The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [287]
Traditionally, Americans like “firsts” and the “biggest,” “widest,” or “tallest” of anything. So the fact that the Times and other newspapers had declared Crater Lake the deepest greatly helped Steel’s preservation efforts. Oregonians, like everybody else, enjoyed bragging. Dutton helped Steel in another fundamental way. In a long letter to Powell, published in part by the Times, Dutton described the geological uniqueness of the lake, mentioning “splendid examples” of glacial striation and rare submerged cinder cones 800 to 1,200 feet high. Many readers probably skipped over Dutton’s engineer-like prose about pumice and tufa, but one effect of his findings was to make the entranced Crater Lake the Yellowstone of the Pacific Northwest.12
Taking a lesson from the John Muir School of Publicity, Steel, with the U.S. Geological Survey report at his side, started introducing Portlanders to the importance of conservation, as simply as possible. Having met with Muir at Mount Rainier, Steel learned how to lobby effectively on behalf of nature. Steel relied on inoffensive efforts (like those of the Sierra Club), aimed at raising consciousness about Crater Lake and other sites in the Cascade Mountains. For starters he organized an Alpine Club (which predated the Sierra Club) and participated in the first nighttime illumination of snowcapped Mount Hood, accomplished with red fire and flares. After having a Portland summit meeting with Muir in August 1888 on strategies of preservation, he released rainbow trout into Crater Lake, hoping to win the support of sportsmen throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Two years later Steel published his first and only book, appropriately titled The Mountains of Oregon. Nobody would ever say that Steel wrote with the eloquence of Burroughs or Chapman, but The Mountains of Oregon dutifully presented the geological wonders of Crater Lake, reading like a fanciful lawyer’s brief for granting it national park status. Yawning chasms, high precipices, weird grandeur, hanging rocks, immense cliffs—the book was filled with enraptured descriptions which leaned toward the style of come-ons for roadside attractions. Mainly, Steel was at pains to explain just how large Crater Lake was; he called it an “immense affair” that would dwarf Chicago and Washington, D.C., combined. Photographs of such Crater Lake sites as Mill Creek Falls and Vidae Cliff were included, complementing the prose. There was even a photograph of himself, sitting with fellow Oregon conservationists, his dark, pointed beard suggesting that he was a Burroughs or Muir in the making. The climax of The Mountains of Oregon came when Steel said that even though the Crater Lake area was teeming with game—deer, bears, and cougars—he refused to hunt because the “grandeur and sublimity of the surroundings” filled him with awe.13
Upon receiving a copy of The Mountains of Oregon Muir wrote to Steel that he was impressed by the “interesting and novel mountain material” four years later Muir—the bard of Yosemite—published his own riveting work The Mountains of California.14 As propaganda, The Mountains of Oregon—a hodgepodge of miscellaneous pieces—worked beautifully. Even timber barons liked seeing the magnificence of their own backyard. In 1893, in large measure as a result of Steel’s six years of lobbying, a 4-million-acre Cascade Range Forest Preserve was established in Oregon. The forest reserve encompassed land more than 300 miles long, from the Columbia River to the California state line; it was the largest protected wilderness area in the country. It was a triumph for the intensely focused conservationist against the timber speculators.15
When Roosevelt was elected vice president in 1900, Steel was a forty-six-year-old Republican diehard with unimpeachable conservationist credentials. No firm information exists about whether he knew anything of Roosevelt’s pro–national park convictions. He was a longtime bachelor known for weekend forays into vagabondage, devoted