The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [157]
Roosevelt’s letter, written on U.S. Civil Service commissioner stationery (and thus implying that the federal government was on his side), didn’t mince words. “It is of the utmost importance that the Park shall be kept in its present form as a great forestry preserve and a National pleasure ground, the like of which is not to be found on any other continent than ours; and all public-spirited Americans should join with Forest and Stream in the effort to prevent the greed of a little group of speculators, careless of everything save their own selfish interests, from doing the damage they threaten to the whole people of the United States, by wrecking the Yellowstone National Park,” he wrote. “So far from having this Park cut down it should be extended, and legislation adopted which would enable the military authorities who now have charge of it to administer it solely in the interests of the whole public, and to punish in the most rigorous way people who trespass upon it. The Yellowstone Park is a park for the people and the representatives of the people should see that it is molested in no way.”103
In The Winning of the West, Roosevelt had promoted manifest destiny and the westward march of U.S. capitalism with the zeal of Horace Greeley, so his new position baffled the developers in Montana. Roosevelt, in fact, had once speculated that Duluth would soon rival Chicago as the citadel of the West and that the Red River valley of the Dakotas would harvest grain for the world. As if he were a bond salesman for Jay Cooke, he had written that Montana would supply the most beef and that the Cascade Mountains of Washington Territory had enough potential timber to construct endless homes for America’s growing population.104 Now, suddenly, Roosevelt was smashing the utilitarian paradigm on behalf of preserving lodgepole pines, petrified logs, and elk herds. To the Cooke City folks, Roosevelt’s new demands were nothing more than atheistic excuses for a federal land grab.
Such were the deeply anti-Roosevelt protestations of Montanans (and the organized syndicate YIC) in the early 1890s. How were they to know that Roosevelt had developed his preservationist insights by reading sportsman literature and studying Darwinian biology at Harvard? Who knew he had memorized every detail of Audubon’s Birds of America as if it were a sacred text? How could railroad titans have understood that he took pride in his association with John Burroughs and George Bird Grinnell, who had lured him into the preservationist camp? How were western cattlemen to fathom Roosevelt’s preference for open-range grazing because his humane, Berghian side didn’t like seeing wild game get tangled up in barbed wire? Could anybody really imagine that his Uncle Rob used to have monkeys leaping around in a New York brownstone and a German shepherd sitting at the dinner table? To T.R.’s thinking, his letter in Forest and Stream was just straight talk. Like Muir, he thought the idea of national parks should be adopted, honored, and celebrated by mainstream Americans. Some areas of the American landscape and some types of wild-life, he believed, were simply too magnificent for mankind to destroy for the quick financial profits of scoundrels like the Cooke City crowd.
So when Roosevelt went elk hunting in western Wyoming in September 1891, for the first time since the Forest Reserve Act of the past spring, he was considered by many locals as a bizarre, land-grabbing preservationist zealot. (And that was even before his blistering