The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [153]
What Roosevelt and Grinnell (and John Muir, for that matter) were arguing for was, in fact, closing much of the western frontier to settlement and development. What good, they asserted, were forest reservations and national parks if these were left unprotected and not administered properly? With his characteristic law-and-order attitude, Roosevelt believed all poachers and despoilers should be imprisoned. Their actions, he felt, were unpardonable. All the wildlife he loved that flourished on federal property in 1891—including walruses on Alaska’s Amak Island, sea lions in California’s Farallones, and bald eagles in Colorado’s White River plateau—needed police protection. The national park and forest movement, both Roosevelt and Grinnell understood, was going to hinge on the federal government’s protecting its assets. “The game and timber on a reservation should be regarded as government property, just as are the mules and the cordwood at an army post,” they wrote. “If it is a crime to take the latter, it should be a crime to plunder a forest reserve.” With strict law enforcement, they believed, no big game species would “become absolutely extinct.”95
In recent decades the “new western history”—presented by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White—postulated that declaring the “frontier closed,” as Turner (and Roosevelt, in a sense) did in 1890 had (in postmodern terms) deeply racist connotations.* They chastised Roosevelt and Turner for believing, as Limerick put it, that the frontier was “where white people got scarce, or alternatively, where white people got scared.” 96 The White-Limerick’s new western history arguments, in hindsight and from the vantage point of multiculturalism, were fundamentally sound. As the premier champion of Anglo-American settlement of North America, Roosevelt treated Native tribes, Spanish settlers, and even French Canadians as riffraff who needed to be cleared away like so many weeds. Caucasian outdoorsmen on the western frontier were, to Roosevelt, almost infallible. For example, Daniel Boone and his cohorts in the Cumberland valley, Roosevelt believed, had been “ordained of God to settle the wilderness.”97 Every chance Roosevelt got, he championed George Rogers Clark and Zebulon Pike. No matter how cruel white backwoodsmen were to “red Indians,” the savagery was blamed on the Indians. Although Roosevelt sometimes wrote glowingly of the Indians’ wilderness prowess—as he did in The Winning of the West—he still seemed to be using them as foils in order to elevate the frontiersmen into first-class guerrilla fighters. At its best, The Winning of the West treated Native Americans as Rousseauesque noble savages—a popular concept of the time.
Yet, it’s important to remember that although Roosevelt’s ethnocentrism and his notion of the white man’s burden are repugnant today, they were the accepted tenets of his own time. Nationalistic boasting was in fashion. Ever since Polk won his war in 1848 and the United States acquired parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, western expansion had been touted as an accomplishment to be celebrated, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. So, with half-shut eyes, Roosevelt wrote only the winner’s history of the West. Western triumphalism—called “new history” because it dealt with a part of the continent about which very little had been written—became the scholarly norm in the 1890s, with Roosevelt