, Roosevelt would hand-feed Josiah from a baby bottle.
⁶⁸

With its grayish coat, flattened appearance, heavy body, and short tail, Josiah became a favorite of Roosevelt’s. At train depots the president would show the cute badger to schoolchildren, pointing out the conspicuous white stripe running down its back. Knowing that badgers were carnivorous, Roosevelt fed Josiah the best meat he could find, although for some reason it was rejecting the meat in favor of starches. “I have collected a variety of treasures, which I shall have to try to divide up equally among you children,” Roosevelt wrote home. “One treasure, by the way, is a very small badger, which I named Josiah, and he is called Josh for short. He is very cunning and I hold him in my arms and pet him. I hope he will grow up friendly—that is if the poor little fellow lives to grow up at all…. We feed him milk and potatoes.”
⁶⁹

In Denver, Roosevelt met with cowboys and delivered speeches on irrigation laws and good citizenship.
⁷⁰
Mayor Robert R. Wright, Jr., proclaimed the day of the presidential visit, May 4, a citywide holiday.
⁷¹
A magnificent gold brooch was given to T.R. depicting the Rocky Mountains—he wore it on his winter coat for the rest of the trip. In Denver, he also connected with a former Rough Rider, swapping stories about Cuba. In his Yellowstone journal Burroughs noted how astounding it was that so many Rough Riders wrote to the president about their personal woes. Most were from the territories—Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Roosevelt was their spiritual counselor and adviser. One Rough Rider, Burroughs recalled, wrote to the president: “Dear Colonel—
I am in trouble. I shot a lady in the eye, but I did not intent to hit the lady; I was shooting at my wife.”
⁷²
What surprised Burroughs was that the president had such time for this nonsense.