The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [170]
With the Panic of 1893 giving economic reasons to fight the new forest preserve system, the timber lobby in the West was pushing back against the conservationists. Led by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado (himself the secretary of the interior in Chester Arthur’s administration, a man who now advertised himself as the “defender of the West”), this group wanted the reserves reduced in size if not abolished completely. To repeat, however: from the outset of his second term, President Cleveland had made it clear that he was on the side of the forestry movement.
In April 1894 Roosevelt was preparing to testify before the Senate Committee on Territories, chaired by Charles Faulkner of West Virginia, in favor of giving Yellowstone Park’s U.S. Army soldiers real authority to deal with trespassers; he also testified against the redrawn, smaller boundaries of the park that the timber lobby was championing. An incident in the park the previous month added fuel to Roosevelt’s cause.
Captain George S. Anderson—the superintendent of Yellowstone and a member of the Boone and Crockett Club—tracked a suspected poacher, Edgar Howell, for a few days in the Pelican Valley region of the park. At one abandoned campsite Captain Anderson found six buffalo scalps and skulls. On March 13, he stumbled on Howell along Astringent Creek skinning a buffalo that had just been shot. Nearby were the bodies of five other kills. The superintendent arrested the poacher red-handed and immediately wrote to Secretary of the Interior Smith from Cooke City, Montana, recommending that this arrest “be made the occasion for a direct appeal to Congress for the passage of an act making it an offense…for any one to kill, capture, or injure any wild animal in the Park.”63
By chance, Emerson Hough was on assignment for Forest and Stream in Yellowstone at the time of the arrest, and the official Yellowstone photographer, Jay Haynes, using his new portable Eastman Kodak camera, was able to take pictures of the dead buffalo. This firsthand evidence was the basis for a stinging editorial in Forest and Stream: George Bird Grinnell urged “every reader who is interested in the Park” to write to his “Senator and Representative…asking them to take an active interest in the protection of the Park” before America’s last great buffalo herd was gone forever. Meanwhile, with righteous indignation, Roosevelt publicly lashed out at Howell, claiming that the sleazy marauder should, at the very least, be “sent up for half a dozens years” Roosevelt personally preferred a stiff rope and a short drop.64 In his testimony before the Senate Committee on Territories, Roosevelt milked the Howell case for every possible drop of sympathy, resorting to both shaming and tongue-lashing.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt acquired a new Yellowstone ally on the other side of the U.S. Capitol. Representative John F. Lacey of Iowa was the principal sponsor in the House of the administration’s Yellowstone Game Protection Act; it would “protect the birds and animals in Yellowstone National Park, and to punish crimes in said park, and for other purposes.”65
Lacey was born in Virginia in 1841, and his family moved to Iowa when he was a teenager. The Laceys homesteaded along the Des Moines River, where John was immediately mesmerized by the open prairie and amazed by the endless sea of tall grass and the abundance of songbirds.66 He enrolled at college in nearby Marshalltown, but after the Civil War broke out he enlisted in the Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The combat he saw, against Confederate forces in northern Missouri at the Battle of Liberty on September 17, 1861, turned him against war forever.67 He returned to college, studied law, and by 1870 was elected to Iowa’s House of Representatives, where he became known as an avid advocate of wildlife conservation.
By the spring of 1894, Lacey