The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [152]
But the stunning success of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 raises a question: why then? Was it a coincidence that these events followed on the heels of the supposed close of the western frontier? In a historic paper delivered at the Chicago World’s Fair on July 12, 1893—“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”—Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier closed in 1890. Influenced by Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, Turner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, claimed that the United States’ westward expansion had created a new sort of citizen: the frontier-spirited outdoorsman (e.g., Carson, Bridger, and Pike). On top of that, pointing to census figures on population destiny in the West, he stated that western expansion was now a fait accompli.
Many historians consider Roosevelt the “progenitor” of the frontier thesis because on January 24, 1893, more than six months before Turner delivered his paper at the Chicago World’s Fair, Roosevelt had delivered the biennial address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison declaring the Old Northwest the “heart of the country.”89 Turner was sitting in the audience dutifully taking notes. The historian Michael L. Collins noted that at the very least Turner owed a huge debt to Roosevelt.90 Graciously, Roosevelt claimed that Turner had “put into definite shape a good deal of thought which…[had] been floating around rather loosely.” Essentially, an alliance was formed in promoting the frontier hypothesis, with T.R. as the popular oracle and Professor Turner influencing fellow academics. Even though they developed only what the historian Ray Billington deemed a “corresponding” relationship, Turner, in what is widely interpreted as honoring a debt, quoted T.R.’s Wisconsin address in his own 1920 book The Frontier in American History.91
Roosevelt and Turner’s frontier thesis was clever. In 1890 settlers were no longer riding Conestoga wagons up the Oregon Trail and trailblazers like Kit Carson were no longer tangling with the Navajo at Canyon de Chelly. Thirty years earlier Abraham Lincoln had called for a transcontinental railroad. By 1890, with Chicago as the main terminus, a web of tracks now ran out of Illinois in every direction from coast to coast. Cities all through the American West, such as Albuquerque, Omaha, Sacramento, Seattle, Tucson, Denver, and Portland, were rapidly growing in population. Although Geronimo was making a little noise in the Arizona Territory, the Native American population had by and large been pacified, and reservations were being set up in dozens of states and territories. Indians had now been relocated to Oklahoma reservations (and other locales), the buffalo were nearly gone, and the Great Plains–Rocky Mountains landscape was being developed and mined. Even the stubborn Mormons of Utah had renounced polygamy in the Woodnuff Manifesto.92 “Literally innumerable short stories and sketches of cowboys, Indians, and soldiers had been, and will be written,” Roosevelt wrote Frederic Remington. “Even if very good they will die like mushrooms, unless they are the very best; but the very best will live and will make the cantos in the last Epic of the Western Wilderness, before it ceased being a wilderness.” 93
Now that the “West was won” and the Rocky Mountain wilderness “ceased to be wild,” Roosevelt and his fellow members of the Boone and Crockett Club saw the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 as the responsible national starting point for creating a sustainable trans–Mississippi River environment from which all Americans could benefit. The Winning of the West—plus, equally important, his naturalist writings—made clear Roosevelt’s advanced belief in the benefits of timber resource management and regulated hunting and fishing. Shortly after the passage of the act of 1891 Roosevelt and Grinnell cowrote an essay, “Our Forest Reservations,” lambasting “corporate greed” and fretting over the lack of game wardens in the American West. “We now have these forest reservations, refuges