• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3872 0

to give Bullock a “free hand” in administering the 1,211,680-acre South Dakota reserve. The sixty-six-year-old Hitchcock wasn’t used to having a president run roughshod over him in such a brazen, unremitting fashion. An old-style southern diplomat from Mobile, Alabama, Hitchcock had been McKinley’s minister to Russia before accepting the secretaryship. He was a lineal descendant of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen.13 A snappy dresser and a calm presence, Hitchcock epitomized Mark Twain’s belief that truly civilized men never rushed. Hitchcock dealt with everybody in formal niceties, allergic to conflict, gracious to the point of caricature. A low-grade conservationist himself, Hitchcock was deeply concerned that some of America’s richest timberlands had been recklessly destroyed and others were on the verge of destruction. Certainly Hitchcock understood that the combination of intensive industrial production, the application of science and technology to manufacturing, and the encouragement of land developers and urban growth was destroying natural habitats forever. Yet the optimistic Hitchcock knew that even burned-out forests could be reborn, eventually producing new yields. Nature could heal itself. For the most part Roosevelt and Hitchcock were in sync. Yet between 1901 and 1907 they feuded like obdurate brothers. Hitchcock resented the bullish way the president was going about things, acting like Cassandra, exaggerating the long-term societal dangers because America was consuming forests three times faster than they were being reproduced. Roosevelt and Hitchcock’s goals and vision concerning conservation had nearly identical implications for policy—where they differed was in the matter of pace. It was zoom versus incrementalism.

Roosevelt, apparently sensing that Hitchcock was only three-quarters on board, never fully trusted this cabinet officer. Concerned that pro-development senators from Wyoming and South Dakota wouldn’t like the conservationist-cowboy Bullock being given carte blanche in the Black Hills, President Roosevelt disseminated Bullock’s letter to every legislator on Capitol Hill. No consultation was going on; Roosevelt was informing the legislators that the legendary lawman Bullock was in charge of South Dakota’s rimland management. Hitchcock, contemplating resignation, decided instead to buckle up and join Roosevelt’s progressive crusade, even if it meant absorbing all the president’s doomsday histrionics. Balding, with a huge gray mustache, Hitchcock acted around Roosevelt and Pinchot like a wise butler tolerating abhorrent behavior from youngsters because he had no other choice. What Bullock tried to communicate to Hitchcock was that the Black Hills could survive only if timber and water were conserved. “If both are destroyed,” Bullock warned, “the richest 100 miles square will become a desert.”14

Seth Bullock and Teddy Roosevelt. This photo was taken early in the twentieth century. Roosevelt first met Bullock on a cattle range in 1884, and they became very good friends. Soon after assuming the presidency, Roosevelt appointed Bullock U.S. marshal for South Dakota and Black Hills forest ranger. Bullock had an open invitation to stay overnight at the White House whenever he pleased.

T.R. with Seth Bullock. (Courtesy of David Dary)

Having the vital Bullock—a forerunner of Shane—on his side was a great relief to Roosevelt. Everybody needs a few bad-weather friends. “I hope to see you in Washington this winter,” Roosevelt wrote to Bullock on September 24. “I want to have you at dinner at the White House, and we will talk over past events. I have been peculiarly pleased to have a man of your type to execute the forest laws, for I know you will see to it that they are enforced absolutely without regard to anything but the law itself. Above all I hope you will see that any Government official who is guilty of laxity or inefficiency is held to a strict account.”15

What President Roosevelt was trying to accomplish by circulating his correspondence with Seth Bullock to congressional offices was