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On September 24, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared the “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” the Katmai National Monument. The boundaries of Katmai National Monument, which originally encompassed forty square miles of the Mount Katmai pyroclastic flow, were expanded in 1931, 1942, 1969, and 1978.64 Then, in one of the crowning achievements of the entire post-1960s environmental movement, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 put millions of additional acres surrounding the “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” under federal protection, enlarging the total area to more than 4 million acres. It was redesignated the Katmai National Park and Preserve on December 2, 1980.65

IV

If Taft hadn’t tried to undermine Roosevelt’s national forestry agenda in Alaska, it’s doubtful that the ex-president would have challenged his successor for the Republican nomination in 1912. Even though, as president, Taft had prosecuted the Standard Oil and American Tobacco trusts, Roosevelt nevertheless painted him as a lackey of big business. Roosevelt was partially wrong. President Taft did enjoy automobiles more than bird-watching, but he had a decent record on conservation. Still, perception matters in politics. No matter whether they had sided with Pinchot or Ballinger in the notorious feud, journalists believed that there was a curious ambivalence about conservation issues in Taft’s White House. Taft, it seemed, had an old-fashioned Abrahamic concept of land, finding no real value in wilderness. Favoring the Department of Commerce and Labor, he seemed to enjoy rejecting expansions of forestland proposed by the departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

In February, after weighing the pros and cons, Roosevelt announced that he would indeed run for president again. His declaration was welcomed by a press corps eager for a riveting news story. On every major issue of the day, TR vowed to act uncompromisingly. Taft, in a foolish, backward-thinking way, had mocked Roosevelt’s Alaskan conservationism. If Taft wanted to sell off Alaskan lands to “big coal” instead of leasing them to locals, then Roosevelt would confront the president in the public arena. To Roosevelt’s everlasting fury, Taft had indeed followed through on his pledge to side with the dictatorial Speaker of the House—Joseph Cannon of Illinois—and Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich of Rhode Island, both in the pocket of special interests.66

While the Republican old guard clung to Taft, Roosevelt beat out Robert La Follette of Wisconsin as the progressives’ favorite son. Before long, Roosevelt, in an ad hominem attack, cold and merciless, was calling President Taft an old-maidish “fathead” and “puzzle wit”—and many Americans loved hearing such insults. Taft shot back that Roosevelt was a “dangerous egoist” and “demagogue.” What Roosevelt understood was that rural Americans weren’t instinctively fond of lawyer-politicians like Taft, who supposed that the rifle was a toy for grown-ups and that dinner came from a grocery store, not from a farm or a duck blind. Although Roosevelt outperformed Taft throughout the spring of 1912 and arrived at the Republican convention in Chicago only a few delegates short of having the nomination locked up, the conservative old guard managed to stop the wilderness warrior. Roosevelt had even secured thirty-seven of Ohio’s forty delegates (and Ohio was Taft’s home state)—but these were of no avail in locking up the nomination. The Republicans handed Taft the nomination, by a slim margin.67

But Chicago hadn’t seen the last of Theodore Roosevelt. The ex- president joined a third party: the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. On August 7, 1912, Roosevelt delivered the most impassioned speech of his political career at its convention. Surrounding him like bodyguards were a number of Rough Riders from the Spanish-American War, in full army uniform, who had served under the Colonel in Cuba in 1898. Roaring about the rights of working Americans over business conglomerates,