The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [150]
The board meeting led to White House action to protect the nation’s forests. A few days later two members of the Boone and Crockett Club—William Hallett Phillips (a lawyer and diehard angler who accidentally drowned in the Potomac River in 1897, moving Rudyard Kipling to dedicate a poem in Scribner’s to his memory) and Arnold Hague (a geologist-conservationist with the U.S. Geological Survey who had written an influential report on Yellowstone)—briefed Secretary Noble on how the new science of forestry could prevent deforestation. The Harrison administration quickly pushed legislation through Congress to protect forests on public lands. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which the president signed that March, put an end to the virtual giveaway of public land to the railroads and enshrined the government’s role in protecting the wild-life in American forests. Most important, its final provision, Section 24, gave the president the right to convert public land into forest reserves. It stated: “That the President of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and reserve, in any state or territory having public land, bearing forests, in any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations, and the President shall, by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such reservations and the limits thereof.”80 The language of Section 24 would prove crucial to Roosevelt’s future conservationist efforts as president.
As soon as the first forest reserve—Yellowstone National Park Timberland Reserve—was established, it was clear that YIC and other would-be developers had suffered a huge, irreversible defeat. The Boone and Crockett Club issued a resolution praising Noble, and Grinnell published a glowing tribute to his efforts in Forest and Stream.81 President Harrison quickly bestowed protection on 13 million acres of American woods, creating eleven forest reserves,* where absolutely no tree cutting was allowed; and six timberland areas, where limited logging was permitted under close supervision. As the conservationist Gifford Pinchot later noted in his memoir Breaking New Ground, this was “the most important legislation in the history of Forestry in America,” and it “slipped through Congress without question, without debate.” 82
Before this act, land in the American West was being sold by the U.S. federal government to private enterprises. Nearly a quarter of the Montana Territory, for example, had been deeded or sold to the railroads. But President Harrison’s act put a wrinkle in that habitual practice. Recognizing that Europe’s natural resources were being depleted and its lands deforested and eroded, President Harrison had behaved like a champion for George Perkins Marsh and the Boone and Crockett Club. Working in the administration’s favor was the fact that starting in 1876 the Department of Agriculture had created an activist U.S. Division of Forestry. Meanwhile, at the Department of Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey had formed the Irrigation Survey, in which scientists worked to find solutions to America’s resource management problems. Like Roosevelt, both government divisions considered themselves enemies of the railroad and mining industries.
Despite the enormous victory, Roosevelt wasn’t satisfied. There were still no laws to properly police these public lands; and he was worried that market hunters, loggers, and miners would not be deterred by “No Trespassing” signs if ignoring them had no consequences—no jail time and no heavy fines. In fact, implementing the Forest