The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [99]
As an appendix to A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open, Roosevelt wrote an individual paragraph about all the federal bird reservations he had created by means of executive orders during his presidency between 1903 and 1909. They were his secular shrines. Many of them were in Alaska. Roosevelt continued to work his magic by lobbying legislators on Capitol Hill as a voice of the National Conservation Association. Although he had lost the 1912 presidential election, it was largely through his strong influence that the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate had been thwarted in its repeated efforts to purchase mines around the Tongass and Chugach national forests. This was a policy victory for Roosevelt despite his defeat as a third-party candidate. In 1911, Roosevelt had successfully championed the Weeks Law to purchase lands for national forests in the White Mountains and Appalachian Mountains (where there was no public land). Further, in 1914, Congress passed landmark bills regarding coal and oil leasing, and these acts were in accordance with Roosevelt and Pinchot’s philosophy of keeping huge corporations out of public domain lands. Roosevelt was also a powerful advocate of the Federal Water Power Act to provide for development by private enterprise (under federal ownership and control) of waterpower for the public domain and navigable streams. It even seems possible that Roosevelt’s staunch conservationist agenda had influenced his former antagonist William Howard Taft. Before leaving the White House in 1913, Taft, as if in a face-saving gesture, had signed executive orders saving Alaskan bird-breeding areas on Forrester Island, Wolf Rock, and the Hazy Islands.27
Through lobbying, the Rooseveltian conservationists won numerous battles in Alaska, one at a time. Roosevelt’s “Terminator” was Hornaday, the genius zoologist, who never pulled a punch. The Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA) had ceremoniously placed the head of a Montana bison—one that had died on the Flathead Reservation, a federal game reserve that Roosevelt and Hornaday had founded in 1908—over the fireplace at its Chappaqua lodge in New York. This head was a present to the club from Hornaday; emphasis was placed on the fact that the bison died of natural causes. Toward the end of his life, Hornaday—who remained active in the campaign to protect Alaska’s northern seals until his death in 1937—crusaded against allowing motorized vehicles into national parks; these vehicles disrupted wildlife sanctuaries. “As everyone knows,” Hornaday growled, “the automobile has become a fearful scourge to the game of our land, by enabling at least 2,000,000 men of the annual army of hunters to cover about four times as much hunting territory as they formerly could comb with their guns.”28
Hornaday also sympathized with Native Alaskans who lived just outside McKinley National Park, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, and the huge bird refuges in Alaska.29 Furious at the shoddy way Natives were behaving as stewards of the land—they were too readily bribed by timber and coal interests—he lambasted leaders of the Aleuts, Tlingit, Athabascan, and Inuit. Hornaday didn’t believe that Natives should have special eminent-domain rights to shoot caribou or sell out a habitat to despoilers. From Hornaday’s perspective, the parks and refuges existed for wildlife, not for people. Global overpopulation was forcing a more rigid policy for saving wilderness. Humans—including Alaskan Natives—who ignored conservation laws were, like locusts landing on a crop, a plague.
World War I also caused worries in wildlife protection circles. Roosevelt was a leading proponent of war against Germany, believing that the United States could not sit in comfort and allow the Hun to wreak havoc in Europe.