The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [252]
It was signed, “Your old Colonel.”11
Bureaucratic confusion reigned supreme in late 1901 regarding the protection of national parks and western forest reserves. From 1886 to 1918, for example, Yellowstone, General Grant, Sequoia, and a couple of other national parks remained protected by the U.S. Army. Hence when Roosevelt became president the acting superintendent of Yellowstone was Major John Pitcher of the Sixth Cavalry, known for his antipoaching zeal and hyperefficiency. Selected in 1902 as superintendent, a job he held for five years, Pitcher made great improvements in Yellowstone, establishing a fish hatchery, buffalo alfalfa fields, and trout bag limits in Yellowstone Lake. But owing to the Federal Reserve Act of 1891, the supervision of forest reserves adjacent to the park became the responsibility of the Department of the Interior (not the army). Within Interior the reserves fell under the jurisdiction first of the General Land Office (GLO) from 1891 to 1901 and then, during Roosevelt’s administration, the Forestry Division. But—and herein lies one of the many confusions—the Department of Agriculture (USDA) also had a Bureau of Forestry. Interior and Agriculture divided the responsibilities of managing reserves. So in 1901 Yellowstone National Park, for example, was run by the U.S. Army, while the abutting Yellowstone Park Timber Land Reserve was overseen by the Secretary of the Interior. The United States desperately needed a streamlining of its natural resource policy. As President Roosevelt saw it, forest management and national greatness were one and the same.
What President Roosevelt recognized in the fall of 1901 was that, ironically, the key to making forest science work depended on Class A1 district rangers—men like Warford whom locals would respect as federal law enforcement officers. It was nearly worthless, Roosevelt believed, to appoint out-of-state Ivy Leaguers as rangers. Communities needed to respect the local ranger, who ideally would have a “shared heritage” with them. The new federal forestry rules and regulations had to be explained, because citizens in the West were accustomed to taking timber and foraging livestock at will. Limits had to be taught. The threatening “No Trespassing” needed to come from the mouth of a homeboy. One of the things Roosevelt liked about Warford, for example, was that he spoke Spanish, which allowed him to communicate with many locals in New Mexico and Arizona. Once this pillar of police ruggedness was in place, then the food scientists and biologists could come in as backup. Another innovation of Roosevelt’s was having student assistants—that is, Yale- or Biltmore-trained scientific forestry experts—spend time working side by side with the western-born rangers.* Roosevelt wanted to give the local men the “undivided responsibility” to oversee their respective forest reserve site.
Besides the Arizona reserves, Roosevelt turned to the Black Hills in South Dakota, where his old friend Seth Bullock, sheriff extraordinaire, had been employed as forest supervisor to protect the federal reserve as a result of Roosevelt’s lobbying as vice president. “As soon as I was appointed,” recalled Bullock, “Washington commenced to send a lot of Dudes out here as Forest Rangers. I didn’t want them. I wanted Forest Rangers who could sleep out in the open with or without a blanket and put out a fire and catch a horse thief. I wrote the Colonel [Roosevelt] about it.”12
Upon receiving Bullock’s letter, President Roosevelt instructed Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock