The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [59]
II
Throughout the summer of 1910, Roosevelt worked hard to get Pinchot to contain his anger at President Taft. After all, it was a midterm election year, and Roosevelt didn’t want to be blamed for causing the Republicans to lose congressional seats and governorships. Slowing down a conservationist hothead like Pinchot, however, wasn’t an easy matter. Recognizing that Taft’s political power was ebbing, Roosevelt took a paternal approach toward Pinchot, never saying that Pinchot was wrong, always showing affection and concern, but always signaling, Knock it off. In a fatherly way, Roosevelt told Pinchot to “husband” his influence, to “speak with the utmost caution” and not to “say anything that can even be twisted into something in the nature of a factional attack.”27 Secretly, Roosevelt admired Pinchot’s progressive-minded “Insurgents” movement and was pleased that Lincoln-Roosevelt clubs were being formed across the country as a Republican bulwark against Taft and “Morganism.” Outwardly, however, he continued to feign uninterest in seeking the White House again.28
Nevertheless, Roosevelt did object that it was unacceptable for private concerns to despoil Alaska of its natural resources for the purposes of big mining, big timber, and big railroads. Pinchot cheered the Colonel on. Because Alaska was geographically huge, transportation was always going to be a contentious issue there. The territory had no reliable network of roads for moving cargo. In 1912 there were four practical ways to get around: walking, dogsled, horse, or steamboat (Alaska had more than 4,000 miles of navigable waterways, of which approximately 2,700 were in the Yukon watershed). The Yukon River, flowing bow-shaped for 2,300 miles, was the great artery for freight, effectively dividing Alaska east-west into two halves. Only three North American rivers were longer than the Yukon: the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Mackenzie. Roosevelt was in favor of internal improvements in Alaska, such as roads, canals, and railroads, but only if the U.S. government was in charge of construction on leased public lands.
To Roosevelt, who had lobbied against the railroad industry’s segregating Yellowstone National Park in the 1870s, too many Alaskan roads would mean too much Alaskan development. Places like the coastal panhandle of southeastern Alaska, an ecosystem of thousands of islands equalizing the size of Florida where huge schools of humpback whales, orcas, and sea lions swam along the forested shorelines of the Alexander Archipelago and the Tongass National Forest, should be treasured, not exploited. The Tongass had the world’s highest density of grizzlies, black bears, and bald eagles. Their habitat should be left alone. The real value of Alaska, to Roosevelt, resided in managing its wilderness better than land skinners had managed that of the Lower Forty-Eight.
Everywhere Roosevelt looked there were scoundrels wanting to make quick dollars on dubious transportation or reclamation projects in Alaska. The Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate had finagled financing to construct a 1,550-foot steel-truss bridge on behalf of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, to transport copper from the mines to the seaport wharf in Cordova. Dubbed the “million-dollar bridge” (it actually cost $1.4 million), the construction project smacked of a boondoggle from day one. To Rooseveltians, the bridge was an expensive ploy to eventually open up the Chugach National Forest to increased private-sector copper mining. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “million-dollar