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well that the president would adopt the club’s recommendations). At the core of the final report was the belief that U.S. game reserves should be established inside national forests. For example, President McKinley had established Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains Forest Reserve in 1901 to protect natural resources. The Boone and Crockett Club’s report suggested that part of this forest could become a buffalo or deer preserve. Because the U.S. government already owned the Wichitas, it had the authority to fence off thousands of acres to save vanishing wildlife. The report also recommended that the economic needs of locals always be factored in when policy recommendation were made.62

Prudence, of course, was the tenor of President Roosevelt’s directives regarding forest preservation and wildlife protection. As an accidental president, coming into power because of McKinley’s death, Roosevelt wanted to avoid unnecessarily kicking over a hornets’ nest. Senators from Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Utah, and Colorado already had their long knives out for him. He had to move with caution concerning the regulation of game animals and birds in any new forest reserve he created, to avoid an outcry of states’ rights sentiment. His strategy was to start slowly with just one or two forest reserves, where the political opposition would be next to nil. Then, if he was elected in his own right in 1904, depending on the magnitude of his electoral mandate, he would act more boldly and decisively, taking head-on what he called in An Autobiography the “great special interests” of the Far West that were destroying nature “at the expense of the public interest.”63 As of 1902 the United States had approximately 43 million acres of forest reserves at its disposal. Roosevelt, with Pinchot at his side, wanted the Forestry Bureau to quickly double or triple that amount. From a long-term planning perspective Pinchot hoped to persuade Roosevelt to transfer the Division of Forestry from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture (he accomplished this goal with the Transfer Act of 1905).

IV

Throughout the first six months of 1902 the president fought for the federal government’s “conquest” of the arid lands of the West. Increasingly this involved irrigation. He believed instinctively that the huge undertaking of constructing large dams and reservoirs was an obligation of the federal government because its scope was beyond the capacity of private enterprise.64 Wanting to build on John Wesley Powell’s recommendations for the Geographical Survey, Roosevelt fought tooth and nail for land reclamation through hydrological advancements such as dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts as if he himself were the editor of Irrigation Age. (Ironically, Powell actually believed in decentralized irrigation, not huge, federally run Rooseveltian dams.) Rivers could be redirected, Roosevelt believed, so as to build sustainable western communities in Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Texas, and New Mexico. Although he had promoted saving bird habitats, Roosevelt seemed totally ignorant of the potential downside of advanced hydraulic drilling on the desert ecosystem. Filled with good intentions, the shortsighted Roosevelt was, sadly, unable to envision how potentially harmful the dams were to the western environment he so loved.65 Yet the goal of turning arid land to fields of green was, from a human development perspective, ennobling.

Of course, Roosevelt wasn’t working in a vacuum. Many western politicians approved of selling public lands in sixteen western states to fund ambitious irrigation projects. Every politician west of Kansas City or Bismarck, it seemed, was floating a how-to-do-it irrigation bill. The idea was that once settlers prospered on the irrigated western lands, they would help repay the cost of the hydraulic projects by contributing to a revolving fund (something like the later Social Security system). Roosevelt and his followers believed these large-scale irrigation projects would dramatically transform the western economy, landscape, and farming. The