• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4178 0

to demonstrate the kind of top-drawer fellow needed to protect the western reserves. Roosevelt’s vision of law enforcement was hundreds of Bullocks reined up like an Interior Department cavalry on parade, ready to protect the forestlands as a backup for the U.S. Army. Since 1872 Bullock had been perhaps the most vociferous promoter of Yellowstone living in the West. After all, it had been Bullock, as a renegade member of the territorial legislature, who introduced the bill to preserve northwest Wyoming as a “great national park.” Nobody in the West loathed poachers—and arrested them—with the earnest fervor of Bullock. As sheriff in Deadwood, Bullock—who entered the pop culture kingdom in 2004 as the leading character in the HBO television series Deadwood—relished protecting the Black Hills from rogue mining outfits operating without proper claims and from rank outlaws illegally prospecting for gold on federal land. And he expressed a sweeping damnation of all lawbreakers. A veteran of Grisby’s Cowboy Regiment in the Spanish-American War and a fierce ally of the Rooseveltian conservation movement, Bullock wanted the upside-down county around Deadwood—specially Devils Tower toward the west and Wind Cave to the east—preserved as national parks.

President Roosevelt modeled his administration’s conservation policy after his own governorship in New York—where he had tried to whittle down the Fish, Game, and Forest Commission to one nonpolitical appointee. Thus a new era in forest conservation and wildlife management policy was under way. As governor of New York from 1899 to 1900 Roosevelt had led an effort to measure every stream and brook in the state. He now wanted to apply that idea nationally.16 With an air of reasonableness, he warned Secretary Hitchcock that at all costs nobody should be employed in Interior solely for political reasons. Instead, Roosevelt wanted “good plainsmen and mountain men, able to walk and ride and lie out at night, as any first-class men must be able to do.” He wanted wilderness warriors who understood forest reserves to lead to overall social betterment in America. His exhibits A and B were Warford and Bullock: outdoorsmen without an ounce of haughtiness or of susceptibility to greed. Remembering how Yellowstone had been hampered by a lack of law enforcement before the protection act of 1894, Roosevelt basically wanted the western territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Indian, and Oklahoma protected by Rough Riders. “In other words,” Roosevelt instructed Secretary Hitchcock, “they are to be rangers in fact and not in name, and no excuse will be tolerated for inability to perform the vigorous bodily work of the position any more than lack of courage and honesty would be excused.”17

II

President Roosevelt, now living in the White House, became extremely controversial on a number of fronts besides recruiting rangers and running roughshod over Interior in the late fall of 1901. Roosevelt couldn’t help showing his thornier side and his streak of independence, scoffing at both the GOP party line and concerns over states’ rights. Roosevelt had planned to head to Alabama that fall to meet with the “negro leader” Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. However, suddenly thrust into the presidency, Roosevelt had to cancel this trip. “I write you at once to say that to my deep regret my visit south must now be given up,” Roosevelt informed Washington. “When are you coming North? I must see you as soon as possible. I want to talk over the question of possible appointments in the South exactly on the lines of our last conversation together. I hope that my visit to Tuskegee is merely deferred for a short season.”18

Everything about Booker T. Washington impressed Roosevelt. Born a slave in Virginia, too poor to attend school, the self-taught Washington nevertheless founded, in 1881, the Tuskegee Institute, a technical school for African-Americans. A believer in Washington’s “accommodationist” view toward whites, Roosevelt declared Washington “the most useful, as well as the most distinguished, member of his