The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [151]
The 1897 provision authorized U.S. presidents to set apart and reserve, whenever they chose, government land wholly or in part covered with timber or underwood growth. This executive branch prerogative, in fact, was used by T.R., who founded the Forest Service in 1905, saving 151 million forested acres between 1901 to 1909 as president, mostly in the West (an increase of forest reserves by 300 percent.) As Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, perceptively noted, “The Boone and Crockett wildlife creed…became national policy when Theodore Roosevelt became president.”85
Of course, Roosevelt was thrilled that cedars along the Pecos River in New Mexico were now protected and that the ponderosa pine around Los Angeles’s San Bernardino Mountains would tower unmarred for decades to come. However, he was most gratified that President Harrison had placed 1.2 million acres of Wyoming forest (an estimated area of 1,936 square miles) adjacent to Yellowstone National Park under federal protection as part of the new Yellowstone National Park Timberland Reserve. This was a crucial component for his idea of a big game preserve to grow properly. Not only did Yellowstone deserve recognition as the first national park, but courtesy of the Harrison administration the Yellowstone National Park Timber Reserve was now also where the national forest system was born. This wasn’t quite the same as the enlargement of the park that Roosevelt had lobbied for, but it nevertheless was a huge victory for the Boone and Crockett Club.
Once Noble had understood how forests protected watersheds, he never hesitated in his advocacy of the reserve system. “Your associates, Mr. Phillips and Mr. Hague, brought the business to my attention,” Noble wrote to Roosevelt on April 16, 1891, describing how the Forest Reserve Act was consummated. “Having been familiar with the subject, I had no hesitation in immediately advising the President favorably as to the proclamation, and I am glad to see that he has promptly appreciated the situation and acted as he did.” 86
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The early 1890s were the halcyon days of the American conservationist movement. Groups like the American Forestry Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were starting to be heard on Capitol Hill. In 1891, when the first Irrigation Congress met in Salt Lake City, a future senator—Francis G. Newlands of Nevada—stated matter-of-factly that “unless the mountains and the hillsides are kept covered with timber the snows which now practically impound the water and hold it until needed will melt the quicker in summer and thus make artificial storage more expensive.”87 The lobbying efforts of leaders like John Muir, George Grinnell, and Theodore Roosevelt were paying off. Few congressmen—except some in the West—wanted be remembered for contributing to the deforestation of America. Senators George Vest of Missouri (D) and Charles Manderson of Nebraska (R) bravely fought for forest reserves every year and eventually influenced the Senate with their pro-conservationist views. If the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame were on the job, both men would have been inducted long ago,* as should Noble and Harrison. “The Executive and its representative, the Department of the Interior,” Roosevelt and Grinnell wrote following the act of 1891, “have at all times been most sympathetic and helpful in the movement