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By Root 2954 0

ex-president Roosevelt felt confident that his Alaskan legacy of natural forests and wildlife refuges would be properly protected. All that his handpicked successor—William Howard Taft, a distinguished Yale man who had served him admirably as secretary of war—had to do was let the very able Gifford Pinchot micromanage the Forest Service and read the riveting field reports of William A. Langille. Taft, with Pinchot as a witness, had promised Roosevelt, as a quid pro quo for his support, always to put conservation first—especially in Alaska. “The way is long and cold and lone,” Roosevelt’s friend Hamlin Garland wrote about Alaska. “But I go . . . where pines forever moan their weight of snow.”14

Little could Roosevelt have foreseen that Taft, not understanding the need to preserve the moaning pines, would fail him with regard to Alaskan land issues. Taft, it turned out, thought Rooseveltian conservation, while essentially a noble cause, had ventured too far in protecting forest and marine environments (Tongass National Forest), saving glaciers (Chugach National Forest), and protecting wildlife (Yukon Delta Federal Bird Reservation). The Tongass, Taft believed, should be leased off for harvesting timber and canning salmon. He also had problems with the legality of Roosevelt’s executive orders on behalf of wildlife habitats. Taft, in his first year in office alone, compromised the integrity of huge expanses of wild Alaska. He gave in to syndicates involved in forest clear-cutting; fur trading; salmon canning; whaling; and gold, ore, and copper mining. New sawmills in Hope, Alaska, had a cut capacity of 20,000 feet per day. In Homer, Alaska, a Philadelphia coal company had built major new facilities, complete with a shipping dock. The Chugach Mountains formed an arc 50 million years old around Prince William Sound and the Copper River delta. Many conservationists feared that mining companies were going to ruin the scenery in a decade if Taft didn’t keep the brakes on.

From Roosevelt and Pinchot’s perspective Taft was intent on letting the U.S. government reap lucrative revenues by exploiting the precious metals of the far north, recklessly and unregulated; such metals were usually found in the remote white wilderness, reachable only by dogsled. “Despite his promise to Roosevelt that night in the White House,” Timothy Egan has explained in The Big Burn, “Taft believed the conservation movement had gone too far, too fast, and that too much land had been put in the public’s hands.”15

In late 1909, Roosevelt was in the Lado Enclave in the Belgian Congo, hunting white rhinoceroses, when he received a shock. A special runner sprinted into Roosevelt’s holiday camp with the news that Gifford Pinchot had been fired as chief forester by President Taft ten days earlier. It was as if Roosevelt aged on the spot. He shuddered and paced about, desperate for accurate information about Pinchot’s apparent contretemps with President Taft.16 It was hard to fathom the implications. Why had America’s most eminent forestry professional been dismissed? Pinchot was like a son to Roosevelt. Together they shared a historic legacy of saving more than 230 million acres of wild America by creating national parks, national monuments, national forests, and federal wildlife reserves. They had injected the concept of conservation into public discourse. A self-critical Roosevelt now wondered how he had let Taft worm his way into his good graces. Seething with contempt and feeling that he had been double-crossed, Roosevelt was dismayed that Taft didn’t have the courtesy to continue his predecessor’s federal forestry and wildlife protection policies in Alaska. Taft, he soon declared, was a “great pink porpoise of a man.”17 All of Roosevelt’s deepest suspicions regarding Taft came to the fore. “I cannot believe it,” Roosevelt immediately wrote to Pinchot on January 17, 1910. “I don’t know any man in public life who has rendered quite the service you have rendered; and it seems to me absolutely impossible that there can be any truth in this statement. But of course