The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [171]
On May 7, 1894, the president’s team of Hoke Smith, John Lacey, and Theodore Roosevelt secured the passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act (otherwise known as the Lacey Act of 1894). At long last the federal government could take poachers like Howell to nearby courthouses in Cooke City and Livingston for legal prosecution, instead of merely having them escorted off the park premises.69 The Act also ensured protection by the U.S. Army against timber harvesting, mineral extraction, and the defacing of geysers or rock formations for the foreseeable future. If you were caught carving your initials in rock—the way William Clark had done in 1806 at Pompey’s Pillar in Montana—you could end up in jail. The U.S. Army, which had first started administering the park in 1886, would continue doing so until 1918. Entrepreneurs trying to make a quick buck out of Yellowstone were frowned on by Roosevelt. For example, Edward Waters of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, operated a buffalo-elk zoo (even getting a permit to exhibit Crow Indians) but was eventually forced to shut down his roadside operation. As purists, Roosevelt and Grinnell even wanted to prohibit steamboat tours of Yellowstone Lake. “In protecting the beautiful wonders of the Park from vandalism,” Captain Anderson noted, “the main things to be contended against were the propensities of women to gather specimens, and of men to advertise their folly by writing their names on everything beautiful within their reach.”70
Overnight Roosevelt’s beloved bears had a sanctuary, and they were on their way to becoming a great tourist attraction.71 At the Fountain Hotel in the park, black bears started showing up regularly at the kitchen garbage dump, begging for leftovers. Their panhandling became almost as reliable as Old Faithful, and a new tourist attraction. “The preservation of the game in the Park has unexpectedly resulted in turning a great many of the bears into scavengers for the hotels within the Park limits,” Roosevelt wrote with self-evident glee of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act a few years later. “Their tameness and familiarity are astonishing; they act much more like hogs than beasts of prey. Naturalists now have a chance of studying their character from an entirely new standpoint, and under entirely new conditions. It would be well worth the while of any student of nature to devote an entire season in the Park simply to study of bear life; never before has such an opportunity been afforded.”72
The passage of the Yellowstone Game Protection Act of 1894 impelled Roosevelt to push for more U.S. government protection over the national parks. There was scant chance wildlife would last, he believed, if U.S. Army guards didn’t patrol California parks like Sequoia, General Grant, and Yosemite as protectors. In Yosemite, grazing sheep—domestic animals that John Muir denigrated as “hoofed locusts”—were ruining the integrity of the park’s valleys. Instead of merely chasing the flocks off the U.S. government property, Roosevelt wanted illegal shepherds arrested, handcuffed, and marched to jail. For the wondrous California parks to survive, Roosevelt believed, the U.S. Army also needed to be trained in stocking fish, fighting forest fires, and planting trees.
Although Roosevelt still grumbled that the Northern Pacific was trying to “segregate” Yellowstone, in truth the railroad industry was becoming a fierce proponent of establishing national parks throughout the West. The Southern Pacific Railroad company had even helped push the Yosemite bill