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By Root 2995 0

of Roosevelt’s national forests and federal bird reserves. In May 1911, the former mayor of Cordova, Alaska, accompanied by an angry group of “territory rights” activists and debt-ridden people from the chambers of commerce, engaged in an act of civil disobedience reminiscent of the Boston Tea Party. They raided the wharves where the Copper River and Northwestern Railway was storing imported anthracite, split open crates, and dumped tons of imported Canadian coal into Controller Bay.46 “The Cordovans were striking back at a distant colonial government,” the historian Char Miller explained in his biography of Pinchot. “Then they put the torch to their own King George III, burning an effigy of Gifford Pinchot, denounced by The Alaska-Yukon Magazine, as a man who ‘thinks more of trees than people.’ ”47

Well-organized protests against Roosevelt and Pinchot erupted throughout Alaska that year. When Pinchot voyaged to Alaska on a fact-finding mission in September, the predominant complaint in the territory was that federal laws were stunting the economic growth of Alaska.48 Such legislation was called conservation colonialism. All the major Alaskan newspapers thought that Richard Ballinger—a former mayor of Seattle and the current U.S. secretary of the interior—was a hero and Pinchot a scoundrel. Covetous boomers intuited that they had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive a wedge between Roosevelt’s conservationism and Taft’s pro-development philosophy; and prospectors who had missed out on the Klondike gold rush believed that coal mining would give them a second chance at wealth. Alaskan town hall meetings resounded with antigovernment rants and calls for direct action. Angry protest was everywhere. In the towns of Seward (on the Kenai Peninsula) and Valdez (on the eastern side of Prince William Sound), for example, President Roosevelt’s national forest orders of 1908 limiting corporate mining in the Tongass and Chugach were posted and defaced with an angry X. In the timber town of Katalla, unhappy loggers and miners burned Roosevelt’s order of 1908 in a public display of defiance. In another Alaskan town, a threatening placard that looked like a “Most Wanted” notice was posted:

PINCHOT, MY POLICY

No patents to coal! All timber to forest reserves! Bottle up Alaska! Put Alaska in forest reserves! Save Alaska for all time to come!49

Wherever Pinchot traveled in Alaska, he defended conservation in front of audiences full of skeptics. Pinchot argued that Ballinger had been ousted in a necessary effort to “prevent men who were trying to plunder and monopolize Alaska from carrying out their plan.”50 Town hall meetings turned volatile if Pinchot’s name was even mentioned. Many citizens in Valdez, situated on the lip of the Chugach, thought him hopelessly wrongheaded for locking up the forestlands. The Cleveland Press, for example, reported that a satirical anti-Pinchot banner had been hung in Seward, Alaska: “Conservation prices . . . British Columbia coal, $17 per ton . . . Wood, $7 a cord . . . But you must not mine your own coal, nor cut down your own wood . . . All reserved for future generation . . . signed Pinchot . . . ‘Pinhead.’ ”51

While a cabal of defiant Alaskans were up in arms over the Tongass and Chugach national forests, which they saw as having been grabbed by the U.S. government, Roosevelt was entering a nasty (if erudite) public argument with the naturalist Abbot H. Thayer of New Hampshire, who was a theoretician. The disagreement centered on theories of concealing coloration. Roosevelt first challenged Thayer, at some length, in Appendix E of African Game Trails. He also inveighed against Thayer in the introduction to Life History of African Game Animals (a magnificent two-volume zoology reference book whose coauthors were Roosevelt and Heller). Then—in the August 23, 1911, issue of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History—in a 40,000-word monograph titled “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Animals,” Roosevelt intensified his thesis with new field data from Africa. He particularly