• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4048 0

leading the way. Despite all its shortcomings, Roosevelt and Turner deserve kudos for helping create this genre of U.S. western history, on which both Limerick and White would build their careers 100 years later. Limerick, in particular, challenged the 1890 frontier-is-closed thesis time and again. “In the American West, too many ‘frontier-like’ events happened after 1890—homesteading continued, short-term extraction even accelerated as the western oil, timber, and uranium booms took off, and contrary to myths of a vanished West, neither Indians nor cowboys disappeared,” Limerick noted in 1991, in a speech celebrating the National Forest Service’s centennial. “In extractive industries, the familiar boom/bust cycle continued, while Indian, Hispanic, Anglo, and Asian people continued to search for ways to live together. The westward movement didn’t stop at 1890; millions more people moved into the West in the twentieth century. If one went by numbers, one would have to call the nineteenth century westward movement the frail prelude to the much more significant twentieth century westward movement. It would be easier to sell me a used car, or a vacuum cleaner, or an encyclopedia set, than it would be to sell me on the idea that the creation of forest reserves was another sign and symbol of the end of the frontier.”98

While Limerick rightfully threw cold water on Roosevelt and Turner’s thesis, a caveat must be added. Three new national parks were created in late 1890 out of huge parcels of pristine California wilderness. Approximately 13 million acres of the West had been set aside in 1891 by the Forest Reserve Act. (That acreage is more than twice the size of Massachusetts.) Limerick was correct in saying that millions of settlers kept coming west, but they weren’t allowed into the sequestered government-owned prime forestlands. The Interior Department was, by 1890, closing off large swaths of the West to future development. By 1898, 40 million acres had been saved as reserves. Therefore, perhaps the appropriate resolution to the dispute between Roosevelt-Turner and Limerick-White can be found by considering the role of forestry science during the gilded age. Roosevelt, as the New York Times would note, was a leader in a new post–Civil War generation trying to redefine Americanism in the 1890s. Roosevelt may have named his pony Grant, admired John Hay’s ring made of hair from Lincoln’s beard, and applauded Sherman and Sheridan for protecting Yellowstone, but he had never personally experienced war—and neither had his wealthy father. As for the western American “frontier,” Roosevelt wasn’t part of its settlement. Hopping off the Northern Pacific Railroad with thousands of dollars to lavish on wilderness guides and equipment in Medora was hardly Jim Bridger stuff. But the obverse of that reality was also true: Roosevelt never killed a Confederate, an Indian, a Mexican, or any other human on American soil.

What Roosevelt did in the Dakotas (and Grinnell did in Nebraska, Baird in Arizona, and Merriam in California) was collect samples of western wildlife, as ambulating Ivy League scientists were apt to do. For all their Wild West notions, these men—and a dozen like them who graduated from Harvard and Yale between 1870 and 1890—were the children of Charles Darwin. After the surrender at Appomattox in 1865, an entire generation of Ivy League graduates, for the first time, had all studied Darwin. Science was the rage. And to those who—like Roosevelt, Baird, Merriam, and Grinnell—were predisposed to biology, the father of evolutionary theory continued to be a secular saint as they entered their thirties. Once On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, it was virtually impossible for educated Americans like Roosevelt to look at flora or fauna in the same way. In other words, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 came about not because the frontier closed but because during the 1870s Harvard and Yale had started taking biology, naturalist studies, and forestry seriously in the aftermath of Darwin (and George Perkins Marsh). For the