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By Root 4210 0

night and day to the cause of Cascades preservation, and the wheel of fortune was starting to turn his way. That February he had married Lydia Hatch, who was said to be the one and only love of his life. Besides having his wedding reported in the Portland press, Steel started receiving communitywide praise for his program to introduce rainbow trout into Crater Lake. Reports from southern Oregon indicated that his “planting” of rainbow trout had worked; the trout were flourishing, easily surviving the bitter-cold winters (skeptics had feared that this was impossible). Steel, in essence, had provided a welcome twist to wildlife reintroduction efforts, which usually were like those of the Boone and Crockett Club. For in the case of Crater Lake, there was no “re” to be concerned about. Recognizing that the clear waters were ideal for trout, he introduced them to a new habitat in the Cascade Mountains. Congratulatory letters came his way from anglers all over America.

Ironically, Crater Lake’s fortunes took a turn for the better when President McKinley was assassinated. With Theodore Roosevelt as president, the chance that it might become a national park was increased tenfold. Over the years Steel had made many friends in the burgeoning conservation movement from coast to coast, mailing copies of The Mountains of Oregon to judges and legislators in the hope of teaching them about the pristine Cascades.16 Of all the valuable contacts Steel had cultivated, however, none outshone Gifford Pinchot. In 1896 Steel had an opportunity to take Muir and Pinchot on a camping excursion to Crater Lake. Although Muir was only moderately impressed, Pinchot was knocked out by the sparkling blue water glistening in the midday sun. As he wrote in his memoir Breaking New Ground, “Crater Lake seemed to me like a wonder of the world.”17

Further bolstering Steel’s effort to create a national park was the fact that neighboring Washington state had won a campaign to have 14,411-foot Mount Rainier become a national park in 1899; the park was so large that it created its own weather system and sometimes received 1,000 inches of snow annually.18 Playing on the rivalry between the two Pacific Northwest states, Steel reminded Oregonians that Crater Lake was every bit as gorgeous as the peaks of the Tatoosh range. Whenever Steel’s sales pitch for Crater Lake was falling flat or a setback occurred, he knew Pinchot was available for encouragement. No sooner had Roosevelt delivered his First Annual Message to Congress in December 1901 than Steel solicited letters of endorsement from Muir, Pinchot, and others. Muir begged off—he was preoccupied with his own agenda in Yosemite—but Pinchot rallied to Steel’s side like a knight in shining armor. “You ask me why a national park should be established around Crater Lake,” Pinchot wrote to Steel on February 18, 1902, in a letter intended for public dissemination. “There are many reasons. In the first place, Crater Lake is one of the great natural wonders of this continent. Secondly, it is a famous resort for the people of Oregon and of other states, which can best be protected and managed in the form of a national park. Thirdly, since its chief value is for recreation and scenery and not for the production of timber, its use is distinctly that of a national park and not a forest reserve. Finally, in the present situation of affairs it could be more carefully guarded and protected as a park than as a reserve.”19

By procuring this testimonial from Pinchot and using it as exhibit A when presenting the Crater Lake bill to Congress, Steel had the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket. Quite naturally Roosevelt would defer to Pinchot’s wisdom about the Oregon backcountry. Steel met a formidable roadblock—Speaker of the House David Henderson, a heavy-fisted politico from Iowa. Ticked off because Steel and Pinchot were foisting a national park on Congress even though T.R. had been president for only a few months, Henderson, representing the antiunion Midwest and western timber-mining interests, offered an adamant “no.” By