The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [146]
Perhaps there was another motivation for visiting Yellowstone in 1890. Roosevelt might have felt embarrassed that both President Harrison and George Bird Grinnell—his superiors in national politics and North American big game conservation, respectively—had already toured the national park whereas he had seen Old Faithful and the Tetons only in picture books. He would now be able to even the score. Polishing up his Civil Service badge, Roosevelt would probe into why Wyoming poachers and Montana lumbermen and railway-tie cutters were being permitted in what the law of 1872 deemed a “public park of pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”62 Why weren’t these intrusive criminals being collared by local law enforcement or the U.S. Army? How could the U.S. government make sure Yellowstone wasn’t “shot out” by horn and hide hunters? His “grand holiday,” doubling as a fact-finding mission on behalf of the Boone and Crockett Club, he believed, was an integral part of this journey to the park that the novelist Thomas Wolfe later called “the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”63
Even before leaving for the West in late summer, Roosevelt chafed at the loopholes in the original Yellowstone Act, which didn’t properly preserve big game. He wanted protective amendments, and fast. In 1872 there had been only a single transcontinental railroad spanning the Rocky Mountains—the Union and Central Pacific, which rumbled across Wyoming far to the south of Yellowstone. Roosevelt was fine with that. But in 1890, influenced by Grinnell, Roosevelt, after deep consideration of the issue, opposed a proposed new Montana Mineral Railroad line aimed at “segregating” the park. Under the sway of the Forest and Stream crowd, Roosevelt now fancied himself as the conservationist point man in upbraiding Montana Mineral on the Yellowstone issue. “I am glad to hear that Roosevelt is going to stand back on the question of railways in the Park,” Grinnell wrote to a fellow member of Boone and Crockett, “and not to work against us.”64
The “grand holiday” started out splendidly—a first-class train ride from New York through Chicago and Saint Paul, until the steaming locomotive eventually rolled into the western edge of the Dakotas on September 2. For seven or eight days they mixed it up with the sharp-faced Ferris brothers and T.R.’s hardy Elkhorn ranchhands, such as Bill Merrifield, who lived among the abrupt escarpments like nonconformist characters in a Bret Harte story. Roosevelt’s elation with Medora was evident as he pointed out Custer’s 1876 campsite, the Marquis de Mores’s defunct meatpacking plant, and the innumerable rock formations that gave the Badlands its peculiar charm. One afternoon, coping with washouts and quicksand, they forded the Little Missouri River twenty-three times. Absent-eyed antelope could be seen grazing along a ridge, with muscles suddenly tensed upon the realization of human encroachment. At dusk they watched timid white-tails in bushy gullies and big-eared mules on sage-spangled buttes. “Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint glow of the red sun filled the west,” Roosevelt wrote about these rock landmarks in a publication of the Boone and Crockett Club. “The rolling prairie, sweeping in endless waves to the feet of the great hills, grew purple as the evening darkened, and the buttes looned into vague, mysterious beauty as their sharp outlines softened in the twilight.”65
Corinne marveled at how Theodore spoke of Dakota cowboys as if they were heroic knights on horseback and their low-lying