The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [187]
The challenge Roosevelt, more than any other high-profile American, addressed in the 1890s was how to get farmers and backwoods families to hop on the new conservation bandwagon. Thousands of settlers in the Rocky Mountains, California, and Pacific Northwest accepted the arguments of the mining and timber industries and disobeyed federal law—for instance, cutting timber down in the reserves in broad daylight. Federal geological reports collected in 1897 made the feelings of local citizens vividly clear. “Nearly all illicit lumbering and other timber depredations are looked upon by settlers as blameless ventures,” the investigator George B. Sudworth wrote after on-site investigations of Colorado’s White River Reserve. “Such operations furnish a limited amount of employment to the poorer classes…. They are considered to be taking only what rightfully belongs alike to them and all other settlers. The depredator’s good name is not thought to be sullied by the veritable theft of timber from the national domain. The spirit of some landless settlers…is well illustrated by the following remark made to this writer by a party suspected of selling dead building logs: ‘This timber belongs to us settlers and we’re going to get it! The Government officials can’t prevent us either, with an army! If they attempt to stop us, we’ll burn the whole region up.’”59
Roosevelt remained convinced that increased law enforcement, in the newer “Washington’s Birthday Reserves” as well as Yellowstone, was the answer. He wanted to lock up any and all scoundrels trying to despoil the federal forestlands. This was a continuation of his brag that he would have shot the slimy hide hunter Edgar Howell in the face for killing the Yellowstone buffalo. If anarchic, anti–federal government followers of senators Teller and Pettigrew wanted to challenge the authority of the executive branch over the forest reserves by acts of civil disobedience, Roosevelt’s view was “Bring them on.” Their conniptions were music to his ears; after all, the federal government was now on his side. If these debasers defied federal authority, then off they’d go to Fort Leavenworth Prison or Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico, where they would rot behind bars whittling driftwood as the sun rose and set. Because Roosevelt had studied the life of Zebulon Pike for Volume 4 of The Winning of the West, he became especially incensed that shepherds in Colorado were destroying the grasses in the forest reserve named after the bravest scout of the Jeffersonian era. As Muir squared off against the “hoofed locusts” of Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra, Roosevelt likewise fought to save the Colorado Rockies.
V
Drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs in New York had been abuzz in early 1897 over what job Theodore Roosevelt would get in the new McKinley administration. He was known to want a post that would be intellectually stimulating, and there were some early murmurs that he might be given Interior. The anti-forestry legislators deserved nothing less. But only a fool took them seriously. The effect of Bliss’s expedient confirmation put an immediate wet blanket on that low-burning fire. Roosevelt was much too volatile a pro-conservation figure to deal with the western politicians, so McKinley could not make that appointment. However, watching the Republican boss Mark Hanna hold court at a party in New York made Roosevelt grow ashamed and leery of any kind of connection with the McKinley administration. Hanna was a political operative—a breed of man he disliked. Not wanting to be associated with such immoral types, he developed a mild case of self-revulsion.60 “I felt,” Roosevelt wrote, “as if I was personally realizing all of Brooks Adams’s gloomiest