The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [186]
A graduate of Yale, Pinchot was tasked with making recommendations about forest management and building public support for the “Washington’s Birthday Reserves.” Known for giving himself airs, he traveled up and down the West Coast, meeting with newspaper editors, politicians, Rotary clubs, and citizen groups. The assignment required a delicate balancing act. Constantly Pinchot had to pluck up enough nerve to tell lumberjack types about the virtues of forestry and preservationists about the need for paper products. In Seattle, for example, Pinchot got into an ugly dispute with John Muir over sheep grazing in national parks and forest reserves. Even though Pinchot had personally reassured Muir, while they were hiking together in the Cascades, that he was against the “hoofed locusts,” in an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer he switched stories. An infuriated Muir shouted hypocrite, accusing Pinchot of currying favor with the Wool Growers Association. Spitting mad, his “eyes flashing blue flares,” Muir told Pinchot, “I don’t want anything more to do with you.”56
Throughout 1897, as groups like the wool growers fought tooth and nail to overturn the federal “lockup” of forest lands, with their congressmen promoting a spate of amendments and nullification bills, Roosevelt vehemently defended Cleveland and McKinley’s policy. At least on paper and in principle, many of his most cherished wilderness places (including Wyoming’s Bighorns and Tetons and Montana and Idaho’s Bitterroots) had been saved in part for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enjoy. But westerners didn’t like the government’s incursion into their lives. The arrival of a federal land officer, a scientist from the Biological Survey, or an inspector from the Interior Department caused many westerners to reach for their guns. A forest ranger coming to an outbank town like Bend, Oregon, or Spokane, Washington, for example, was greeted with all the hospitality that would have been extended to a plague of locusts. In Montana alone, suddenly the Flathead reserve was assigned nine rangers, Lewis and Clark seven, and the Bitterroots nine (though part of this reserve is in Idaho). These mounted rangers formed a “chain of patrol” around each forest preserve, looking for fires, poachers, and outlaws.57
Meanwhile, a consensus had started to form in America that big business was insensitive to the environment. The educated class was coming to believe that the federal government needed to intervene before the rivers ran dry and the forests disappeared like the buffalo herds. While working for the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great Depression, the poet Kenneth Rexroth reflected on the character of a typical 1890s Californian businessman, for example, willing to destroy natural wonders like Mount Shasta for the sake of mineral exploration. “He is most often a stranger to the country in which he operates, with no interest in its well being and no care for the conservation of its resources,” Rexroth wrote in the WPA Guide to California. “He is interested