The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [251]
On the domestic front, however, immediately deviating from McKinley’s policies, Roosevelt began professionalizing forestry and wildlife protection in both Interior and Agriculture. A battle royal for the future of the West had erupted, and he didn’t plan on letting his pro-conservationist side lose. “This immense idea (of conservation) Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation,” Robert La Follette of Wisconsin recalled of the months following McKinley’s assassination, “until the Nation heeded.” 7
Influenced by Pinchot, Roosevelt believed that the United States was in the Dark Ages when it came to proper scientific management of the reserves. In late 1901 showdowns between preservationists and developers over forest reserves had become common in the West. For example, a spur track had been laid from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a distance of sixty miles, slashing its way through forest. Besides increased tourism, eastern fortune seekers were pouring into the Grand Canyon region seeking minerals and timber rights. Other companies wanted to construct buildings at scenic sites. Plans were under way by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway to erect the luxurious El Tovar Hotel on the canyon brink. Was the Grand Canyon going to be ruined? Roosevelt determined that forest rangers and wildlife protectors should be hired as a police force around the Grand Canyon to deal with the increased tourist, timber, and mining development. Not that Roosevelt was opposed to limited wise development.8
In actuality, Roosevelt wanted more Americans to spend holidays in the West rather than waste time in Europe. What concerned him was that the U.S. government didn’t have enough army troops protecting, for example, California’s sequoias or Yellowstone’s petrified wood. Roosevelt hoped old-breed mountain men, husbandry experts, and Rough Rider-types could be employed in national parks and forest reserves as rangers. In the Sequoia National Park’s Superintendent’s Annual Report of 1901 the term “park ranger” was used for the first time by the U.S. Army. Roosevelt liked the ring of it. According to the historian Charles R. Farabee Jr., in 1902 Roosevelt’s Interior Department created three classifications of rangers: Class A1 (deeply familiar with forestlands and able to survey and inventory) and Classes 2 and 3 (no complex requirements, “but they must be able-bodied, sober, and industrious men fully capable of comprehending and following instructions”).9 Class A1 was paid ninety dollars per month; Class 2 got seventy-five dollars; Class 3 got sixty dollars.10
Like a diligent ROTC recruiter, Roosevelt now went after one of the ablest Class A1 westerners he knew—David E. Warford of Arizona, from the Troop B Rough Riders, who had taken two Spanish bullets in his thighs near Santiago—to watch over white-tailed deer and forestlands in the Kaibab Forest north of the Grand Canyon. To Roosevelt, Warford—who had returned to Arizona a war hero—was a “new prototype” of the forest ranger conservationist. Warford would protect the yellow pine groves of central-eastern Arizona in what is today the Apache, Coronado, and Tonto national forests. Because the nearly 4.15 million acres* of noncontiguous reserve lands had irregular boundaries—on a map the land looked like jigsaw pieces—it needed somebody who knew every swath of the entire Great Colorado Plateau like the back of his hand to protect the forests from exploitation. Such a vast territory needed a “ranger”—a term first popularized in America during the French and Indian War but appropriated by the Confederate Army during the Civil War. “You have been appointed a Forest Ranger,” Roosevelt wrote to Warford. “Now, I want to write to you very seriously to impress upon you that you have got to do your duty well, not only for your own sake, but for the sake of the honor of the regiment. I recommended you because under