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become contaminated from copper pit runoff. The margin of life for mountain goats and Dall sheep would become narrow. The finest salmon runs in Alaska—like those in the Bristol Bay Basin—would become stinking mudholes. Backing Pinchot was James Wickersham, Alaska’s lone congressional delegate in Washington, D.C., who was a rip-roaring critic of the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate (although he preferred that the Tongass and Chugach be redesignated as state forests). An Alaskan district judge, Wickersham loved wild country. In 1903 he tried to climb Mount McKinley but aborted the attempt at 8,000 feet. Wickersham, whose memoir Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials is an Alaskan classic,41 understood that all the syndicate wanted to do was mine copper ore for its smelter in Tacoma, Washington. “The delegate approved of federal conservation policies,” the historian Peter A. Coates writes, “as a restraint on outside interest that creamed off Alaskan wealth.”42

What truly concerned Roosevelt about the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate was that it was planning to bring hydraulic machinery to Alaska to supersede small, individual placer operations. Rooseveltian conservationists did not want any monopoly to get a sweetheart lease for timber, copper, or ore in Alaskan national forests. Roosevelt and Pinchot’s policy was for the General Land Office to lease coalfields in Alaska, whereas Ballinger and Taft wanted outright selling of the lands—a big difference.43 From his experience with the construction of the Panama Canal, Roosevelt knew how brutally destructive such large-scale construction projects could be to pristine landscapes. (When Roosevelt visited the Canal Zone in 1907 as president, he kept natural history records of the tropical foliage.) Pacific Northwest banks, however, were itching to clear-cut the Chugach and Tongass national forests. Because the U.S. Forest Service didn’t have a team of full-time rangers, bootleggers set up distilleries on federal property, convinced that they could operate undetected in such expansive outdoors settings. Whether as president or as a private citizen, Roosevelt wasn’t about to let a few New York or Seattle bankers desecrate America’s great rain forests. The fact that the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate wanted to keep its Tacoma smelter burning around the clock didn’t mean Alaska should be recklessly exploited.

Roosevelt always took the high ground with regard to Alaskan affairs. But as proof that he hadn’t been antidevelopment, consider this: in 1906 he had appointed Wilds Preston Richardson, a U.S. Army officer from Hunt County, Texas, who had attended West Point, to become the first chairman of the Alaska Roads Commission. During the Klondike gold rush, Richardson, in command of the Eighth Infantry (eighty men), kept law and order around Skagway. He later oversaw the construction of army posts at Rampart, Eagle, and Nome. Then in 1906 Roosevelt ordered the army to build what today is known as the Richardson Highway, the two-lane road connecting Valdez (the seaport on Prince William Sound) to Fairbanks (gateway to the Brooks Range). Clearly, Roosevelt wasn’t antidevelopment. He just wanted the U.S. government, not private concerns, to control the infrastructure of Alaska.44 Nevertheless, in 1909 the Cordova Daily Alaskan ran a headline that evidently spoke for the majority of district citizens: “Pinchot Is Daffy over Conservation.”45

III

The feud between Pinchot and Ballinger had become a brouhaha in America throughout 1909. On August 12, the New York Times ran the headline “Pinchot in Danger of Losing His Place.” The charge against Pinchot was insubordination. No president likes leaks from or even dissension in the ranks, let alone whistle-blowers. From Taft’s perspective, Pinchot was a socialist-minded menace: arrogant, fanatical about trees, one-dimensional, and unable to understand that American politics involved the art of give-and-take. The biographer Nathan Miller wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: A Life that Pinchot was desperate to expose Taft’s deficiencies and in doing so “courted martyrdom.